VMware

It was with great honor both Sam and I were awarded vExpert 2014 (my first and Sam’s second award!) we are both proud to be listed alongside so many others in the vExpert programme. You can view the announcement and the full list here - http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-announcement.html

In my previous post Backing up ESXi 5.5 host configurations with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) – Workflow design walkthrough I showed how to create a workflow to back up host configurations, but it was limited to one host at a time. For this post I’m going to show how to create a new workflow that calls the previous one on multiple hosts using a ForEach loop to run it against each one.

As a little learning project, I thought I’d take on Simon’s previous post about backing up ESXi configurations and extend it to vCenter Orchestrator (vCO), and document how I go about building up a workflow. I’m learning more and more about vCO all the time, but I found it has a really steep entry point, and finding use cases is hard if you haven’t explored capabilities. The steps I want to create in this post are:

I’ve been playing about with a compact SRM install in my lab - since I have limited resources and only one site I wanted to create a run-through for anyone learning SRM to be able to do it in their own lab too. I am creating two sites on the same IP subnet (pretend it’s a stretched LAN across two sites) and will be protecting a single, tiny Linux web server using vSphere Replication.

I’m fairly new to SRM, but even so this one seemed like a real head-scratcher! If you happen to be using CA signed certificates on your “protected site” vCenter and “recovery site” vCenter servers, when you come to linking the two SRM sites you encounter SSLHandShake errors – basically SRM assumes you want to use certificates for authentication because you’re using signed certificates. If you use the default self-signed certificates, SRM will default to using password authentication (see SRM Authentication).

This had me scratching my head, what seemed to be a common problem wasn’t fixed by the common solution. It was actually my fault – too familiar with the product and setting things up too quickly to test. I installed a VCSA 5.5 instance in my lab as a secondary site for some testing and during the process found I couldn’t log on to the web client – it failed with the error:

After having a play with Virtual Flash and Host Caching on one of my lab hosts I wanted to re-use the SSD drive, but couldn’t seem to get vFlash to release the drive. I disabled flash usage on all VMs and disabled the Host Cache, then went to the Virtual Flash Resource Management page to click the “Remove All” button. That failed with errors: “Host’s virtual flash resource is inaccessible.”

In case you missed it VMware have now released vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) in Europe! The first data center residing in Slough with more data centers planned across Europe in the near future. Working in an SME that has several existing vSphere environments this was of real interest, as the need to scale out quickly from our Private clouds is rapidly becoming a requirement. Having already spoken to VMware on the phone to get a rough idea on options and costs I decided to take a look at the Hands-on-labs to see how easy it really is to use and migrate VMs from an existing private cloud to vCHS.

For those of you unaware VMware recently released the VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist What does it do? “VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.

Just a quick post on something that was not immediately obvious when it happened to me. When deploying vCSA 5.5 and trying to add it to the domain, I was presented with the following error. I immediately did all the all the usual checks, making sure it had a static IP and correct DNS servers etc.. The one thing missing however was a FQDN for the hostname (in the network tab).