Vcenter

This one is just a quick post regarding an issue I came up against just before Christmas. To get straight to the point, I found an issue where in multiple separate environments, when cloning a virtual machine via the VMware vCenter HTML5 Web client interface, if you select the tick box to “customize this virtual machine’s hardware” and change any of the settings of the VM, the cloned virtual machine’s VMDK file(s) will be pointed to the VMDK file(s) of the source machine you used for the clone. ...

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment). It has been clear that the embedded model should now be the default model and it is the recommended model from VMware, in fact last week VMware announced their plans to deprecate the external PSC, but until today we did not have a way to automatically converge an external model in to an embedded model. ...

Update 27th October 2018: I was meant to provide this update last weekend, but it has been a hectic week. Within a few hours of posting this issue, a few people at VMware reached out to me to understand more about my configuration, asked me to upload the logs and a few of the smart guys and gals at VMware had been able to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, the key in the APPLMGMT_PASSWORD vecs store is used when a file based backup of the VCSA is scheduled. I believe a KB is on the way, but the workaround is to delete the VCSA backup schedule, perform the converge and you can then re-enable the schedule after the converge is complete. ...

This one will be a quick post, but I wanted to alert people to a new minor but useful feature that’s included in the vCenter 6.7 appliance, which is the ability to schedule backups natively within the appliance management interface. If you wanted to schedule an appliance based backup in 6.5, you would have to schedule a task to do so. Thankfully this was made easier by Brian Graf’s script, but now we have a way to build this in to the appliance configuration with no reliance on an external script. ...

[toc] Introduction Starting from VMworld US 2017, VMware announced their plans to support PSC replication and Enhanced Linked Mode with the vCenter Embedded deployment model, simplifying overall deployment and management requirements for a multi-vCenter environment. This feature is now included in the release of vSphere 6.7. In this post, I go over a little history for common deployment models, as well as what the new “vCenter Embedded Linked Mode” brings to the table. I also compare a couple of topologies between vSphere 6.0/6.5 and vSphere 6.7 to show the savings in the amount of nodes and in some cases, the complexity, that can be saved by using this new deployment topology. ...

It’s back, finally! A new feature with vCenter 6.7 is the ability to repoint a vCenter Server to another Platform Services Controller node, that resides in an entirely different vSphere SSO domain. This functionality is huge for domain consolidation, and also domain splitting (which admittedly is a less required use case from what I’ve seen, but something that still can be a useful use case). Edit: As per a comment from Rupak, I believe this feature is only available on the vCenter Server Appliance and is not available for the Windows deployment of vCenter 6.7. With that said, hopefully if you are running vCenter 6.7 you are now running the appliance, as you have likely had several chances to migrate to the VCSA either using the migration tool, or manually (albeit with plenty of scripts to assist with the move of config and workloads). ...

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. ...

The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well. Please find the video for the VCSA Embedded CLI deployment below. This has been recorded in FullHD, so best to watch it in Full Screen! ...

[toc] Introduction So I’ve finally had some spare time to download and have a look at some of the vSphere 6.5 components and I’ll be planning to do a few blog posts in early 2017 on some of the cool new features that have been added in this release. I’ve decided to start with a few posts on the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using both the new GUI installer and the CLI option as well. I’ve put the links immediately below, but I’ve also written a little about the VCSA below in this article which you may like to read as well. I’ll walk through the deployment of an embedded VCSA as well as an external deployment with 1 PSC and 1VC node. The individual posts below include both a video and text with screenshots. ...

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. ...