vSphere

Scott Vessey, a fellow VMware Certified Instructor started his own blog at http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com. Scott is Lead Instructor for VMware at Global Knowledge UK and has just discovered when the beta and final VCP on vSphere 4 exams will be available.

The beta exam for vSphere 4 will be available June 29th, 2009. Candidates eligible for the beta exam will automatically be contacted by VMware. These candidates must be VCP3 certified and beta product users.

The final release of the VCP on vSphere 4 exam will be available publicly on August 1st, 2009.

Rawlinson Rivera a fellow VMware Certified Instructor spilled the beans about the
“New VMware Education Roadmap for vSphere 4”. Rawlinson AKA Punching Mike, “Punches” through topics such as security issues, implementations, and new technologies using videos and how-to demos. You can read all about it at “Punching Clouds”, a blog covering breakthroughs in the Field of Virtualization, Cloud Computing and other Cool Shit!

Here’s a list of the classes that will be available this year:

Virtualization Generalist

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V4
• VMware vSphere: Script & Automate V4
• VMware vSphere: Manage Availability V4
• VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting V4
• VMware vSphere: Design

Security Specialists

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V4
• VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security V4

Performance Specialists

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V4
• VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Perfrmance V4

Virtual Desktop Administrators

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V4
• VMware View: Install, Configure, Manage V3
• VMware View: Design

Availability Specialists

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage V4
• VMware vSphere: Manage Availability V4
• VMware Site Recovery Manager: Install, Configure, Test V1
• Business Continuity Data Recovery: Design

The  VMware vSphere: Fast Track V4 class is a five day course designed for accelerated learners that want to learn about a variety of expert topics. The class is based on a well balanced mix of of content from the Install, Configure, Manage, Scripting & Automate, Manage Scalability, Manage Availability and Troubleshooting classes. Classes range from two to five day classes and they will be available in two formats - Instructor Lead Training and Live on Line.

When you’re going to enable Fault Tolerance on a virtual machine, you have to specify vCenter Server SSL settings because vCenter requires verified host SSL certificates in order to use FT. This option can be found at the Administration vCenter Server setting menu option.

When this option is selected, vCenter will verify the validity of the SSL certificates of the remote hosts when establishing SSL connections. This affects operations such as adding a host to vCenter Server, connecting to a VM, and making the VM devices remotely available. Selecting this option will disconnect all hosts which do not have a selected verified checkbox.

I’m upgrading my home-lab environment to the GA release of vSphere. After enabling HA on my two node cluster there was trouble in paradise. Every time I “turned on VMware HA” the task eventually resulted in an unknown HA error.  This usually happened around the 84%. I investigated two interesting log files which can be found at /var/log/vmware/aam.

aam_config_util_addnode.log

05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] No AAM Primary Agents were found that would accept our connection.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] Connection Unsuccessfully attempted at:
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ]
05/26/09 09:48:17 [active_primary_ftcli] command did not run successfully on 'esx4-r'.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [active_primary_ftcli] 'esx-r' would not accept our connection.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [find_active_primary ] attempting to find an active primary.
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cli_cmd       ] command is '/opt/vmware/aam/bin/ftcli -domain vmware -cmd "la -l"'
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] CMD:    /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ftcli -domain vmware -cmd "la -l"
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] STATUS: 1
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] RESULT:
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] Unable to get Fully Qualified Domain Name
05/26/09 09:48:17 [issue_cmd           ] [Err:0] Unable to get Fully Qualified Domain Name

aam_config_util_listprimaries.log

05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args          ] KEY: cmd VAL: listprimaries
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args          ] KEY: -z VAL: 1
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args          ] KEY: uname VAL: Linux
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args          ] KEY: shortname VAL: esx4-l
05/26/09 10:17:09 [print_args          ] KEY: domain VAL: vmware
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd           ] CMD:    /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ft_gethostbyname esx4-l |grep FAILED
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd           ] STATUS: 0
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd           ] RESULT:
05/26/09 10:17:14 [issue_cmd           ] ft_gethostbyname(esx4-l) FAILED

Ok, that sounds fair, there is a problem with hostname resolution, and this is the most common error source for VMware HA problems. Since I didn’t have a proper DNS server in my lab, I was relying on host files. Eventually the problem was caused by the short host name. When editing your host files don’t forget to add the short hostname after the fully qualified domain name.

192.168.178.180 myserver.domain.com myserver

In addition to VMware’s announcement that vSphere 4 is now generally available, VMware is also pleased to announce that as of May 21, 2009 the vSphere vShield Zones product is also generally available. VMware vShield Zones 1.0 offers the following key features and benefits for vSphere 4 environments: