2017

I was recently rolling out the base install of VMware NSX in my lab, where I ran in to a controller deployment issue. The lab is running NestedESXi, and I have two ‘sites’ that are nested, each with 3 ESXi hosts in a vSAN cluster. vCenter, PSC and NSX Manager / controllers are then deployed on to the nested ESXi hosts, so the storage is on the nested vSAN datastores.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in my home lab, which has involved me moving from a flat /24 network (yeah, I know) to a somewhat more realistic lab environment with a Cisco SG300 switch and Ubiquiti EdgeRouterx. Due to these networking changes, as I build out the environment I’ve been creating a lot of VLANs and subnets between my physical ESXi host, the Cisco switch and the ERx.

I’m a bit late to the blogosphere with with one, but we’ve had a couple of customers hit the issue described below, and it seems to be mostly across HPE and Dell hosts running ESXi 6.x. I’ll get to the good stuff first. If you’re hitting an issue on ESXi 6.x where the RamDisk is filling up and ScratchConfig.CurrentScratchLocation is reverting to /scratch, even with a location configured, it’s likely due to a known issue with an Emulex Driver.

For those that weren’t aware, vRealize Infrastructure Navigator went End of Distribution (EOD) and End of Support Life (EOSL) at the end of September, 2017. Information on this is provided in another post. If you are not aware of what vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) was, it was a tool that was part of VMware’s vCloud Suite that discovered application dependencies and mapped network flow within a vSphere environment. VIN was deployed as a virtual appliance and then registered with vCenter Server.

Blink and you will miss it! For those that weren’t aware, VMware disclosed a security vulnerability with the vCenter Server VIX API which has been patched, but this also impacted VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) as it used the VIX API to build service mappings. As per the VMware KB article that announced this information, if you are running vSphere 5.5/6.0 you essentially have two options. Continue using VIN on an unpatched environment (not recommended), or use a new management pack for vROps that replaces VIN functionality called the Service Discovery Management Pack.

Earlier this year, I bought a new laptop which is my daily workhorse. I don’t own any other computers or tablets. I decided to put my ramblings in to a post below. This is not a technical review of the laptop or going in to benchmarks or different customisations, there’s plenty of that available online in “formal” reviews. For the past couple of years, I have used a Microsoft Surface Pro as my main computer.

And here we are, at the end of October. Before I get in to it, I signed up for Blogtober a few weeks ago, and this is shamefully my first post for Blogtober, and I’m writing this on the 25th of the month. Let’s see if I can get 5 posts out by the end of the month! Anyhow, it’s that time of the year again and vForum Australia 2017 is just around the corner.

One of the quieter announcements from VMworld US 2017 was that of VMware Skyline. No, not the Nissan sports car! As a VMware customer, VMware Skyline is a platform that provides VMware visibility in to your environment with the aim of providing proactive and predictive recommendations, based on the configuration in your environment, cross referenced with VMware guidance, KB articles and lessons learned from other customers' environments. In the event that you log a case with VMware, Skyline also provides the Global Support Services (GSS) team access to information about your environment, without needing to spend hours gathering logs, configurations or sitting on a Webex with an Engineer while they get familiar with your environment and specific configurations.

I was recently working in a customers environment to configure vRealize Log Insight with VMware Identity Manager. They had vIDM deployed some time ago and configured, primarily for vRealize Business for Cloud. I’m not yet that familiar with vIDM, and I learnt something new in troubleshooting this issue. When logging in to vIDM to set up the new configuration, after going to Identity & Access Management > Directories > Selected the sync directory > Sync log, I noticed there were sync issues with Active Directory:

Overnight VMware announced a new technical resource for vSphere administrators called vSphere Central. Check out the blog post here. In conjuntion with the above, Adam Eckerle released a blog post to announce the availability of a new tool named vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool. The blog post can be found here. I don’t want to repeat much of the post here, but in short to quote Adam; “This tool aims to help customers plan and execute both upgrades to vSphere 6.