Tag - vSphere

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me how I manage networking on my single host lab environment. “How do you do VLANs and manage routing/firewalling without a physical device providing that upstream?” they would ask. Well, I use a PFSense VM. Which would usually be followed up by “Yea but how?” VLAN trunking on my dvSwitch and sub-interfaces within PFSense. Easy stuff! Let’s review requirements first: Be able to define multiple VLANs and subnets.

I have a customer about to embark on a (relatively) large Cisco ACI upgrade, followed by a dvSwitch LACP update to Enhanced LACP. This includes updating ACI EPG policies to use the newly created LAG as the primary uplink port. Normally in the vSphere UI, you can view this per port group. But in an environment wth 12 vCenter Servers and 22 distributed switches (and a couple thousand port groups), that manual process can get out of hand pretty quick.

A few weeks ago, a customer of mine was attempting an embedded vCenter upgrade from 6.7U3 to 7.0. Stage 1’s deployment of a new vCenter appliance was successful, however Stage 2 (on the new appliance) was failing while attempting to perform a pre-check. We checked the requirements-upgrade-runner.log file and found an error, but it’s quite vague: lookup.fault.EntryNotFoundFault. We worked together and checked the following: SSO admin password contained only supported characters.

TL;DR - the vSAN HCL Database update from vCenter requires port 80 outbound to http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json. A little while ago, a customer of mine, in a restricted environment, was having issues getting the vSAN HCL Database updated in vCenter. Following https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2109870 didn’t address the issue, but allowed them to update the DB manually. Outbound HTTPS traffic to partnerweb.vmware.com was whitelisted on the proxy, and 443 allowed on the firewall. Testing DNS and ports using curl showed that everything should be working, but we still couldn’t update the HCL DB.

I recently had the need to ‘prep’ a VM after converting it to vSphere. By ‘prep’ I mean (after you’ve installed VMware tools) do the usual grind of updating the virtual hardware to the latest supported by ESXi, update the vNIC to VMXNET3, and change the SCSI controllers to ParaVirtual. I thought about the times when I was in customer land and we would have to convert VMs from some other platform or in some cases, correct a VM that had been built incorrectly.

Note: A bit more testing on my end has found this script is only valuable if your VMDKs are on separate datastores. I am working to find a better metric to pull the data per VMDK. Background Have you ever heard of “Uncommitted Space” in vSphere? It’s one of those things we all seem to ‘know’ without really knowing. It’s a pretty standard metric most commonly found against vSphere Datastores. It’s effectively calculated based on the provisioned and used storage of a datastore and its contents.

Note: This post addresses and (hopefully) fixes the cause of the issue found here: vVols Endpoint - Failed to establish connection on ESXi host Recently, one of my customers was trying to refresh the CA store on newly built ESXi 6.7 U3 hosts under a freshly upgraded vCenter Server 6.7 U3 instance. When the admin tried refresh the CA store, they were getting this error message in the vSphere Client:

My customer has successfully rolled out VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (or “vVols”) in their environment. They’re loving the simplicity of storage management in vSphere, but were a little stuck when they added a pair of newly installed ESXi hosts to their environment. The hosts were not mounting the vVols datastore as expected meaning hosts could not run VMs backed by vVols. All existing hosts were OK. To start, they dug in to the logs at /var/log/vvold.

Recently I had a customer wanting to identify if a VM of theirs was in Production, Test, or Development based on the VM’s name. Luckily, all of their VMs are named using a naming standard of “{customer}{P|T|D}{application}{server-role}”, giving a generic VM name like “custpdc1” or “cust-t-sql2”. They’re just getting started on their journey with vRealize Orchestrator, and wanted to use it to perform this function. Easy enough, what do we need?

Introduction We all know the immense pain of managing Windows Server VM templates, regardless of the platform you’re using. Sure, you can build them once then update them manually on a schedule. However, it’s tedious to document and even worse to execute, making sure the template is identical every time (except for your new updates of course). In my experience, you also have to maintain multiple versions and editions of Windows Server.