vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 6 limitations removed.

If you have been using the vCenter Appliance (vCSA) in vSphere 5.5 or been considering it, then you are more likely aware of its limitations. You might have in the past as well looked at my blog post that highlighted the vCSA 5.5 limitations found at: vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 limitations. The good news in vCSA 6.0 seems to over come the biggest one of these as follow:

– vCenter Linked mode is now supported with vCSA 6.0. This one by far was the biggest limitation of the vCSA 5.5 and the one that had been most mentioned by my customers who were considering vCSA 5.5 at that time. Now this has been resolved for you and you can use vCenter Linked mode with vCSA 6.0. Wohooooo!

– You were limited to 100 hosts and 3000 VMs when using the embeded DB with vCSA 5.5, where you had to use an external Oracle Database to expand beyond these limits, which did not make larger customers happy. The good news these limits were waived in vCSA 6.0 and you will be able to use up to 1000 hosts and 10,000 VMs using the embedded database. I am sure between this one and the availability of vCenter Linked mode, many customers who were considering to move to the vCSA appliance, they will be eager to put their hands on the vCSA 6.0… Read More

vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 SSO Issues

While rebuilding my home lab to use the latest version of vCloud Automation Center, I have decided to rebuild it from scratch with the latest vCenter Server Appliance and ESXi. After deploying the vCenter Appliance 5.5c and going through the configuration, I wanted to join the appliance to my domain and allow users from my domain to authenticate.  While I was able to join the appliance to my domain and that seemed to work just fine as in the below screen shot, I was having a problem configuring SSO for native active directory. I kept getting the following error:  ” ‘alias’ value should not be empty ”

Alias Value should not be empty

The solution for this particular problem was easy, actually it was more of Ooops I have forget to restart the vCenter Appliance after joining the appliance to my domain. Actually it tell you to do so as in the below screenshot:

You actually need to restart the appliance after configuring AD

I wanted to document this, as I am positive there will be the case where others will miss this as well and try to fight this error and thought I will save them time. This is especially true that I have seen other posts on forums and blogs that claim rebooting after this step is not required although the documentation state so.… Read More

vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Appliance

Yesterday, I was asked twice if using our vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) with vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) is a viable option. As one of the two requests came from inside our VCDX family, It seems to be not a common knowledge, not when I get asked by another VCDX about it.  I thought this seems to be a good topic to address in a blog post, as the following questions seems to come often:

  • Does vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 6 support vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)?
  • Do your recommend using vCSA with vCAC?
  • What’s the added benefits of using vCSA  in my vCloud setup?
  • What extra limitations does using the vCenter Server Appliance with vCloud Automation Center impose to my environment?

I am sure you either had one of these questions on your mind or had been asked one of these at least once if you are working on a vCloud Automation Center setup. I will try to address these questions in this post.

Does vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 6 support vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)?

vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Appliance

I guess the image above gave the answer away, but for those of you who liked it spelled out, yes vCAC 6 support vCSA. Just make sure you check the vCenter interoperability matrix to ensure you are getting a supported version of the vCenter Server Appliance with the version of vCAC you are planning to install.… Read More

vCenter Appliance fsck failed

While I have been working with a customer on upgrading their infrastructure to vSphere 5.5, they had a power outage during the night which got their full virtual infrastructure down including storage (Not sure what the story with their UPS/Power generator). After they have brought their virtual infrastructure backup up both their vCenter Appliance and VDP appliance and few other Linux VMs has failed the fsck check while it was booting and it was stuck at the following error:

=========================================

fsck failed.  Please repair manually and reboot.  The root
file system is currently mounted read-only.  To remount it
read-write do:

bash# mount -n -o remount,rw /

Atention:  Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this
maintanance mode.  shutdow or reboot will not work.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

==========================================

Below is an actual screenshot of the error for you to compare it with what you got:

VMware vCSA fsck failed

Below is the steps I have followed to fix this on both vCSA and VDP Advanced:

  1. Stay Calm & Don’t Panic!
  2. Take a backup/snapshot in case the below steps does not work for you and you need to revert it back to the current state when you call support or call for help.
Read More

vCenter Server Appliance Error: failed to connect to VMware Lookup Service

While working with VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5, I needed to change the IP Address of the appliance as my customer were changing their IP scheme. It was quite to go to the VMware vCSA then to the network tab then Address tab and change the IP Address. After rebooting the appliance to ensure the IP change has taken affect and is working properly and consistent, I was able to login to the vCenter Server Appliance Management portal, but I was not able to connect to using the Web Client and was kept getting the following error:

“Failed to connect to VMware Lookup Service https://<vCenter Appliance IP>/lookupservice/sdk – SSL certificate verification failed”

Or as shown in the below screenshot:

Web Client Error after changing vCenter Appliance IP

 

It seems changing the IP Address of the vCenter Server Appliance does not regenerate the certificate with the new IP and you will have to configure the appliance to generate a new one manually. The good news it is pretty easy to do, and below is the instruction:

  1. Log in to the vCenter Server Appliance Web interface at https://<vCSA IP>:5480/.
  2. Click the Admin tab.
  3. Regenerate certificates:
    • vCenter Server 5.1: Select Toggle certificate setting so that the Certificate regeneration enabled displays Yes.
Read More

vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 limitations

VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 has been gaining huge attraction lately, especially with many of the major limitations affecting the vCenter Appliance in previous verions have been lifted. This is including the limitation where it was only supposed to support 5 hosts and 50 VMs when using the embedded database. In fact the all shiny new VMware vCSA 5.5 support up to 100 hosts and 3000 VMs using the embedded database, which seems to be able to deliver up to the scale required by most customers.

Note: It seems a misleading assumption has been going around that 100 hosts and 3,000 VMs is the maximum supported configuration by VMware vCSA 5.5, where is that is absolutely not true. This limit only apply when using the embedded  built-in vPostgres where it actually can support up to the vCenter maximums of 1,000 hosts and 10,000 VMs when connected to an external Oracle Database. This is clearly documented on page 7 of vSphere 5.5 Maximums guide and a copy of that table is shown below. I believe this misleading belief has spread as many bloggers has mentioned the 100 hosts and 3,000 VMs limit while failing to point out it is not the actual limit of the appliance, but it only apply when using the embedded database. Read More

Deploying VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance

Lately for most of my labs and even for many customers I have been deploying the VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance, as it is much quicker to install and give less chances for error. Further it saves customers a Windows license and not to mention being much easier to maintain, patch and upgrade. Further, with many of the earlier versions limitations being lifted it becoming much more viable option than ever before. For that I have decided to document the process of installing the VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance in a hope to encourage more of you to try it out.

 VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance Installation Steps:

1- Download the VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance OVA (I rather the OVA as all you have to get and deploy is a single file)

2- Deploy the VMware vCenter 5.5 OVA into one of your hosts.

  1. Launch the vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client.
  2. Go to File > Deploy OVF Template.
  3. Browse to the location of the vCenter Server Appliance downloaded .ova or the .ovf file and click Open.
  4. In the OVF Template Details page, click Next.
  5. In Name and Location, enter the name of your vCenter Server Appliance and click Next.
Read More

VMware vCenter Server Appliance Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation.

While playing with VMware vCenter Server Appliance in my home lab, I have been surprised with the following error:

Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation.

This error has came up while trying to change authentication to active directory authentication and kinda seen the same error when trying to change the database to an external database. For some reason the Server service stop button is shadowed as well which mean I could not stop it by the GUI interface. Although my lab setup is not ideal and it might just due to the way I set it up, though I will still document how I resolved this where the same mechanism can be used to stop and restart any other service used by the vCenter Server Appliance. Below are the steps I have followed:

1- SSH to your VMware vCenter Server Appliance using the root account.

2- Execute the following command to see the status of all the service running in the vCenter Appliance:   chkconfig

The output of all services will look something like below:

localhost:~ # chkconfig
after.local               off
apache2                  off
arpd                         off
atftpd                       off
auditd                       on
autoyast                    off
chargen                      off
chargen-udp              off
cron                       on
daytime                    off
daytime-udp              off
dbus                     on
dcerpcd                  on
dhcp6r                   off
dhcp6s                   off
dhcpd                    off
discard                  off
discard-udp              off
earlysyslog              on
echo                     off
echo-udp                 off
eventlogd                on
fbset                     on
gpm                      off
haldaemon                on
haveged                  on
irq_balancer             on
kbd                      on
ldap                     on
lsassd                   off
lwiod                    on
mdadmd                   off
multipathd               off
netlogond                on
netstat                  off
network                  on
network-remotefs         on
nfs                      on
ntp                      off
pcscd                  off
powerd               off
random               on
raw                      off
rpasswdd            off
rpcbind                on
rpmconfigcheck           off
sendmail                       on
servers                           off
services                         off
setserial                        off
skeleton.compat         … Read More