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vSphere

VMware vCenter users are entitled to free 25 OSI licenses of vRealize Log Insight #FreeVMwareStuff

by Philip Sellers December 12, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

Its not news, but I find that a lot of folks still don’t realize that they are entitled to free benefits from VMware, included with their vSphere licenses. In this #FreeVMwareStuff post, I want to focus on vRealize Log Insight.

Anyone who has entitlement to VMware vCenter also gets 25 OSI licenses for vRealize Log Insight. This means you can collect logs from your vCenter and 24 more ESXi hosts. For a lot of users, that may include all of their ESXi host logging to vRealize Log Insight.

NSX users also get their own flavor of Log Insight if you purchased NSX 6.2.4 or better.

What is vRealize Log Insight?

vRealize Log Insight is two things: 1) it is a syslog server and 2) it is a UI and search interface built to help VMware users discover conditions in their vSphere environment. The major advantage is having the search of a consolidated repository of logs. Even if you setup logging on each host, this means you have to go host to host to troubleshoot the logs. Log Insight offers you the advantage of a centralized location for logging.

Because it is centralized, it can also do some basic analysis of the logs and show you how many of a single problem may be occurring and across which hosts. Users will get access to both the raw logs and to the interpreted logs.

The UI is a big benefit in addition to search capabilities – you have filters and ways to look for exactly what may be occurring in an environment.

Free?

Yes, that’s right – its free – to start anyways. vCenter Server users get 25 OSI (Operating System Instance) licenses – meaning you can connect up to 25 operating systems to this vRealize Log Insight server. To move beyond that, additional licensing is needed.

Full licensing also gives you features you want – including clustering and and HA for vRealize Log Insight.

NSX users get vRealize Log Insight for NSX for free for users of 6.2.3 or higher. There is no additional charge for this product and it is included with your NSX licensing – no restrictions.

Getting Started

There is a great post from Altaro that outlines the steps to deploy and create a vRealize Log Insight appliance and get your vSphere linked to it. https://www.altaro.com/vmware/vrealize-log-insight-a-first-look-and-how-to-deploy-it/

This post first appeared on Techazine.com and was reposted here. For more great VMware content, check out Phil’s blog at Techazine.com

December 12, 2018 0 comments

VMware vCenter users are entitled to free 25 OSI licenses of vRealize Log Insight #FreeVMwareStuff

by Philip Sellers December 11, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

NSX users also get their own flavor of Log Insight if you purchased NSX 6.2.4 or better.

What is vRealize Log Insight?

The UI is a big benefit in addition to search capabilities – you have filters and ways to look for exactly what may be occurring in an environment.

Free?

Full licensing also gives you features you want – including clustering and and HA for vRealize Log Insight.

NSX users get vRealize Log Insight for NSX for free for users of 6.2.3 or higher. There is no additional charge for this product and it is included with your NSX licensing – no restrictions.

Getting Started

December 11, 2018 0 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Cross vCenter vMotion UI from VMware Flings #FreeVMwareStuff

by Philip Sellers December 5, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

File this under – have you seen it? Cross vCenter vMotion is one of the most useful features that was introduced in recent years. I say that because a lot of times we have consolidation projects in a company that does a lot of mergers and acquisitions. We inherit companies that already have vSphere and already have their own vCenter – so how do you handle consolidation? How do you handle moving VMs live and online during a migration situation? Cross vCenter vMotion.

Cross vCenter vMotion is simple from PowerCLI. It is the same Move-VM cmdlet that is used for any other vMotion or Storage vMotion. The only difference is you have to pass it objects in a second vCenter – which is also not hard, but you just need to know what you’re doing. And, it can be tough to determine the right port groups and NIC mappings in the process.

A lot of people are not comfortable working from the command line or can’t quite get all the correct parameters to do this using PowerCLI – so the engineers at VMware have released a Fling that lets you have a UI for Cross vCenter vMotion.

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility is the official title of the UI for Cross vCenter vMotion. It is available for free download at https://labs.vmware.com/flings/cross-vcenter-workload-migration-utility.

The current release lists the following notes about the Fling:

Key Features

Completely UI-driven workflow for VM migration
Provides REST API for automating migration tasks
Works with vCenters in same/different SSO domains
Enables batch migration of multiple VMs in parallel
Auto-populates inventory for ease of management

Supported Operations

Perform live/cold migration as well as relocate/clone operations
Works for migration tasks within and across vCenter servers
Select host/cluster/folder/resource pool as placement target
Supports both storage vMotion and shared datastore migration
Flexible configuration for VMs with multiple network interfaces

How it Works

This particular Fling is a Java based application. It runs a local web server on your local machine under the default port of 8080. You can access the UI by going to http://127.0.0.1:8080 or http://localhost:8080. There is no authentication.

Once it launches, you hit the Migrate button to begin.

The first step is registering your vCenters by toggling to the Register tab. Once you enter hostnames and credentials, you’ll have at least 2 vCenters registered and available for use in the tool.

Toggle back to the Migrate tab to select the source, target, and all the details for your migration. The drop downs allow you to define the placement and network mappings between port groups on each vCenter. Once you have all your selections made, choose Submit and the migration begins.

You are returned to the home screen which shows the status of the relocation or clone job and you can monitor from here. Rince and repeate.

Its a Fling?

Flings are unsupported tools from VMware Labs that are released into the community as-is. They are there as a test to see how popular and helpful the tool is and to receive feedback. Some Flings appear and die. Some Flings get productized – like the vCenter HTML5 web client and the ESXi HTML5 Host Client.

December 5, 2018 0 comments

Datacenter PowerCLI Virtualization

A simple script to update ESXi host DNS settings in PowerCLI

by Philip Sellers June 7, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

Not long ago, we updated our internal DNS to use Cisco Umbrella (aka OpenDNS). During the migration, we needed to update all of the DNS settings on our ESXi hosts. There is a built-in cmdlet called Set-VMHostNetwork which will update the settings. The best practice is to always have multiple DNS servers, so doing that is fairly easy but you will need to create an array with multiple addresses.

To create an array, you have to declare a varaible and assign it to an empty array using @(). Afterwards, you can add your data into the empty array.

The code below assume you already have a connection to vCenter. If not use a Connect-ViServer cmdlet to connect first. The code will get all of the ESXi hosts connected to a vCenter and update their DNS settings with the new settings you specify:

[code language=”PowerShell”]$dnsaddress = @()
$dnsaddress += "8.8.8.8"
$dnsaddress += "8.8.4.4"
Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostNetwork -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Set-VMHostNetwork -DnsAddress $dnsaddress[/code]

June 7, 2018 0 comments

Datacenter PowerCLI Virtualization

Automating VMware Tools upgrades on VM reboot with PowerCLI

by Philip Sellers May 24, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

When it comes to improving the health of an existing vSphere environment, one of the first lifts that you should try is upgrading all of the VMware Tools to the current version of your ESXi hosts. A lot of times, the VMware Tools get installed during initial deployment and forgotten. VMware has made a lot of progress in the capabilities packaged in VMware Tools. These capabilities appears to be accelerating with some new developments like AppDefence.

VMware offers a few ways to upgrade the tools, but one of the methods with least impact is the upgrade on reboot. Officially, Upgrade on Power Cycle was introduced back with vSphere 5.1, but a lot of folks have overlooked this checkbox in the VM configuration.

Step 1

Set your templates! May sound crazy, but lets fix the future before addressing the past. Go into your templates and set the Upgrade on Power Cycle setting inside of the VM configuration. Right click your template, choose Edit Settings and then go to the VM Options tab (in either the vSphere Client or the HTML5 Client). Check the box for “Check and upgrade VMware Tools before each power on” button and click OK to save the setting.

Step 2

Fix the past! The PowerCLI below will create an object and then embed another object inside and set its value to “UpgradeAtPowerCycle.” The same config object can be used to reconfigure every VM in your environment to set this setting.

[code language=”PowerShell”]# VMware Tools Automatic Upgrade on PowerCycle

$vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$vmConfigSpec.Tools = New-Object VMware.Vim.ToolsConfigInfo
$vmConfigSpec.Tools.ToolsUpgradePolicy = "UpgradeAtPowerCycle"
Get-VM | Where {$_.ExtensionData.Config.Tools.ToolsUpgradePolicy -like "manual"} | ForEach { $_.ExtensionData.ReconfigVM_task($vmConfigSpec) }[/code]

May 24, 2018 0 comments

Datacenter PowerCLI Virtualization

Find Orphaned VMs in vCenter with PowerCLI

by Philip Sellers May 18, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

After a failure or event with data loss, its possible for vCenter to lose a VM. When this happens, the VM is marked as orphaned. Orphaned VMS will exist as a stub in vCenter and you can right click and remove them from Inventory, but getting a list of these VMs prior to making changes is a great first step. PowerCLI is a great way to capture a full snapshot of that information before making changes.

[code language=”PowerShell”]$OrphanedVMs = Get-VM * | Where {$_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "orphaned"}[/code]

By storing the full VM information in a variable, you can save it for reference.

Modify the cmdlet slightly and you can automate removal of Orphaned VMs, rather than having to right click each one in vCenter and select Remove From Inventory.

[code language=”PowerShell”]Get-VM * | Where {$_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "orphaned"} | Remove-VM[/code]

The above cmdlet will prompt you one by one to remove the VM from inventory, or you can select the Yes to All option on the first prompt.

How do you get Orphaned VMs?

vCenter marks a VM as orphaned when vCenter has the VM’s ID in its database, but the location of the VMX file is no longer where vCenter believes it is located. This does not mean the VM doesn’t exist on a file system somewhere. By using the PowerCLI above, you get the full details of the VM, including the location where vCenter believes its VMX is located.

May 18, 2018 0 comments

News

Change Host Hostname and DNS in vSphere 6.7 in vCenter.

by Roger Lund May 1, 2018

written by Roger Lund

With the release of vSphere 6.7, The interface looks a bit different.

Thus , I thought I would do a write up on how to change a ESXi Host’s Hostname and DNS in vSphere 6.7 within vCenter.

We are going to use the HTML 5 interface.

Lets expand to the host I just installed, and added to the cluster. In this case it is esxufss02.

Next, Lets click the Configure Tab.

Next, Lets click into Networking > TCP / IP Configuration.

Next, Click Default under TCP/IP Stack. And Click Edit.

Next, enter the information, and click ok.

Enjoy.

Roger L

May 1, 2018 0 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Warning: SolidFire Element OS 10.1 + vSphere Round Robin PSP + VVOLs = problems

by Philip Sellers February 26, 2018

written by Philip Sellers

Warning: SolidFire Element OS 10.1 + vSphere Round Robin PSP + VVOLs = problems

During our recently Element OS 10.1 upgrade, we experienced a catastrophic failure between vSphere and Solidfire. Although the Solidfire array continued to stay online, IO between vSphere and array slowed to crawl leading to non-responsive hosts and VM workloads – in short – nothing worked in this cluster after upgrade. Solidfire support said they have only seen this once prior to our issues and although there is a known issue with Round Robin and VVOLs, it was not this bad. The solution is to setup a Fixed path selection policy (PSP) rule in vSphere, moving away from Solidfire’s best practice of round robin. This is only a mitigation configuration, however, and the fix will be in a later version of Element OS.

Our vSphere environment runs under the Solidfire best practices, which is round robin multipathing policy (PSP) for all Solidfire paths in vSphere. In this configuration with VVOLs, the upgrade to 10.1 is a problem. We ran for a year(ish) on 9.2 without issue using VVOLs and Round Robin PSP. We exclusively use VVOLs and experienced extended downtime until switching to a fixed PSP.

Solidfire has a known issue highlighting the problem, but as VVOL adoption is still quite low, the number of affected environments is low also. According to Solidfire support, traditional VMFS datastores are not affected – it is solely VVOLs.

Mitigation

Prior to Element OS 10.1 upgrade, you’ll need to create a rule to assign all Solidfire paths with Fixed PSP. If you had previously created a rule with Round Robin PSP, you’ll have to remove this rule. If you try to create a Fixed rule with ESXCLI and the Round Robin rule already exists, you get an ambiguous error in ESXi.

Check for the the Round Robin rule with:

[code]esxcli storage nmp satp rule list[/code]

[code] esxcli storage nmp satp rule list | grep Solid[/code]

Your actual remove command may vary (if, for instance, you do not have the IOPS=10 option). To remove an existing rule, use may use a version of the following ESXCLI command:

[code]esxcli storage nmp satp rule remove -s VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA -P VMW_PSP_RR -V "SolidFir" -M "SSD SAN" -e "SolidFire custom SATP rule" -O iops=10[/code]

To add the Fixed PSP rule for Solidfire Element OS 10.1 + VVOLs config:

[code] esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA -P VMW_PSP_FIXED -V "SolidFir" -M "SSD SAN" -e "SolidFire custom SATP rule"[/code]

It is imperative to note that the command above is a MITIGATION CONFIGURATION ONLY and is not the recommended best-practice configuration outside of this specific situation.

For general best practices, check out Josh Atwell and Aaron Patten’s PowerShell for setting up best practices around Solidfire: https://github.com/solidfire/PowerShell/blob/master/VMware/SolidFire-VMware-Best-Practices.ps1. Their code also has examples of how to remove rule in PowerShell, if you prefer that method to ESXCLI on a host.

February 26, 2018 0 comments

News

repost: VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History as of Dec 15 2017

by Phil Marsden December 15, 2017

written by Phil Marsden

Repost: VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History as of Dec 15 2017

The following listings are a comprehensive collection of the flagship hypervisor product by VMware. All bold versions are downloadable releases. All patches have been named by their release names. Please note that the ESXi hypervisor is available since version 3.5.

So I am still learning and when i went to download esxi i was unable to download version 6.5 and it would only allow me to download version 6, being a newbie and assuming there were no major differences beween version 6 and 6.5, I did so.

But now with hindsight i understand that was not the case and i am reposting this excellent article on VMwares build history to help you avoid falling in the same trap

VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History

So what’s the difference?

the main difference apears to be with vSphere, having moved from a client app system to a HTML5 interface, now seeing as its a complete interface change it would be better to learn that. But have no fear all is not lost, i now have the perfect opertunity to look into upgrade paths and learn about that!

Anyway keep tuned for the next insallment

Tchau for now.

Phil

December 15, 2017 0 comments

News

Hypervisor installed, what now?

by Phil Marsden December 11, 2017

written by Phil Marsden

Hypervisor installed so what now?

Well a hypervisor has one purpose, host and allocate resources to virtual machines. so to do that we need some way to manage the hypervisor and the virtual hardware it will provide

How do we manage esxi? well looking at the splash screen on the esxi server we have a friendly prompt:

“Download tools to manage this server from http://192.168.159.128”

That sounds like just the ticket, noting it’s the ip address of our newly installed esxi server. so firing up our internet browser of choice and heading over to that url…

We find a nice VMware EXSI welcome page, and the first paragraph suggests downloading something called vSphere to manage the server, i liked the sound of that so i downloaded it.

Running the installer gives us a standard compressed windows package installer: (note pretty sure its going to need administrator privileges to install so i granted them when asked

lets keep it simple and install it in English!

Accept the license Agreement..

Specify the install location

Install

well that was painless, lets see what has appeared in our start menu

VMware vSphere Client, that’s new lets take a look.

ok, the first thing the cvlient wats to do is connect to a server to manage, so i enter the IP of our new esxi server and the root credentials i set at install

Now as this is a home lab to play around with i don’t have a certificate authority, so vSphere will prompt to accept the self signed certificate the first time you connect.

Success!

vSphere has successfully been downloaded, installed, and connected to a remote hypervisor. In what can only be described as a super slick, fast and intuitive process.

I find it very exciting that this process is all that is involved in deploying new hardware in a virtualised environment, install the hypervisor on the bare metal and connect it up to the existing infrastructure. the rest can be done remotely.

Now, next up lets install a server on our hypervisor and get to know vSphere a little

Tchau for now

Phil

December 11, 2017 0 comments