vRealize Orchestrator Interoperability Problems

We've been working with Orchestrator recently and came across a subtle incompatibility issue.  Our vCenter is currently version 5.5, update 2.  We came across an authentication issue and one of the more popular work arounds on the forums was to upgrade Orchestrator to version 6.  We did a quick compatibility check on the good old VMware Interoperability Matrix and found that Orchestrator 6 has no problems with the vCenter 5 family, so we went ahead with the plan.



We applied the update and everything seemed to be working just fine for several months.  We decided that we're happy with how Orchestrator is working and so want to roll it out to several of the other vCenter servers in the environment... and that's when we ran into a problem.

We had some difficulty adding the second vCenter to the system, so we went ahead and removed the first one and then re-added them both.  They added just fine, so I logged into the Web Client to kick off a test workflow... and Orchestrator was missing.  The whole Orchestrator section of the Web Client was just gone.  We dug around in the MOB and found that the extensions were there and tried all sorts of restarts and removals and reinstalls, to no avail.

Eventually, Jeff checked out the C:\ProgramData\vmware\vSphere Web Client\Logs\wrapper.log file on the vCenter server during a service reboot.  He noticed an interesting pattern - the log tracked the installation of VCO and then reported that it promptly uninstalled it.  In the log, we saw this as a bunch of lines like this:

Installing bundle ‘com.vmware.vco.vcoui’ version ‘5.5.0’.

Followed by a bunch of lines like this:

Stopped bundle ‘com.vmware.vco.vcoui’ version ‘5.5.0’.

We removed both vCenter servers from Orchestrator (and the Orchestrator 6 folder from the C:\ProgramData\vmware\vSphere Web Client\vc-packages\vsphere-client-serenity\ folder) and restarted the web service again; this time we only saw the install messages and the Orchestrator plugin appeared in the web client (although we didn't have any Orhcestrator servers registered).  When we registered our Orchestrator system and restarted the web client again, it went back through that install/uninstall process and the whole plugin failed to load once more.  This pointed us at the compatibility matrices again.




You see, it turns out that supporting vCenter does not mean supporting all of vCenter's functions.  In this case, if we select the "VMware vSphere Web Client" as the platform on the matrix, we can see that Orchestrator 6 does not support any of the vCenter 5.5 Web Clients.  If we change our Solution to vCenter Orchestrator (the name of the 5.x version of Orchestrator), we can see that it has absurdly specific support for the vCenter Web Client.


Comments

Post a Comment

Sorry guys, I've been getting a lot of spam recently, so I've had to turn on comment moderation. I'll do my best to moderate them swiftly after they're submitted,

Popular posts from this blog

Clone a Standard vSwitch from one ESXi Host to Another

One of my customers is standardizing the configurations on their HP C7000 enclosures (they've been set up at various sites by various administrators with varying involvement from the architecture team).  As such, we need to stand up some temporary resources so that we can take down the main enclosure for reconfiguration.  That's fine, we can easily ship a smaller enclosure to each site for temporary compute resources.  Some of the sites are using Standard vSwitches, so we need to be able to quickly copy the networking configuration over from their existing blades to these new, slightly different blades.  As I see it, we had 2 good options: 1) Capture a Host Profile with the desired vSwitch configuration.  Delete every other component of the Host Profile so that only the networking section is applied; design the new ESXi hosts so that the vSwitches'll work with the old vmnic-to-vswitch configurations. 2) Write a script to clone the vSwitch from ones ESXi host to another.
Read more

PowerShell Sorting by Multiple Columns

PowerShell's Sort-Object cmdlet is super useful, especially when preparing output for human consumption.  A few people have found my blog while looking for more information about its use, specifically while looking for how to sort by multiple columns (well, properties, technically).  I've never done so (much less written about it), so I hope those folks found answers elsewhere.  But, it got me curious... and it turns out that it's really easy. The Technet article on Sort-Object has the answer directly spelled out: just use commas to create a list of properties to sort by (in order to precedence).  Let's look at some examples!  First, prepare a variable with some good sortable data: $myData = get-eventlog System -newest 25 And then we can get to sorting!  Say you want to sort primarily by EntryType (Warning, Information, Error) and then by Source.  Easy-peasy: $myData | sort EntryType,Source How about if you want it to be in descending order?  Yeah, there&
Read more

Deleting Orphaned (AKA Zombie) VMDK Files

A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them).  These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs.  How can this happen?  Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files".  The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!"  But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted.  After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen. So, how do you deal with these orphaned files?  Well, a few years ago I found a scrip
Read more