VMware

Upgrading to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 from Windows vCenter 5.1

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My coworkers and I recently undertook the task of upgrading our vSphere 5.1 environment to version 5.5. While upgrades of these nature aren’t really newsworthy we did something of increasing interest in the VMware world: switched from the Windows-based vCenter Server on a physical host to the vCenter Server Appliance, or vCSA, which is a VM. This is the story of that process. If you aren’t familiar with the vCSA it is a vCenter implementation delivered as a SuSE-based appliance from VMware. It has been around for several major versions, but until vSphere 5.5 it didn’t have both feature parity with Windows and the ability to support very many hosts & VMs without connecting to an external database. Under vSphere …

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Updates to My vCSA 5.1 to 5.5 Notes

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I just updated my notes on upgrading the VMware vCenter Server Appliance from 5.1 to 5.5. I added a couple of things that have become issues: Remove all non-standard users from SSO before the upgrade. If you added users to the 5.1 Single Sign-On system directly those users will be copied to the 5.5 vCSA as members of SYSTEM-DOMAIN. Unfortunately they will then become trapped, undeleteable & unchangeable, as VMware didn’t think to make the SYSTEM-DOMAIN an editable domain. You can see them, and you can still log in, but you cannot remove them or change their passwords. Your only recourse is to remove the permissions for that user from vCenter, which still means they can log in, but won’t have …

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Notes on Upgrading the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 to 5.5

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I’ve done a few upgrades of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.1 now, to the GA release of 5.5 (build 1312297). Here are my observations: You need a second IP temporarily for the upgrade. The way it works is that you deploy a new vCSA, then the two of them talk to each other to do the upgrade. When they’re done copying stuff around the process will shut the old one off and reboot the new one so it’s fully functional. While the need for a second IP is fairly obvious, I managed to overlook it. Don’t specify a hostname for the new vCSA in the OVF/OVA deployment wizard if you don’t want to change the name of the …

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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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I Love the VMware vCenter Server Appliance

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Most things in my life that I think are good & excellent are things I started out being very critical of, or at the least greatly disliking. Some of my best friends were some of the most annoying people ever when I first met them. My wife loves to tell the story about us camping in Denali National Park a few years ago, where I absolutely hated the place at first, just to end up a complete fan. And, speaking of my wife, ask me sometime how we met. It seems fitting that I’ve gone from hating the idea of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) to having an inappropriate man-tech crush on it. To be fair there are a …

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Changing vCenter Operations Manager vApp IP Addresses

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I needed to renumber one of my VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 instances and it’s not immediately clear how to do it. It isn’t like the other virtual appliances VMware delivers. Here’s how I got it done, with some encouragement from Matt H. in VMware Support. It also seems to me someone wrote this up recently, but I could not find it. If that was you please leave me a comment with a link to your work. 1. Shut it all down. Take a snapshot of the individual VMs. I ended up having to revert to the snapshot, so that was nice. Remember that if you revert it reverts the VM config, too. 2. Edit the properties of the vC …

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