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Bad Idea: Disabling HA Admission Control With vCloud

5
1 week ago
by in , ,

Gabe has written up a really nice article recently about HA Admission Control you should read.  It made me think of a very recently conversation I had with some folks about HA Admission Control and vCloud Director specifically.  Namely, the fact they disabled it entirely.  Even when I was a vSphere administrator, before I was more educated, I made the same mistakes of disabling HA admission control.  When I talk to people now at least 9 times out of 10 people who have disabled HA Admission Control did it because “No more virtual machines would power on”….Yeah of course! It was doing its job, ensuring that what was running would be able to power on in the event of a failure.  The other reason is I think people felt they could be smarter than the feature itself.  For whatever reason you basically are turning off the “Virtual Bouncer” as my friend Frank Denneman so eloquently put it the other day on a Skype call.

I have seen it get disabled so many times to “Power on Just one more More >

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[INFO] vCloud Director Fast Provisioned Catalog Virtual Machines

3
1 week ago
by in ,

A while back I was messing around with Fast Provisioning in vCloud Director and I noticed something I wanted to dig a little deeper into.  My Co-Worker Cormac Hogan (@VMwarestorage) also wrote a little about this as well which does a great job showing the linked clone aspect.  Also William Lam (@lamw) wrote up some nice scripts to find the linked chains.  However, it took me up until now to get my home lab back into a clean state to test things a little differently specifically with how these interact with the vCloud Director Catalogs.  The premise of what I am looking at is a very simple setup, but could change some operational ideas about how and when you enable Fast Provisioning, which is a great, and handy thing to have in test and development environment.  However, you need to understand a little about how they work before you check the box to enable them.

There is a couple of things you need to know first about vCloud Director Fast Provisioning.

  1. It is Enabled on a PER More >
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[INFO] What Does Preparing a Host for vCloud Director Do?

4
2 weeks ago
by in , ,

This question comes up a lot and only recently did I ask this of engineering and the answer is quite simple.  We all know that Preparing a host for vCloud Director essentially installs the vCloud Director Agent onto ESXi.  However, the secondary question that usually gets asked is, “What does the vCloud Director Agent actually do?”  I decided to ask that and I was also told I could publish the answer.  Frankly, the answer is quite simple really.

The vCloud Director Agent is used for two things:

  1. Communicating with the cross host fencing vmkernel module that is installed when the agent is pushed. This is needed when you use VCD-NI network pools.
  2. Retrieving virtual machine thumbnails

I was pretty sure I knew about the VCD-NI aspect I just forgot about it.  The image thumbnails on the other hand was quite news to me.  Either way, now we know what the vCloud Director Agent does once it is installed as part of the host preparation.  For information on ways to manually remove the agent see More >

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Gotcha: Changing IP Address on vCenter With SRM

1
1 month ago
by Kristopher Boyd in , , ,

Post written by contributing author Kris Boyd and Chris Colotti

As part of the Disaster Recovery solution that Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti developed, Kris Boyd has been working on a comparative VMware View Solution using the same basic principles.  However, one thing both solutions came across is a unique situation on the vCenter virtual machines when trying to use Site Recovery Manager’s ability to change the IP Addresses on the Guest OS in the recovery site.  This situation only seems to affect the vCenter virtual machines and is a very specific condition.  It is unique because in most cases Site Recovery Manager is talking to an upper layer vCenter Server, and in our Disaster Recovery solutions there is also a vCenter Server being managed by another vCenter and SRM as depicted below.

Most of us know that SRM has the capability to change the IP on a virtual machine that is part of a recovery plan, and in most cases this works just fine.  There are a few situations, such as More >

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Segregating The vCheck Daily Report Scripts

1
1 month ago
by Shane Williford in , ,

Guest post by Shane Williford

Last week I was going through some tweet history from my European colleagues, and one particular tweet stood out to me by Alan Renouf. He mentioned that “if you are a system admin of any kind, you *should* be using this tool”. That tool being vCheck (see HERE for info, download, & video on how to use). At the time, I think I may have heard of it, but since I had a few free minutes, I thought I’d check it out to see what the buzz was about.

DISCLAIMER: The vCheck script is from Alan Renouf as well as several other contributers. Any troubles you may have running the script in and of itself, you will need to follow-up with Alan on his site so he can assist you.

After downloading vCheck, going through Alan’s video, and ‘tweaking’ things to make it work, I began to think…”can I separate these plugins out so I can have a more ‘niched’ output for what I want to run?”.  Also, this script needs to be ‘configured’ upon initial run, and with all the plugins it has, More >

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Gotcha: NTP Can Affect Load Balanced vCloud VMRC

2
1 month ago
by in ,

This is short and sweet, but something we spent almost two weeks trying to resolve.  The environment was setup using my documentation on Load Balancing Cells but the Remote console was not load balancing correctly.  It worked if one cell was removed from the pool but not if both were live in the load balancer.  As it turns out we saw the following error:

 2012-03-26 09:43:10,470 | WARN     | consoleproxy              | ConnectionTracker              | Closing connection java.nio.channels.SocketChannel[closed] as it has not initialized in time |

We suspect we see this message because the initial connection has left vCloud Cell 1 with a time stamp, and by the time it arrives to vCloud Cell 2 that time stamp was more than 2 minutes old. Which is well above the 2 second allowed skew.  vCloud Cell 2 ignores the request because its more than the time allowed.  The result is just an inconsistent drop in connections on the Remote Console connections.

I had run into other issues with NTP and More >

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[INFO] The Right vCloud Allocation Model For Catalogs

3
1 month ago
by in , ,

I wanted to supply a small, yet interesting piece of information that Frank Denneman and I discovered while writing our upcoming white paper.  I want to preface the fact we are looking at this from the PROVIDER’s perspective.  So from a catalog storage aspect this would be the “Published” catalogs maintained by the provider.

In the course of examining the vCloud Allocation Models and their deeper relationship with vSphere, we did discover a helpful tip on your catalog vApps.  Essentially you want to create a Pay As You Go Org vDC to house all these catalog items.  The reason is simple without going into too much gory detail.  I will save that for the white paper.

The nature of the The Pay As You Go vCloud Allocation model is to assign resource settings to the individual virtual machines.  The resource pool itself has no settings assigned for limits and reservations.  This means that the virtual machines will not consume the reservations assigned unless they are powered on.  Since you More >

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[INFO] vCloud Director 1.5.1 Released!

1
2 months ago
by in , , ,

I know I am about 8 hours late to the party on this one, but there is a few things I wanted to point out.  Although this is a minor release, with some feature enhancements, to me there is a lot to this in the way of fixes.  The feature enhancement list is not that long but some are key for folks:

New platform support (Huge!)

  • vCloud Director 1.5.1 adds support for the following:
    • vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1
    • ESXi 5.0 Update 1
    • vShield 5.0.1
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64 bit), Update 7 (as a supported vCloud Director Server operating system)

Firewall rules can be configured with CIDR blocks, IP ranges, and port ranges Added system notification for lost connection to AMQP host Enhanced cell management tool and log collection script Support for AES-256 encryption for VPN tunnels Increased the retention maximum for vCenter Chargeback history

What is most interesting is many of the Resolved Issues which I have pulled out what I think are the most notable.

Cannot compose a vApp or add More >

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