vSphere - 15

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:

Continue reading "The vSphere vShield Zones Product" »

VMware ESX 4 Version: 4 | 2009/05/21 | Build: 164009 Download

VMware ESXi 4 Versson: 4 | 2009/05/21 | Build: 164009 Download

VMware vCenter Server 4 Version: 4 | 2009/05/21 | Build: Log in for build number. Download

VMware Consolidated Backup Version: 1.5 Update 1 | 2009/05/21 | Build: 150805 Download

VMware Data Recovery Version: 1.0 | 2009/05/21 | Build: 164675 Download

VMware vShield Zones Version: 1.0 | 2009/05/21 | Build: R1.0G68 Download

Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Ethernet Module Version: 1.0 | 2009/05/21 | Build: 27-0.4.2 Download

VMware is pleased to announce the general availability for VMware vSphere 4 is 21 May 2009. VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform – VMware Infrastructure 3 – along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

The update manager within vSphere has some great enhancements. You can download all the updates with the UMDS tool and place the downloaded updates in a shared repository.  A shared repository is a location within your firewall to which patches from various venders may be downloaded using the Update Manager Download Service. When these patches are required for remediation, the system retrieves them from the shared repository, rather than to a remote location, which will save time. The types of locations supported are: local disk, a file URL, or an http URL.

How to reduce your storage footprint with VMware vSphere 4 and EMC Storage.

That’s what I want to know, I’ve downloaded Microsoft’s newest version of Windows 2008, and installed it in a vSphere virtual machine. This virtual machine contains 4 virtual CPU’s and 4 gigabytes of memory.

Windows Server 2008 R2 also holds the much-anticipated update to Microsoft’s virtualization technology, Hyper-V™. The new Hyper-V™ was designed to augment both existing virtual machine management as well as to address specific IT challenges, especially around server migration. Hyper-V™ is an enabling technology for one of Windows Server 2008 R2’s marquee features, Live Migration. With Hyper-V version 1.0, Windows Server 2008 was capable of Quick Migration, which could move VMs between physical hosts with only a few seconds of down-time. Still, those few seconds were enough to cause difficulties in certain scenarios, especially those including client connections to VM-hosted servers. With Live Migration, moves between physical targets happen in milliseconds, which means migration operations become invisible to connected users.

One problem, I haven’t figured out yet how to install the VMware tools.

Update from fellow vExpert Jase McCarty : Howto: Install VMware Tools on Windows 2008 Server Core

VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage

This hands-on training course explores installation, configuration, and management of VMware® vSphere™, which consists of VMware ESXi/ESX™ and VMware vCenter™ Server. Upon completion of this course, you can take the examination to become a VMware Certified Professional. The course is based on ESXi 4.0, ESX 4.0, and vCenter Server 4.0.

Continue reading "VMware vSphere training is here!" »