Infrastructure

It’s sometimes necessary to clone VMs when you don’t have a vCenter, either because you plain don’t have one in a small customer environment or you are doing a deploy and don’t have vCenter deployed yet - you’ve created a template VM for Windows or such and want to roll out some DCs and management VMs before your vCenter deploy such that you have DNS etc. Luckily there is a way to do this through the ESXi host directly, the method I use that I find effective is:...

Spent longer than necessary messing with vRealize Orchestrator and trying to get it to display the plugin in vCenter server appliance 6.0 U1, you can review my trials and tribulations here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/523397?src=vmw_so_vex_mgray_1080 ↗ I have been trying to deploy vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.3 with my VCSA 6.0 U1 instance (supported according to compatibility matrix), the symptoms are almost exactly the same as this post: Re: Installing vRO v6.01 but not showing in web client ↗...

I have been working with VSAN in the lab recently and had the need to get some deeper stats on the inner operations. I had upgraded the lab to ESXi 6.0 U1 and vCenter 6.0 U1 and for the life of me couldn’t get the RVC console in the VCSA to work per the VMware KB ↗. In particular it just wouldn’t log in with this line, even with the correct password:...

If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid....

I recently rebuilt my lab and added 2x new ESXi hosts, I re-used my old single host in the process which I upgraded from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 and patched to the same level as the new hosts. Everything was working as expected until it came for the time to enable HA. My old host claimed the master roll and thus the other boxes had to connect to it as slaves, however, these failed with “HA Agent Unreachable” and “Operation Timed Out” errors....

If you’ve just spun up a new vCenter 6.0 appliance, have joined it to the domain and added a new identity source but have found that your integrated windows auth (the handy checkbox you use for SSO) isn’t working with this error: A General System error occurred: Cannot get user info Then it’s because the nsswitch.conf file is missing the lsass parameter, to remedy this: SSH as root to your vCenter server appliance....

Creating signed certs for vCenter has never been easy, with the new release of 6.0 though this has changed somewhat, there is a built in certificate manager that allows you to import a CA (say Microsoft AD) cert and key to have VMCA sign it’s own certs with and make them trusted. First thing, we need to set up an AD cert template for vSphere 6.0, that’s in my article here....

Signing certs for VMware has always been a pain in the ass, it’s gotten a lot better in v6 but there are a few caveats, what we’re going to do here is set up a certificate template in Active Directory from which we will sign our vCenter certificates. Load up your AD-CA box and run: certtmpl.msc Next right click on Web Server and click Duplicate Template: If you use an encryption level higher than sha1 choose Windows Server 2008 as the Certification Authority....

Sometimes when third party plugins or solutions work with vCenter and ESXi (Like NSX) they will create a custom TCP/IP stack for them to use. If for whatever reason (say, unclean uninstall) you need to remove the TCP/IP stack you can’t do it from the vCenter GUI, log into each host directly and execute: esxcli network ip netstack delete -N="stack_name" E.g. if you are uninstalling NSX and get a stuck vxlan stack:...

While working on my VMware NSX implementation I wanted to operate the solution in Multicast mode, to do so we need IGMP support and addresses on the switches. The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IPv4 networks to establish multicast group memberships. Enter the following in configure mode on the VLANs you want IGMP enabled on: vlan 8 ip address [enter....