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March 8, 2013

Long time … no post … I’m to busy at work

Personal, VMware Personal No comments

It’s now a while that I have posted something new on my page 🙁 but currently I’m extremely busy at work. Setting up multiple new environments based on new / different hardware and in multiple data centre area’s. This is quite interesting because all environments will work together even if they don’t have direct connections between the vCenters/ESXi servers. So hopefully everything will work as I have it in my mind 😀

What else is going on … hmm yeah I’m preparing myself for my first VCP exam. So I plan to do the VCP5 exam within the next weeks or months depending on my spare time. As preparation I bought the VMware Press VCP5 certification guide. For someone without deeper VMware knowledge this is a really helpful book. For myself with multiple years of VMware experiences in small production environment with nearly 50 ESXi servers and around 1400 virtual …

January 8, 2013

Call “StorageResourceManager.RecommendDatastores” for object “StorageResourceManager” on vCenter Server failed

VMware, vSphere VMware No comments

If you are using Datastore cluster with enabled SDRS in vSphere 5.1 you possible will receive this error message.

Call “StorageResourceManager.RecommendDatastores” for object “StorageResourceManager” on vCenter Server failed

Currently is no fix available from VMware. But will possible be available in ESXi 5.1 Update 1. There is a workaround available described in the VMware KB. Link

To work around this issue:
Disable Storage DRS. To disable Storage DRS:

In the vSphere Client inventory, right-click a datastore cluster and select Edit Settings.
Select Turn off Storage DRS and click OK.

Clone the virtual machine from the template.
Enable Storage DRS. To enable Storage DRS:

In the vSphere Client inventory, right-click a datastore cluster and select Edit Settings.
Select Turn on Storage DRS and click OK.…

December 19, 2012

New HP Microserver NL54

Homelab, HP Homelab, HP No comments

HP has announced a new version of the nice little Microserver. After the NL36 and NL40 now it is the NL54. The basics are the same the only real improvement is the new CPU which is now running on 2.2Ghz instead of 1.5Ghz. The official memory limit is still 8GB. 🙁 I had expected that HP will increase the limit to 16GB. Nevertheless it is a cool small server which is perfect for home lab setups.

Quickspecs…

November 29, 2012

Save licenses costs for vSphere Webclient

VMware, vSphere VMware No comments

Normally you install the vSphere Webclient on an additional windows server to separate it from the vCenter. This results in one additional Windows license (Server or 7 both possible).

But wait why should I do this if there is the vCenter Appliance from VMware which contains the Webclient running on Linux? So I tried it I have deployed the vCenter appliance additionally to my normal vCenter. I just configured the SSO to use my existing one and directly after this I was able to login with the Webclient from the vCenter appliance to my vCenter. The vCenter in the appliance is not configured/started and therefore I save additional resources.

Steps to configure:

* Deploy the vCenter appliance OVF
* Start the vCenter appliance
* Configure the network
* Access the management interface https://vCenterAppliance:5480
* Skip the setup assistant
* Go to the SSO tab
* Select “external” as SSO deployment …

November 27, 2012

VMware VSA 5.1

VMware, VSA, vSphere 1 Comment

I’m currently playing around with the new VMware VSA 5.1. I have installed it successfully on a standalone vCenter with local users. But on a different vCenter which is using an OpenLDAP as user base the VSA Manager fails to install with the error message “Login failed due to a Bad user or password”.
The reason for that is that the installer tries to log in to the vCenter using the vCentername and the current user (example: vcenter01\administrator). This fails as the vcenter01 is not the correct domain in the SSO. In my case there are just domains valid the standard System-Domain and my OpenLDAP domain. To resolve this you can start the VSA Manager installer using some command line options.

VMware-vsamanager-all-5.1.0-859644.exe /v"VM_SHOWNOAUTH=1"

This will enable the option to enter the vCenter credentials.

With the correct credentials the installation should complete without any errors.…

August 28, 2012

VMware vSphere 5.1 announced

Cloud, VMware Cloud, VMware No comments

Yesterday VMware has announced the new VMware vSphere 5.1 with multiple cool new features.

Feature list from the Whats New VMware 51 Platform Technical Whitepaper.pdf

VMware vSphere 5.1 introduces many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities
of the vSphere platform. The core platform enhancements in vSphere 5.1 include the following:

• Improved security and auditing by removing reliance on a shared “root” account

• Improved SNMP monitoring with SNMPv3 authentication and SSL encryption

• Enhanced vMotion support, enabling virtual machines to be migrated between hosts and clusters that do not have shared storage

• Support for the latest Intel and AMD CPUs along with support for Microsoft Windows 8

• Bundling of VMware® vShield Endpoint™ as part of the core vSphere product
Along with the core platform improvements, vSphere 5.1 provides the following several virtual machine–related enhancements:

• Support for up to 64 vCPUs per virtual …

August 14, 2012

VMware Datarecovery Kernel Panic possible solution

VDR, VMware, vSphere VDR, VMware No comments

Since May ( Post ) I was facing multiple Kernel panic’s in my VDR appliance. Now I got something like a fix which is running quite smooth in my environment.

Steps:
1. Deploy a new VDR 2.0 appliance
2. SSH in or log into the console (root/vmw@re) 3. Install this kernel.
rpm -i http://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el5/x86_64/RPMS/kernel-ml-2.6.39-4.1.el5.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
4. Set the kernel as the default one. (You can manually select this one at. The command just sets grub to boot the first kernel in the list) sed -i ‘s/default=1/default=0/’ /boot/grub/menu.lst 5. Reboot.
6. Confirm we are running on the new kernel # uname -r 2.6.39-4.1.el5.elrepo

Give it a try and if possible provide me with your experiences.…

June 14, 2012

Change Linux User password using Powershell

PowerShell PowerShell No comments

Sounds strange but yes it is possible 🙂 Just one module and some lines of Powershell code and thats it.

Import-Module SSH-Sessions

$old_passwd = "vmware"
$new_passwd = "VMware1!"

New-SshSession -ComputerName IP-ADDRESS -Username admin -Password $old_passwd

$result = Invoke-SshCommand -ComputerName IP-ADDRESS -Command "printf '%s\n' $old_passwd $new_passwd $new_passwd | passwd"

Write-Host $result

Remove-SshSession -RemoveAll

…

May 8, 2012

Proxmox VE 2.1 released

Proxmox, Virtualisation Proxmox No comments

The great virtualization solution Proxmox VE has been release in version 2.1.

Release notes

– simplify GUI for users without permissions
– implemented startup/shutdown ordering
– improved task logs on node startup/shutdown
– added Russian, Italian and Turkish translation
– updated corosync cluster stack to 1.4.3
– update LVM to 2.02.95 (fixes snapshot problems)
– bug fixes

Download

Link

…

VMware DataRecovery Kernel Panics

VDR, VMware, vSphere No comments

I’m currently facing an problem with my vdr that it runs into a kernel panic.

It looks like an issue with the hot add function which add’s vmdks from virtual machines.

The response from vmware was to set to parameters in the datarecovery.ini file.

Location: /var/vmware/datarecovery/datarecovery.ini

If the file doesn’t exist you can create it.

Parameters to be added to this file:

SerializeHotadd=1
DisableHotaddCopy=1

After the file is created and the parameters have been inserted the datarecovery service has to be restarted.

service datarecovery stop
service datarecovery start

I’m currently testing these settings. Keep you in the loop. 🙂…