Virtually Jason

Hi everyone - I was helping a customer upgrade their vCenter Server Appliance from 6.0 to 6.7 and we came across a bit of trouble.  During the pre-upgrade checks phase, our logs revealed these errors: No file found matching /etc/vmware/install-defaults/cm.url No file found matching /etc/vmware-vpx/vcdb.properties No file found matching /etc/vmware-vpx/vc-extn-cisreg.prop Googling around revealed some possible DNS related issues, but we doublechecked that all of our DNS records were good so figured that was unlikely to be the issue.  So, after some more unfruitful research, we decided to check on the current version of the vCenter server.  It was a very early version of 6.0.  Lacking further direction, we went ahead and used the management interface (via port 5480) to download the latest 6.0 updates.  After those were applied, we tried the 6.7 upgrade once again and everything went great! So, if you come across those error messages, you may just need to upgr...

I was replacing some vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) self-signed certificates with signed certs from an Active Directory Certificate Authority and I came across a minor issue that I wanted to document here.  I was using the /usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager tool to generate the CSR, and then PSCP to download the CSR and hand it off to the security team. When I first tried to use pscp to get the file, I encountered an error that I hadn't seen before: Fatal: Received unexpected end-of-file from server Some quick googling didn't turn up any hits on this issue, but I thought of something as I was poking around.  When I connected to the VCSA via SSH, it didn't drop me to a BASH shell until I did the usual "shell.set --enabled True" "shell" operation that it prompts you with.  Since PSCP (and SCP in general) is just establishing an SSH connection to the host and then doing a copy command, I figured that my issue was probably that the default...

One of my customers ran into a situation where they had lost track of the root passwords for their vCenter and Platform Services Controller appliances.  As they logged into devices with expired passwords, they changed them, but they had lost track of which devices had had their passwords changed and which password each device was using.  Since there was a decent sized list of potential passwords and quite a few devices, I decided that we'd all be better served by writing a script to test them for us, rather than trying them all by hand.  Aside from the boredom that would come from running the tests by hand, I was concerned about human error introducing false negatives to our results. Well, such a script is pretty trivial - I can just make an array of server names and an array of potential passwords, then nest a foreach inside of another foreach to try each password against each server.  And that's true, but then I got to thinking about security.  I really didn...

One of my customers recently had one of their vCenter 6 Server Appliances go offline.  The VM was still running and responding to pings, but the service wasn't working.  I established an SSH session to the server and went through the basics, and what do you know, "df -h" revealed that the /storage/seat partition was 100% full. Well, VMware has a fine KB Article about a full seat partition and how to solve it.  At least, mostly how to solve it.  The problem that I ran into is that the truncate commands (that free up space) were failing to run because there wasn't enough space on the partition.  When I tried to execute them, I got the following message: "ERROR: could not extend file ... No space left on device" "Hint: Check free disk space." I'll admit to chuckling when I saw the "hint" line.  So, I had to free up some disk space so that I could free up some disk space.  I did a bit of research into how to free up some space on ...

Towards the start of the year, I made a post about my vCenter to vCenter migration process , which can be used to update from vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6 (or for that matter, to downgrade, or whatever).  Since then, I've done a lot of these migrations and the scripts/procedure have matured.   Jeff and I have fixed many bugs, but the reason that I'm posting about this (again) is that I recently added a new feature and have polished our migration process. The latest versions of the migration scripts (the ones that get the settings from the source vCenter and then recreate those settings on the destination vCenter) now support DRS Rules!  The native support for DRS Rule manipulation through PowerCLI is a bit lacking... but fortunately, the community has solved that problem!   Matt Boren and Luc Dekens have created a module called DRSRule that is built to help with the reading and manipulation of DRS Rules (pretty self explanatory, right?).  I took advantage of t...

I was recently deploying a series of VMware vCenter Server Appliances for a customer who wanted to migrate to that platform from their windows based vCenter 5.5 environment.  Rather than deploying all of these by hand, we figured that this was an excellent time to check out the VCSA command line install options. The first thing that we had to do was to figure out our architecture.  In this case, it was pretty easy.  Each site was getting a vCenter appliance and a PSC appliance.  We decided that we wanted our PSC appliances to replicate with each other, so that we could use the enhanced Linked Mode functionality in vSphere 6, and so designed a ring topology to reduce the impact of a given site being offline. The first thing that we had to do was to prepare some JSON answer files.  To do that, open your vCenter Server Appliance install ISO and browse to vcsa-cli-installer\templates\install and examine the bounty contained within. Copy the example .JSO...

One of my customers is planning on upgrading to vSphere 6.  They have many sites and require that each site be able to operate independently, but want them to be centrally managed under normal conditions.  So, they have a great use case for Enhanced Linked Mode! We're exploring different architectures and how to handle various situations.  One of the situations that we wanted to explore very thoroughly was the loss of a vCenter or PSC at one of the sites and how the recovery process might work.  To that end, we've set up three VCSA + PSC pairs in a single SSO domain and have been ripping them apart and generally abusing them. We've come up with a generally good procedure that covers, start to finish, how to decommission a PSC all the way to how to restore a replacement PSC/vCenter to full functionality.  We've come up with this process by combining the steps from a few VMware KB articles, and so I've decided to go ahead and cover it here in a single workflo...