VMware

Blink and you will miss it! For those that weren’t aware, VMware disclosed a security vulnerability with the vCenter Server VIX API which has been patched, but this also impacted VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) as it used the VIX API to build service mappings. As per the VMware KB article that announced this information, if you are running vSphere 5.5/6.0 you essentially have two options. Continue using VIN on an unpatched environment (not recommended), or use a new management pack for vROps that replaces VIN functionality called the Service Discovery Management Pack.

And here we are, at the end of October. Before I get in to it, I signed up for Blogtober a few weeks ago, and this is shamefully my first post for Blogtober, and I’m writing this on the 25th of the month. Let’s see if I can get 5 posts out by the end of the month! Anyhow, it’s that time of the year again and vForum Australia 2017 is just around the corner.

One of the quieter announcements from VMworld US 2017 was that of VMware Skyline. No, not the Nissan sports car! As a VMware customer, VMware Skyline is a platform that provides VMware visibility in to your environment with the aim of providing proactive and predictive recommendations, based on the configuration in your environment, cross referenced with VMware guidance, KB articles and lessons learned from other customers' environments. In the event that you log a case with VMware, Skyline also provides the Global Support Services (GSS) team access to information about your environment, without needing to spend hours gathering logs, configurations or sitting on a Webex with an Engineer while they get familiar with your environment and specific configurations.

I was recently working in a customers environment to configure vRealize Log Insight with VMware Identity Manager. They had vIDM deployed some time ago and configured, primarily for vRealize Business for Cloud. I’m not yet that familiar with vIDM, and I learnt something new in troubleshooting this issue. When logging in to vIDM to set up the new configuration, after going to Identity & Access Management > Directories > Selected the sync directory > Sync log, I noticed there were sync issues with Active Directory:

Overnight VMware announced a new technical resource for vSphere administrators called vSphere Central. Check out the blog post here. In conjuntion with the above, Adam Eckerle released a blog post to announce the availability of a new tool named vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool. The blog post can be found here. I don’t want to repeat much of the post here, but in short to quote Adam; “This tool aims to help customers plan and execute both upgrades to vSphere 6.

I’ve just been working through automating the powering on and off of my lab server, which is a single physical server running ESXi 6.5, and nested virtual machines for my lab. I wanted to use the ESXi Autostart feature to start my domain controller and jump box at power on. But I had an issue where one of the two VMs I want to power on would simply not start.

I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.

Ahh, vSphere Host Profiles. My old friend. One of our customers recently had a hardware failure on one of their Dell M620 blade servers, and the server was repaired under warranty which included a motherboard swap. The server got inserted into the chassis and booted back up OK. The server was part of a 12 node cluster, so the customer tried applying the host profile, which would fail when it hit 22%.

Runecast Analyser was founded in 2014 and at a high level, is a product to provide proactive analysis for VMware environment. I’ve only recently been introduced to Runecast and I’ve had the chance to download and use it in my lab environment. I was lucky enough to meet Ched and Stanimir recently at the Melbourne VMUG. I thought I would take the opportunity to record a walkthrough of the product for those that may be interested to see what Runecast Analyser is all about.

So last week I received a new lab server that is going to be housed at home. It is a Dell T430 with 128GB ram, which is exactly what I was after as I want to get right back into the lab work, but I didn’t want a heap of gear and network requirements. NestedESXi has worked reasonably well in the past few vSphere releases and there’s not much that can’t be simulated within a nested environment for the purposes of learning or testing.