vSphere 5

Recently at my day job we had some new storage allocated at our recovery site to use for vSphere storage.  I was tasked with decommissioning the old datastores.  The problem is that my replicated VMs resided on the old storage.  Of course I could go into my vSphere replication settings on each VM and just point it to the new datastores and be done with it.  That would have taken quite some time to do since the VMs would have to fully replicate again.  I wanted to find an easy way to copy the replicated VMs from the old datastores to the new datastores.  So I did some Internet searches and found the following blog post:  Copy Files Between Datastores – PowerCLI.   Dan Hayward posted a useful PowerCLI script that he used to copy ISO files from one datastore to another.  I basically adapted this script and changed it to move a VM from an old datastore to another.  I could have scripted it and passed in the variables from a CSV file but I wanted to update the vSphere Replication settings one VM at a time.  So here is what my script looked like:

Connect-VIServer ServerName

#Set’s Old Datastore
$oldds = get-datastore “OldDatastore”

#Set’s New Datastore
$newds = get-datastore “NewDatastore”

#Set’s VM Folder Location
$VMloc = “VMName”

#Map Drives
new-psdrive -Location $oldds -Name olddrive -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root “\”
new-psdrive -Location $newds -Name newdrive -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root “\”
#Copies Files from Old to New
copy-datastoreitem -recurse -force -item olddrive:\$VMloc\$VMloc*.vmdk newdrive:\$VMloc\

Basically the script connects you to your vCenter server, sets the old and new datastore variables, sets the VM Folder name and then does the magic to map the datastores and copy the VMDK files from the old to the new.  Having the VMDK files copied over to the new datastores allowed me to use these as my replication seed for each drive when I reconfigured replication settings for the VM.  I just updated this file for each VM that I needed to copy to the new datastores.

Obviously this could have been automated even more as I had to do this for over 120 VMs but I am not a scripting expert.  I am just thankful for a great blog post from Dan Hayward to help me out!  Thanks Dan!

On January 27 2015 VMware released an update for vCenter Server 5.5.  The release notes are located here.  A brief summary of the resolved issues from the release notes are below.

vCenter Single Sign-On

• VMware Directory Service consumes excessive memory
• Backup and restore of vCenter Single Sign-On database might not replicate the data between primary and secondary nodes correctly
• Attempts to logout through the vCloud Automation Center UI might fail

Networking

• Network Interface Cards of virtual machines in disconnected state might get ejected during vMotion

vCenter Server, vSphere Client, and vSphere Web Access

• Virtual machines on ESXi hosts containing NSX Endpoint virtual machines might not power on
• Update to SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition Server in vCenter Server Appliance to address time zone changes
• vpxd reports massive logging
• Accessing the Storage View tab fails with the error
• Scheduled tasks cannot be created for a different time on the same day in vSphere Web Client
• The VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails intermittently
• HTML console cannot be launched with custom port
• Datastore browser in vSphere Web Client does not overwrite existing files
• VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails

Virtual Machine Management

• Cloning or deploying deploying virtual machines over the network causes performance degradation
• Alert event is not triggered when one VM has multiple vNICs with same MAC address

vMotion and Storage vMotion

• The default behavior of DRS has been changed to make the feature less aggressive during cluster upgrade