Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
A problem reared it’s head over the weekend with one of our hosts’ Fibre Channel HBAs negotiating it’s way down to 2GB, and consequently introducing massive latency for the LUNs behind it. Analysis showed that the drivers for the HBA were over a year out of date so the suggested fix from VMware was to update the drivers. This is fine to do manually for a few hosts, but would be a real pain for the 300+ hosts in the environment I manage.
Updating vCenter Server certificates has always been a pain - it has only got worse with the sheer number of services that are running under vSphere 5.1 - each service requiring a unique certificate and to be installed in many complex steps.
Fortunately , with the release of the SSL Certificate Automation Tool, VMware have gone some way to reducing the headache.
Gather all the components you need OpenSSL installer: http://slproweb.
I’ve previously posted around this topic as part of another problem but having had to figure out the process again I think it’s worth re-posting a proper script for this. VMware KB 1016106 is snappily titled “ESXi/ESX hosts with visibility to RDM LUNs being used by MSCS nodes with RDMs may take a long time to boot or during LUN rescan” and describes the situation where booting ESXi (5.1 in my case) takes a huge amount of time to boot because it’s attempting to gain a SCSI reservation on an RDM disk used by MS Clustering Services.
This article originally started off life as a record of how I managed to get this working, as a lot of my posts do, but this time it appears I am foiled.
Last week, I had 3 vCenter Servers that appeared to be happily talking to each other in Linked Mode sharing a singe Multi-site SSO domain without any real issues. I had a single-pane-of-glass view of all 3 and I could manage them all from the one client.
Had a strange one after deploying an XP VM from a template today - the VM would not power on and threw the following error:
An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM [VM name].
cpuid.coresPerSocket must be a number between 1 and 8
Digging around on google the error seemed to be related to over-allocating vCPUs (e.g. assigning 8 vCPUs on a VM with 4 physical CPU cores).
So VMware’s Support Assistant is pretty awesome and it’s free! I thought I’d do a quick run through of the installation and set up for anyone who was interested, it’s fairly straightforward and if you raise a lot of calls or have multiple calls on the go it’s a time saver!
VMware’s official page for the Support Assistant is here - https://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-support-assistant/overview.html
The OVF deploy is so simple I’ve just taken screenshots:
I’m very pleased to say that as of 21st December, I passed my VCP510 exam and am now VCP5 qualified! It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time (since VCP3) but have never been able to get funding for the required course. My current employer sent me on the vSphere 5 Fast Track course earlier this year, so I was all set to take the exam.
My exam experience was somewhat marred by a very poor first attempt which I narrowly failed.
While adding an additional vCenter Server to our Multi-Site Single Sign On instance I encountered a problem as I entered the details of the existing SSO.
The error thrown was:
User credentials are incorrect or empty. Provide correct credentials.
After a couple of hours online with VMware support I took a guess at the problem. On the existing Single Sign On Configuration I have added the Active Directory domain DefinIT and in order to enable integrated authentication from the vSphere Client I moved it to the top of the list - this meant that System-Domain is no longer the default authentication domain.
I’ve been learning my vSphere 5 config maximums before my upcoming VCP5 exam, so in a supreme effort of procrastination I thought I’d write a PowerShell quiz script: here it is!
Save the QuizMe.ps1 file into a folder and then place one or more text file in the same folder containing a comma delimited set of questions and answers. Then run QuizMe.ps1!
You can choose the quiz you take (which text file it will use).
The process of requesting certificates for vSphere 5.1 is a fairly grim, manual process. It’s repetitive and easy to make a mistake on any step of the way. Since I’ve got to do this for quite a few VirtualCenter Servers, I thought I’d script the certificate generation if nothing else. I am following the excellent documentation provided in Implementing CA signed SSL certificates with vSphere 5.1 and more specifically in Creating certificate requests and certificates for vCenter Server 5.
