VMware

Install the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Without Ephemeral Port Groups

by

Trying to install VMware vCenter in appliance/VCSA form straight to a new ESXi host? Having a problem where it isn’t listing any networks, and it’s telling you that “Non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups are not supported” in the little informational bubble next to it? Thinking this is Chicken & Egg 101, because you can’t have an ephemeral port group without a Distributed vSwitch, and you can’t have a dvSwitch without a vCenter, so how do you install vCenter when you need something that only vCenter can create? Yeah, me too. Here’s the secret, though: don’t remove the default “VM Network” port group, or if you did, put it back, and restart the installer (or just back up to select the host …

Read More

vCenter 6.5b Resets Root Password Expiration Settings

by

I’m starting to update all my 6.x vCenters and vROPS, pending patches being released. You should be doing this, too, since they’re vulnerable to the Apache Struts 2 critical security holes. One thing I noted in my testing is that after patching the 6.5 appliances, their root password expiration settings go back to the defaults. In this case I’d set them to not expire, but it’s clearly not that way anymore: Depending on your security requirements this might not be what you want. It’s bad form on VMware’s part, changing something that had been explicitly set. I also didn’t test to see if it resets the actual password age, or just the expiry. You might have far less than 365 …

Read More

esxupdate Error Code 99

by

So I’ve got a VMware ESXi 6.0 host that’s been causing me pain lately. It had some storage issues, and now it won’t let VMware Update Manager scan it, throwing the error: The host returns esxupdate error code:99. An unhandled exception was encountered. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details. A little Google action later and it’s clear there isn’t a lot of documentation, recent or otherwise, about this out there. People suggest rebuilding Update Manager, or copying files from other hosts to repair them. The VMware KB has documentation of the particular error but only in context of the Cisco Nexus 1000V, and only for ESXi 5.0 and 5.1. Here’s another thought, if you’re …

Read More

Use Microsoft Excel For Your Text Manipulation Needs

by

I’m just going to lay it out there: sysadmins should use Microsoft Excel more. I probably will be labeled a traitor and a heathen for this post. It’s okay, I have years of practice having blasphemous opinions on various IT religious beliefs. Do I know how to use the UNIX text tools like sed, awk, xargs, find, cut, and so on? Yes. Do I know how to use regular expressions? Yes. Do I know how to use Perl and Python to manipulate text, and do poor-man’s extract-transform-load sorts of things? Absolutely. It’s just that I rarely need such complicated tools in my daily work. I often just have a short list of something that I need to turn into a bunch of …

Read More

Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

by

I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

Read More

When Should I Upgrade to VMware vSphere 6?

by

I’ve been asked a few times about when I’m planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 6. Truth is, I don’t know. A Magic 8 Ball would say “reply hazy, try again.” Some people say that you should wait until the first major update, like the first update pack or first service pack. I’ve always thought that approach is crap. Software is a rolling collection of bugs. Some are old, some are new, and while vendors try to make the number of bugs go down the truth is that isn’t the case all the time. Especially with large releases, like service packs. The real bug fixing gains are, to borrow a baseball term, in the “small ball” between the big plays. …

Read More

9 Things You’ll Love About vSphere 6.0

by

vSphere 6.0, finally. It’s been in beta for what seems like an eternity. Betas are like Fight Club, where the first rule of participation is that you may not talk about your participation. But today’s the day that changes, as VMware just announced 6.0. A lot of rough edges were smoothed in this release, and all the limits have increased again (64 hosts per cluster, etc.). Beyond that, though, there’s much to like. Here are nine things I think are pretty neat about 6.0. 1. Centralized Services (PSC, Content Library, Update Manager) VMware has acknowledged that there’s a fair amount of “meta-administration” (my term) that goes on for vSphere. To help curb that they’ve created the Platform Services Controller, which is …

Read More

Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

by

I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

Read More

You Cannot Use open-vm-tools to Customize VMs

by

Homer Simpson: Kids: there’s three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way? Homer Simpson: Yeah, but faster! My biggest pet peeve with open source is that projects don’t ever solve whole problems. They get 60% of the way to solving a whole problem and then run off to chase another squirrel. The most recent example of this is VMware’s recommendation to use the open-vm-tools packages that ship with modern distributions of Linux. Dumbest recommendation ever. Why? Because the project got to 60% of the solution and stopped, effectively solving no problems for anybody. From what appears to be a VMware employee on the open-vm-tools mailing list archives: > …

Read More

CentOS 7 Refusing VMware vSphere Guest OS Customizations

by

So I just spent two hours of my life trying to get my CentOS 7 VM template to deploy correctly with a vSphere customization specification. No matter what I did it would customize the VM, then uncustomize it, essentially leaving me with the template again. I finally asked our oracle and savior, Google, and two amazing things occurred. First, I found the answer. About three weeks ago a fellow named Jeff Burns asked this same question on Server Fault, then answered his own question five minutes later (this is often what happens to me immediately upon filing a support case). He built on something I’d seen in /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log, where the VMware Tools couldn’t figure out what the OS is and …

Read More

+ More Posts +