2016 on Matt Allford

vSphere 6.5 - Upload File to Service Request via Web Client

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 11:02:53 +0000

Just a quick note on something I spotted as I’ve been working through some blog posts for vSphere 6.5. It looks like you can now upload files for a Support Request to VMware directly from the vSphere Web Client.

KB 1008525 lists some of the main methods for uploading diagnostic information to VMware including using the Support Assistant (which I am planning to do a post on), FTP and email. It does not yet contain information for this new feature in vSphere 6.5, but it is documented here.

Quick Tip - Finding vSphere Update Manager Version and Build

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 11:29:11 +0000

Every now and then I need to find the version and build number of VMware vSphere Update Manager that is running in a customer’s environment. I’ve written this post mainly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully it helps someone else down the track.

VMware have a KB article for most of their products to correlate the build numbers with versions. The specific article for VUM is KB 2143837. Sometimes these aren’t always right up to date unfortunately.

VCAP6-DCV Deploy - It's a Pass!

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 05:08:31 +0000

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience.

I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never had any industry certifications and in 2016 I made it a bit of a personal goal to chase a few down. Towards the middle of the year I decided to pursue the VCP6-DCV certification. Because I was new to the certification track, I had to do the foundations and VCP exams. I passed both in June. From there I was looking at doing a Microsoft Exchange / Office365 certification because I worked a lot in this space at the University, but July was when I changed jobs and my focus shifted.

vCenter 6.5 PSC Repoint Limitations

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:18:52 +0000

Hi all,

This is just a quick note to let you all know of a limitation with vSphere 6.5. Repointing of a vCenter Server to a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in another vSphere SSO domain SITE is not supported. Please see the caution at the top of this VMware KB article.

Note: As of 21/11/2016, the KB article for repointing a VC to a PSC WITHIN the same SSO domain site (see here) also has a caution to say it is not supported with 6.5. I believe this is a mistake in the KB article, as the 6.5 documentation has steps on how to repoint within the same SSO site, and I’ve reached out to the product manager Adam Eckerle who also believes this is an error and is investigating.

VMware vForum Sydney 2016

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 12:30:19 +0000

[toc]

Introduction

Well, another vForum Australia event has come and gone this week and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on my few busy days spent in Sydney attending this event.

This was my third time attending vForum, and this roughly reflects how long I’ve seriously been working in the VMware ecosystem. While the last two years were OK, this year was my favourite by far, most likely due to not being afraid to meet new people and get involved in some events. Earlier this year I had a career change, and when that happened I had some moments of clarity which also resulted in me wanting to achieve some personal goals as well, and a big part of that is around community involvement. Although it is early in my own personal journey, having a glimpse into the great communities that are involved in different pockets of the IT world has been an eye opener and is an area I will personally be trying to put a lot of focus into, all while trying to manage that work / life / family balance thing!

PowerCLI Functions - Get Raw Device Mappings and Set Perennial Reservations

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:57:52 +0000

Introduction

Just a quick post to say I’ve written a couple of powershell functions to deal with Raw Device Mappings and perennial reservations within a vSphere environment. Although I do try to avoid them, some customers do still have RDMs in their environment, mostly for Microsoft failover clusters configured at the virtual machine layer. Some ad-hoc scripts exist for this at the moment, but I wanted to break out the ‘getting’ of RDMs and then setting them to perennially reserved.

VMware Update Manager vCenter Privileges

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 23:39:39 +0000

I’ve always tried to use and recommend using the ’least privileges’ model when designing and implementing systems. But we’ve all been there, when the same service account is being used to connect everything to vCenter, and said account has been assigned the full administrator role and propagated within vCenter.

I’m getting my lab set up again and I needed to install VMware Update Manager (VUM). I realised that in the lab previously I have just done as I mentioned before and used a high privilege service account thinking “it’s just a lab”. I thought this would be a good chance to check what privileges are actually required to install and register VUM with vCenter Server. I’ve quickly documented the steps below including the only privilege that is required.

VMware VCSA Migration Tool Now GA

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 23:15:09 +0000

A long last, VMware have made a tool available and supported to migrate from a Windows installation of vSphere 5.5 across to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.0U2. VMware gave us a teaser with a fling in 2015, but this was taken down and there have been hints dropped via Social Media and most recently some good sessions for the migration tool at VMworld 2016.

Prior to this tool, migrating from a Windows install to the VCSA was not a trivial task. I undertook this at my previous employer, where we had 2 vCenter Servers, around 10 clusters and approx 70 hosts. While a lot of it was scripted, it was still a very involved process, as we had distributed switches, a number of cluster, host and VC advanced settings etc. Along with that, the historical data was not transferred across so we had to be OK with not migrating that data.

Repoint vCenter Server to PSC

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:07:08 +0000

Introduction

This article will walk through the steps required to repoint a vCenter Server 6U1 or later node to a different Platform Services Controller (PSC) node. Scenario one will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located within the same vSphere SSO site, where as scenario two will walk through the steps if the destination PSC is located in a different vSphere SSO site. This is almost the same process, but repointing a VC to a PSC in a different SSO Site than the original PSC requires an additional step.

Reconfiguring and Repointing vCenter Server to PSC

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 22:05:48 +0000

Introduction

Starting with vSphere 6, there are two main roles to a core vCenter infrastructure. The vCenter Server (VC) and the Platform Services Controller (PSC). During deployment, administrators are presented with two deployment options:

Embedded. With an embedded deployment, the VC and PSC roles are installed on the same node
External. With an external deployment, the PSC and VC roles are installed onto separate nodes. External deployment also enables the enhanced linked mode feature for vCenter Server

Prior to 6.0U1, you had the ability to repoint a VC node to another PSC within the same vSphere SSO site using vmafd-cli. See VMware KB 2113917 for the steps. You could not repoint the VC node to a PSC in a different SSO site, even if it was in the same SSO domain.

VMworld 2016 US Breakout Session Recordings Available

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 22:23:54 +0000

Edit: At the time of publishing, the main page at www.vmworld.com is not rendering correctly (it is just showing a blank white page where the videos should be), though it was a few days ago. The URL that should be displaying on the vmworld URL below is http://www.webcastregister2016.com/vmware/form.php, and you can go directly to this URL to access the videos if the URL below is not working when you try.

Just a quick post to note that the recordings for all of the breakout sessions from VMworld 2016 US are now available online at this URL.

Reminder - vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 End of General Support

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 12:23:00 +0000

In the busy world we live in, a lot can be said for the “time flies when you’re having fun” saying. And with so much happening in the world of the SDDC, it’s easy to forget about some of the core components that, for the most part, sit there reasonably quietly just ‘doing their thing’.

This is just a quick reminder post for those still running vSphere 5.0 or 5.1, that end of general support ends for those products this week, on the 24th of August to be exact.

ESXi and Nimble Storage Unmap SCSI Blocks

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 11:28:44 +0000

OverView

Back in vSphere 5 a new VAAI primitive called unmap was released. When using thin provisioned volumes or LUNs for VMFS datastores, actions such as storage vMotion, consolidating snapshots and deleting data (such as VMDK files) do not automatically reclaim the space on the underlying datastore. For example, if you have a thin provisioned 1TB datastore that has 2 x virtual machines using 400GB each, and you delete one of these virtual machines (using the ‘delete from disk’ action), the used space on the datastore will still report as 800GB.

vSphere 6 - Add Second External PSC to Nested Lab Environment

Sun, 17 Apr 2016 21:52:02 +0000

For my lab, I run everything nested within VMWare workstation, which is running on a single Dell physical host that runs Windows for the base OS. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to spend a bit more time in the lab, mostly for learning some components of the vSphere environment I’m not familiar with, but also as a test area. I deliberately started the environment with a single embedded deployment, so the PSC and VC server was running on the one node. I also made the decision to run the lab with the appliance. We run the appliance in production, and it is clear that this is the preferred deployment method from VMWare.

vSphere 6 - Reconfigure Embedded vCenter to External PSC

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 10:45:08 +0000

Introduction

As of vSphere 6.0U1, VMware allow an embedded vCenter server deployment to be reconfigured to an external deployment, which demotes the Platform Services Controller (PSC) components of the embedded node and points the VC server to an external PSC node which resides in the same Single Sign On (SSO) domain as the source embedded node.

This is done by using the utility cmsso-util

Before we get too much further, there are two main uses for cmsso-util:

PowerCLI Script- Configure ESXi Host for Connectivity to Nimble iSCSI SAN

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 04:39:09 +0000

So last week I noticed that a user by the name of Dean had opened a thread on the Nimble Connect forums with some handy PowerCLI to configure an ESXi host to connect to Nimble Storage arrays. I had done the same thing near the end of 2015 when we installed 6 Nimble Storage arrays in our environment, and I was meant to get around to putting it all together in a powershell function/script. Reading Dean’s thread prompted me to revisit this task, and I now have a version 1.0 release of a PowerCLI script that can be run against an ESXi host.

VMWare SRM Array Based Replication Volume Mounted as 'snap-xxxxxxx-VolumeName' After Failover

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 20:42:26 +0000

I’m going through the process of installing VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1 in our production environment, which is currently running vSphere 6.0U1.

We use Nimble Storage arrays and have elected to make use of array based replication (ABR) for data replication between sites.

During our initial testing and doing full failovers of some dev applications, I noticed that the datastore name within vCenter for the protected volume on the SAN was getting renamed, and had a prefix of snap-5b356a02-VolumeName

VMWare Update Manager sysimage.fault.SSLCertificateError

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 01:37:53 +0000

Recently I’ve gone through the process of replacing the machine_ssl certificates on our vCenter and PSC nodes at work, and shortly after I went to use Update Manager and received the following error: sysimage.fault.SSLCertificateError

We opted for the ‘Hybrid’ model of certificates in vSphere 6, where the machine_ssl certificate on the PSC and VC server nodes is replaced with an externally signed certificate, and the VMCA takes care of all of the solution user certificates using the default configuration.