Author Archives: Duco

Challenges when upgrading environment with EMC CX4 to vSphere 5 and mixed CX4/VNX environment

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Yesterday my good friend Gabrie van Zanten from  Gabes Virtual World asked the following question on twitter:

My first reaction was “Why would Gabe want to disable VAAI on a per array basis isn the first place?” so I asked.

His answer was pretty simple and straight forward. He was working on an environment where ESX5 hosts had both EMC CX4s and VNXes connected, and VAAI was not supported on vSphere 5 for CX4, so he had to disable VAAI for the CX4’s and wanted to leave it on for the VNXes. Continue reading →

Change the default url for vCenter Operations Manager for View

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vCenter Operations Manager for View is a new VMware product that correlates al kinds of performance figures in a VMware View environment. More info on vCenter Operations Manager for View can be found here

vCenter Operations Manager for View basicaly is a set of front end tools for vCenter Operations Manager 5 that gets info from all View components.

Whenever you connect to the vCenter Operations Manager 5 UI VM, you automatically end up at the default login page for vCenter Operations Manager 5, which made me enter my credentials at the wrong place all the time, since this instance is only used for vCenter Operations Manager for View.

The correct way to access vCenter Operations Manager for View is go to the
https://<UI VM>/vcops-custom url, which off course can be bookmarked, but since I access this system from multiple desktops, I was looking for an easier way to do this, and succeeded.

It’s pretty simple, Continue reading →

Enable “save password” for VMware View iPad client in VMware View 5.1

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In the release notes for the View client for iPad version 1.5 I read one of the new features for the client is:

Save password option if administrator enables new VMware View 5.1 policy

Since I already upgraded my Lab/Demo environment to View 5.1, and this would be a very welcome feature for demo purposes (I would not use this in a production environment due to the security issues this might cause) I decided to enable it.

Because the release notes talked about a policy, I kind of expected this option to be either in an ADM template, or in the policy section of the Connection Server.

It was not …. Continue reading →

Update Manager broken after import Cisco VEM extension

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Today I was working on upgrading some hosts in a vSphere 5 environment that is using Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switches. I imported the extension bundle in Update Manager, created a baseline, and scanned the hosts. After a couple of seconds , I got a message in vCenter telling me the scan failed:

Scan entity <hostname> Host cannot download files from VMware vSphere Update Manager patch store. Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details. Continue reading →

LUN connectivity issues with Storage vMotion on EMC VNX when using VAAI

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The last few weeks I have been working on some serious issues in an environment where we used vSphere 5 with an EMC VNX storage array. All seemed to run fine, but whenever we started a Storage vMotion, we noticed all kinds of strange errors we where not expecting at all.

We saw messages regarding write-quiesced VMFS volumes, we lost paths. and in some cases, the Storage vMotions did not complete at all.

During these Storage vMotions we noticed datastore latency peaked at more then 5 seconds on the source and destination LUN’s.

Continue reading →

Unexplained LUN trespasses on EMC VNX explained …

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Recently I saw some unexplained LUN trespasses on an EMC VNX that is used in a vSphere 5 environment where we use VAAI.

Since we use pools on the VNX, it is advised to keep a LUN on the owning SP, to prevent unnecessary traffic over the internal bus between SPA and SPB. EMC says:

Avoid trespassing pool LUNs. Trespassing the pool LUNs to another SP may adversely affect performance. After a pool LUN trespass, a pool LUNs private information remains under control of the original owning SP. This will cause the trespassed LUNs I/Os to continue to be handled by the original owning SP. When this happens both SPs being used in handling the I/Os. Involving both SPs in an I/O increases the time used to complete an I/O. Continue reading →

Great resource for adding ssl certificates to VMware products

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A while ago I decided to purchase an official wildcard ssl certificate to use in my VMware demo/lab environment. Purchasing the certificate turned out to be the easy part. The next step was installing the certificate on different VMware products, like vCenter (which includes Update Manager and some web services nowadays), View connection servers, vCenter operations, and Zimbra.

I went trough the official documentation, and learned very quickly this was not as simple as I had expected. All products have very specific installation instructions, and some are better then others. Continue reading →

Syslog stops working after upgrade to ESXi 5.0 Update 1

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After upgrading an environment from ESX5 to ESX5U1, I noticed syslog stopped working. Since ESXi by default does not keep log messages across reboots, it is a must to either specify a syslog server to collect the log files, or set the log directory to a shared datastore.

In this environment I used syslog to log all messages from the ESX hosts to a central syslog server.

When checking the syslog server after the upgrade, I noticed there where no more log messages arriving at the syslog server, and confirmed there used to be log messages just prior to the upgrade. Continue reading →