While installing vCenter 5.1 recently I experienced the following error at the point where you confirm the AD account to use for the vCenter service:
Failed to verify the service account. Error code: [87]
At first I figured I was mis-entering the credentials, but it turns out to be an issue if the user AD account for the vCenter service is the same name as the vCenter computer account.
Renamed the AD account and started the install again.
While installing a fresh vCenter 5.1 recently I was presented with this really helpful error message at the point where you are registering a vCenter Server administrator user or group with vCenter Single Sign On:
Wrong input - either a command line argument is wrong, a file cannot be found or the spec file doesn’t contain the required information, or the clocks on the two systems are not synchronized. Check vm_ssoreg.
I sincerely hope this saves somebody else some time because I had a fair amount of head scratching with this today. Installed a Windows Server 2012 VM on vSphere 5.0 U2, pretty standard install with a C:\ drive for OS, Software etc and D:\ for data. This particular server needed to run SQL Server 2012, however the install kept repeatedly failing with the error “Could not find the Database Engine startup handle”.
The next London VMUG will take place on July 4th 2013 and it looks like a great line up as usual. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing the session about some real world experiences with vCenter SSO.
I also heard a rumour that there may be a few copies of a new vCloud book given away…….
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I recently passed the VCP-IaaS exam and thought I would share the resources I used in case it is useful for anyone else. This is the exam which gives those already certified as VCP on vSphere, the VCP-Cloud certification.
I took the VMware vCloud Director: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1] course as my primary source. I enjoyed the course and felt it had a good mix of theory and hands on work.
There’s still time to register for the next London VMUG on April 25th 2013. As usual some excellent sessions are lined up – hope to see you there!
A colleague of mine experienced this issue recently where after making a PowerCLI connection to a vCenter and instantly running a command such as Get-VM, he would be prompted by the error:
Get-VM. Not authenticated. Possible cause of this error is that the connection was left unused for a while and session has timed out. Checking he was connected to a vCenter appeared to indicate that he was, i.e.
$global:defaultVIServer returned a value.
While on my working sojourn up North my good friend and fellow PowerShell MVP Jonathan Noble asked me to present a PowerCLI 101 session for the North East Bytes User Group he helps to run. So on Wednesday 20th March you can join us for this event at Newcastle University, session abstract and sign up details are below:
NEBytes March 2013 - Power The World With Imagination PowerCLI 101 IT Pros are starting to come to grips with the idea of managing Microsoft products with PowerShell, but it’s not just Microsoft who are making use of the powerful automation capabilities on offer.
I recently had a need to create some custom attributes for Clusters and VMs in vCenter. Having previously done this a few times a while back in vCenter I fired up Set-CustomField in PowerCLI 5.1, but was greeted with the following message:
$VM | Set-CustomField -Name "TestAttribute" -Value "True" WARNING: Use Set-CustomAttribute cmdlet. WARNING: The 'Set-CustomField' cmdlet is deprecated. Use the 'Set-CustomAttribute' cmdlet instead. So it would work fine now, but going forward some of my code would be deprecated and potentially not work when PowerCLI was upgraded, so I looked for what the options now were, but before we do a quick review of what Set-CustomField gave you.
Darren Wollard set up a very cool vExpert.me URL shortener for vExperts to use. I was curious whether this was available programmatically and turns out it is with a simple URL query. You either need to supply your username and password in the query (bad) or secret code (less bad– tip: find it on the tools page after logging in to the admin site) . Then the query from PowerShell is as simple as