During the Horizon View 5.2 Beta I noticed the View Desktops Tech Preview. Since the Beta was covered by an NDA I was not allowed to publish this, but since the product is GA for a while now here’s the story.
The plugin will let you search for usernames in the vSphere Web Client search field and shows you the desktop(s) for this user. Continue reading
Hello community, we are reaching out to you for your help.
Eric Sloof from NTPRO.NL and myself proposed a session for this years VMworlds. We both do like the VMware vCenter Operations Manager product a lot, but see lots of people do not get the maximum out of it since they just use the standard dashboards that come with the product.
In our session we want to give you some real life examples from the field on how you can customize vCenter Operations Manager Advanced and Enterprise to show you the information you need. We will show you you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to make this happen.
We need your help to make this happen, so please vote for our session 5008 here Continue reading
May 8th – 10th 2013 VMware will host a 3 day beta training at their Frimley UK HQ for their new VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Advanced Usage and Dashboard Design training.
This training course focuses on the advanced capabilities of VMware® vCenter™ Operations Manager™ 5.6, such as adapters, customization and management topics. You will learn how to use adapters, define custom super metrics, customize dashboards, and use the Custom user interface.
I have been fortunate enough to participate in an alpha training for this class and must say I enjoyed it very much. Very useful for people that want to customize their vCOps environment to show specific metrics or combined metrics
Cost for this training is around 50% of the normal price
See the attached info sheet, and if interested, register for this training here
Space is limited
When building a couple of new ESX hosts based on Dell R620 systems, I used the Dell customized iso VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.1.0-799733.x86_64-Dell_Customized_RecoveryCD_A01.iso to install ESXi
Those Dell systems had 4 Broadcom nics (2 x 1Gb + 2 x 10Gb) and 2 Intel 10Gb nics
Install went fine, and I decided to upgrade to the latest patches using esxcli since the hosts had no access to vCenter. All went fine till after the reboot. I noticed all Broadcom nics where missing from my hosts, most likely due to a driver issue, so time to investigate. Continue reading
If you like my blog or one of the other VMware or virtualization related blogs around, you can show your appreciation for all the work lots of people put in to sharing their knowledge by casting your vote here
Voting is open till the 1st of March
A special Thanks to Eric Siebert from vSphere-land for organizing this yearly event.
Recently I ran in to a situation where a customer suffered severe performance issues on a virtualized SQL server. In the SQL server we noticed a high CPU utilization, but the underlying ESX hosts only showed relatively low CPU utilization for this VM.
Debugging the VM performance issue with esxtop showed very high co-stop (%CTSP) vallues.
According to the vSphere Monitoring and Performance guide, %CTSP is
Percentage of time a resource pool spends in a ready, co-deschedule state.
NOTE You might see this statistic displayed, but it is intended for VMware use only.
Funny how VMware expresses this metric is only to be used by VMware 
Continue reading
While upgrading vCenter to 5.1 in an environment where we used local authentication on the vCenter server, we were in for a little surprise.
The original vCenter server had a lot of custom roles and user permissions defind, on all kinds of objects in vCenter.
When we did the upgrade, we decided to install the SSO server on a separate server, and when we did the vCenter upgrade and it was registered with the SSO server, we suddenly received a message that users and groups where not found on the SSO server, which kind of made sense, since even though we recreated the users and groups on the SSO server, they had different security IDs. But what we did not expect, is the upgrade process decided to remove all non existing users and groups from the vCenter database, effectively removing all permissions from vCenter … Continue reading
While working on an upgrade to vSphere 5.0U1 on a Cisco UCS environment, where the ESX hosts boot from SAN, I noticed one of the hosts was not registered correctly on the EMC VNX, as it showed up as unmanaged. Because the ESX hosts boot from SAN, the host has to be registered before it can auto register, and when it was registered manually the host was not able to update the registration. Continue reading
When I tried to upgrade my vCenter 5.0U1 Server to 5.1, all seemed to go well, up until the the moment vCenter tried to register with SSO.
I received an error message “Error 29107. The service or solution user is already registered. Check Vm_ssoreg.log in system temporary folder for details”
I checked this log, but it did not really point me in to the right direction.
Then I found a post in the 5.1 beta archive that said the unique identifier for a service to register with SSO is the Common Name from its certificate. Continue reading
In a vSphere environment I am working on we use VMware vShield Edge to do firewalling, NAT and terminate VPNs for customers.
On several occasions we where not able to make config changes to some of our VSE devices when we tried to publish the changes we made from within vShield Manager. Whenever we tried to publish the changes, we received an error message in vShield Manager it could not reach the vShield Edge device we where trying to configure.
Next to that, we noticed a lot off errors in the vShield Manager System Events tab for this specific Edge Device regarding “Multiple heartbeats missed from appliance”
An other thing we noticed was the VMware Tools for this specific VSE device did not seem to be running.
We decided to open a case at VMware and where told this is a know issue with the version of vShield we are running (5.0.1) and this will be fixed in a future version. (It is not fixed in version 5.0.2 that was released recently) Continue reading