With the release of vSphere 5.1 certificates started to play a much more vital role, where having invalid certificates in your environment is not an option anymore as it could break the operation of your environment as well forbid you from logging in. This change has been done to increase the security of your Virtual Infrastructure Management Components (vCenter Service, Inventory Services, SSO, Web Client, vCO, Update Manager, & vCenter Log Browser) & to compact the possibilities of man in the middle attacks. This change has brought a lot of challenges to many VMware customers who had invalid and expired certificates in their environment without even noticing it. The tedious … Read More

Since vCenter Single Sign On was introduced in vSphere 5.1, many questions have been rising around it. There seems to be a very limited amount of resources out there that document best practices related to vCenter Single Sign On, which is the reason for me to develop this post where I will try to combine as many best practices and answers related to vCenter 5.1 Single Sign On as possible.

I have been one of the lucky consultants who has already got to design/implement vSphere 5.1 for quite few enterprise customers where I have got to debate and drive best practices that I used across those implementations. I am sharing … Read More

While working with my home vSphere 5.1 lab the other day, I was trying to create a VMFS5 datastores on my local SATA disk. Each time I tried to do that I was just welcomed with the following error:

Call “HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESXi “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” failed.

Please note xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx stand for my host IP. To visualize the error below is a screen shot of the error as it has appeared in my home lab

After fuzzing around trying to figure out what happened, I have remembered this particular disk was used by one of my old lab ESXi hosts. As I do all kind of crazy things in … Read More

In earlier versions of VMware vSphere, many of us used to configure VMware tools settings by double clicking VMware tools inside the guest OS. This was most often used to configure NTP in the Virtual Machine VMware tools. Just to remind you of what that looked like:

Alright if you try to do the same in vSphere 5.1, you will be surprised that you will not have any options to choose when double clicking on VMware tools inside the guest OS. What you will get will look like the below screen shot:

Maybe what I have mentioned so far is already what you know and its why you got here. … Read More

I know most of my readers are already aware that Microsoft Exchange & Microsoft SQL have been supported on VMware vSphere for quite long time. In fact, there is so many companies are using it at unbelievably large production scale. Though today while going back from my customer site by train, I was talking to two of their engineers. One of them worked within their Virtual Infrastructure team & the other one within their Microsoft Infrastructure team. What sparked the idea of this post is when the Virtual Infrastructure engineer asked his colleagues what he think of virtualizing their Exchange 2010 setup. The shocking answer was “Our Exchange 2010 environment … Read More

Alright now that you got your vCenter 5.1 up and running & ready to start managing it. I know vSphere Client will be the first thing to come to your mind in here, but its worth mentioning that all the new features in vSphere 5.1 is only included in the vSphere Web Client not the traditional Installable vSphere Client. Alright that should get you enough reason to install and try to get used to the new vSphere Web Client. Though the new vSphere Web Client has been improved dramatically from the one included in vSphere 5.0 that it feels it is a fully different client. It is much faster, smoother … Read More

As covered in my previous three posts, vCenter Service is the third component to be installed. As a reminder the order of installing vCenter 5.1 components is as follow:

Single Sign On ==> vCenter inventory Service ==> vCenter Service.

In this post, I will demonstrate in a step by step fashion how to install the vCenter Service though if you have not followed earlier parts in this series you will need to check them out before you install the vCenter Service. The earlier posts in this series can be found at:

vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 1) – Preparing the Databases

vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 2) – Single Sign On Installation

vCenter 5.1 … Read More

In my previous two posts, I have demonstrated how to prepare the databases required for the different vCenter 5.1 components(SSO, vCenter Service, & Update Manager)  as well how to install vCenter Single Sign On. If you have not went through these earlier two posts, then you will need to follow them before proceeding with this one. These two posts can be found at:

vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 1) – Preparing the Databases

vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 2) – Single Sign On Installation

As I have mentioned in my earlier post, the next vCenter 5.1 component to install would be vCenter Inventory Service. In this post, I will demonstrate how to install the … Read More

During the installation of vCenter 5.1, you will need to install 3 components in the following order: Single Sign On => Inventory Service => vCenter Service. In a new installation I would normally install the Web Service after installing the vCenter Service, though during an upgrade I would install the web service right after the Single Sign On service to be able to use it just in case I wanted to check on my Single Sign On configuration or want to troubleshoot. As this guide assuming a new installation we will leave the Web Client Service to the end. In this post, I will demonstrate the installation of the Single … Read More

After the introduction of vSphere 5.1, there seemed to be a lot of fuzz about the installation of the new vCenter components. I believe most of the hype was caused about how the initial vSphere 5.1 release behaved differently against expired certificates from how vSphere version prior to 5.1 behaved. In earlier releases, vCenter has only checked the expiry date of the certificate used during the initial install and fall to a backup mechanism if the certificate fail though the service would went up and the user would use vCenter as nothing has happened. To increase the security of vCenter and prevent man in the middle attacks, this behavior was … Read More

While data security has always been one of the top CEOs concerns for the past decade or so, more compliance regulation has been hitting organizations doors every year. After organizations have mastered how to secure their physical environment by using physical segregation, Virtualization came around and changed the security game. Now organizations has to ensure that their Virtual Infrastructures are meeting compliance regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, SOX, and FISMA. Trying to manually keep up with such regulations that get updated regularly can be an endless hassle, & that why VMware has released vCenter Configuration Manager few years back.

vCenter Configuration Manager can help organizations not only audit their virtual … Read More

With the introduction of vSphere 5.1, VMware has introduced a new vCenter architecture & SSO ( Single Sign On). This is seems to be the first thing being noticed by customers when deploying vSphere 5.1 as its not exactly what they used to. Prior to vSphere 5.1 all vCenter services were installed at once on a single server without giving you the option of spreading them across multiple servers or not installing certain services. To allow vCenter to scale even further, in vSphere 5.1 you got the option to install four separate services that constitute the vCeter Server 5.1 platform. These are:

• vCenter Single Sign On (SSO)
• vCenter … Read More

As part of my job as a consultant at VMware, I get to deliver Health Check & Architecture Reviews engagement on regular basis. I have found quite few best practices that is generally missed by most & thought to document the top 5 in here for everyone to benefit. Maybe on the next round more enterprises will pass these best practices check. The list below is not ordered in any manner, its just how they happen to kick into my mind and all of them quite important best practice to follow unless you have a strong reason not to.

1- Change port group security default settings ForgedTransmits and MACAddressChanges to … Read More

Time will come when you need a quick inventory of the VMs in your vCenter with their IPs, Computer name, power on status & all these simple things. You might just need that sheet b/c you need to keep an inventory of what you have or just the for the simple cause that the management had asked you for such one. In both cases you need to figure out the quickest and easiest way to do it. Yeah this can be achieved using power shell script or any other scripting language that vSphere support, but let’s keep that to when we require a more extensive inventory that is can not … Read More

Note: This is no longer an issue in vSphere 5.1.

Today while doing a manual DR failback test at one of the customers sites where they use Virtual Distributed Switches, I have noticed when removing/adding a Virtual Machine to inventory it lose the configuration for its network interface of which port group its connected to and the like. As the customer was running vSphere 4.1u1, I went ahead and tested the same in my lab running vSphere 5.0  which end up  having the exact same behavior. Its important to note that this behavior only affect Virtual Machines that is connected to a Distributed Switch port group, & it does not … Read More