Day 1 started with the General Session. I expected this to be pretty much a repeat of SF so decided to watch it from the Hang Space. There were some new announcements around the acquisition of Desktop As A Service provider Desktone, vCAC 6.0 and GA of VMware NSX. You can watch the full session here:
I had a fair few sessions lined up for today. First up was a session around Log Insight.
Having arrived in Barcelona yesterday for VMworld Europe 2013, I made it to the vRockstar event at the Hard Rock Cafe where everyone who’s anyone appeared to be there - you couldn’t move for those Xtravirt guys, they’re everywhere.
Not travelling on the Monday meant a full day of labs for me today and thankfully it was a highly successful experience after last year’s fiasco messed up my planned schedule.
The other day I noticed some comments on Twitter around the time taken to install VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.2
Being of curious nature I decided to check it out further and in doing so discovered this extensive installation guide from Jad El-Zein. Seeing as a lot of the pre-requisites are installing Windows Roles / Features and configuring IIS, I figured this would make a good candidate for some PowerShell work and might save you some time if you need to do this yourself.
Experienced this issue a month or so back (ended up logging a call with VMware to get confirmation of what happened) and it occurred again today so figured it was worth posting about.
If you receive the following error when attempting to log into vCenter 5.1 with an AD account:
A general system error occurred: Authorize Exception
there are a number of potential issues. however most likely it is related to SSO and one of the Identity Sources.
Having recently enabled Storage DRS in a vSphere 5.1 environment we began to see a lot of the following errors in vCenter:
The device or operation specified at index ‘x’ is not supported for the current virtual machine version ‘vmx-04’. A minimum version of ‘vmx-06’ is required for this operation to succeed
The host(s) running the VM(s) in question contained the error matched in this VMware KB article:
[2009-07-10 14:13:41.632 F638BB90 info ‘vm:/vmfs/volumes/4a56e6c2-9319e3df-f1af-001e0bea4030/RVHOLS029/RVHOLS029.
This one tripped me up earlier in the week, so thought it was worth sharing in case you hit the same issue sometime. In PowerShell v2 and earlier when using Get-Credential to save credentials into a variable and NOT using a full Windows domain credential, e.g. something like:
instead of a more Windows style credential:
then the resultant stored credential prepends a \ in front of the username:
$cred = Get-Credential PS C:\\> $cred UserName Password -------- -------- \\root System.
I recently experienced an issue adding a vSphere 5.1 host to vCenter while using the Add-VMHost cmdlet in PowerCLI. I’m pretty sure the same problem would have occured if I was using the GUI, but this work was for part of some automated deployment work.
On a freshly baked ESXi 5.1 install one of the first tasks is to get it into vCenter. However, this was failing with what initially appeared to be a license issue, despite there being plenty of available licenses.
After upgrading a Cisco UCS C210 M2 rack mount server to ESXi 5.1 and then ESXi patches from 25/07/2013 the host was stuck at ‘Initializing scheduler….’
I had checked my firmware version was satisfactory for ESXi 5.1
but found reports suggesting this (intermittent) issue has been around for a while with earlier versions of ESXi, different versions of UCS models and firmware and maybe HP models too.
Before trying the suggested workaround of disabling legacy USB support, I decided to get the box up to the latest firmware.
A colleague of mine demonstrated this for me yesterday while we were troubleshooting which physical NIC out of 8 in a rack mount server matched up to which vminc (0 - 7) in vSphere. Tougher than you might think when vmnic6 and 7 mapped to the onboard physical NICs 1 and 2!
Using the command line tool ethtool you can make each vmnic blink for a specified period of seconds allowing you to identify which port on the back of the server it maps to.
A colleague asked me whether it was possible to clone a VM from a particular snapshot. Since there is no capability to do this via the GUI, I looked at what was possible via other means, i.e. PowerCLI.
The vSphere API contains a Clone_VM task, which includes the ability to specify a snapshot to clone from in the VirtualMachineCloneSpec. So I put together the below New-VMFromSnapshot function to make this easy to do for a few different scenarios - it supports multiple snapshots to choose from, full and linked clones, and multiple destinations such as cluster, datastore, VM folder: