vmware

VCSA: 'Active Directory Enabled' Fails During Setup Wizard

During the setup wizard of the vCenter Server Appliance I experienced an error at the step to make it Active Directory Enabled. In this instance I received the below error: Failed to execute ‘/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ‘ad’ ’test’ ‘sunnydale\vcentersvc’ CENSORED ‘sunnydale.local’’: VC_CFG_RESULT=309(Error: Invalid hostname. FQDN is required for joining a domain.) Initially I thought it may be something to do with how I was specifying the AD domain name or username. Didn’t get very far with that, so I skipped it for the time being and decided to come back to it later.

London VMUG Thursday 23rd Jan 2014

The next London VMUG takes place on Thursday 23rd Jan 2014, you can register here. The below agenda looks great with all the current hot topics covered; vCAC, VSAN, vCHS, NSX, homelabs and Lego. So I’ll be heading there soon with my friends above and will see you there :-)

vSphere: Importing a CentOS VM Exported as a VMDK from KVM

I was recently given a VMDK file which I was informed had been exported from a KVM system and needed to be used to create a VM in vSphere. Initially I thought this would be quite a straightforward task, but turned out to be a bit of an effort, so thought I would share it here since most of the info on the interwebs seems to be for moving VMs in the other direction.

VMware Converter: Permission to perform this operation was denied

While attempting to carry out a V2V using VMware Converter I had a permissions related issue when selecting the source machine: Permission to perform this operation was denied I triple-checked my permissions within vCenter were sufficient to carry out a V2V, even temporarily granting my own account with the Administrator role directly to the location in question, but still received the above error. I stumbled across this VMware Community posting which suggested that granting local Administrator rights to the account I was using on the Windows server where VMware Converter was running from might help.

PowerCLI In The Enterprise: Breaking The Magician’s Code & Function Templates

At today’s #UKVMUG I presented on the topic: PowerCLI In The Enterprise: Breaking The Magician’s Code. Below are the slides from the session: During the session I discussed breaking your PowerShell code down into functions and modules. To aid with this I am posting the 6 function templates I use which cover many of the typical scenarios I write a function for and enable the rapid creation of these functions since much of the code is typically repeated.

VMUG iOS and Android App

I was made aware today that there is a VMUG App for iOS and Android. According to the description it looks like it will be pretty useful if you are attending a VMUG: Attending a VMUG User Conference. Download the event app before you go to have all of your conference details at your fingertips. The app will provide you with real-time updates on sessions, speakers, exhibitors, and networking opportunities. You’ll be able to take notes, follow Tweets, connect with other attendees, provide session feedback, and more, all from your phone.

Problems With VM After Failed Snapshot-Based Backup - Unable to Access File Since It Is Locked

Whatever backup solution you use to backup your virtual infrastructure with, you may sometimes end up with VM snapshots that need to be cleaned up. After a backup failure alert, I use the following PowerCLI one-liners to quickly identify and remove snapshots left behind (by say Netapp SMVI). Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where-Object {$\_.Name -like 'smvi\*'} | ft VM,Name,Created -AutoSize Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where-Object {$\_.Name -like 'smvi\*'} | Remove-Snapshot -RunAsync -Confirm:$false Recently I had an instance where post a backup failure the snapshot failed to remove with the error Unable to communicate with the remote host, since it is disconnected.

UKVMUG 21st Nov 2013 Community Session "PowerCLI Automation in the Enterprise: Breaking the Magician's Code"

The agenda for this year’s UKVMUG has been published and a pretty fine line up it looks too. What’s really great is that during each section of sessions, there’s a community slot with real world info from people working with VMware technologies at the coalface. You’ll be able to pick sessions from @sammcgeown @maishsk @etherealmind @rickyelqasem and me. I’ll be talking about some of my experiences of PowerCLI automation in the field and examples of how to break your code down to make it more flexible to use in different scenarios.

VMworld Europe 2013: Day 3

So the final day of VMworld Europe 2013 for me and since I needed to leave not long after lunch I decided to try and get a couple of sessions in before time to go home. First up was an OpenStack using VMware session with Scott Lowe as one of the presenters. I found this very informative as I didn’t have much of an idea about OpenStack yet and it was very useful to see the integrations with vSphere in the Havana release and good discussion points were raised around where the two might be used together or apart.

VMworld Europe 2013: Day 2

Day 2 and back to the Hang Space to tune into the General Session. This was practically a word-for-word repeat of SF as far as I could tell, so I won’t bother going into much detail here. If you want to watch it in full you can see it here: The session I was most interested in today was that around the integration of Puppet and VMware. PuppetLabs CTO Nigel Kersten was one of the presenters.