Planet vSphere-land

Customer had all his VMware databases for vCenter Server, Update Manager, Single Sign On (SSO), vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback running on one big SQL Server where they shared resources with other databases. They asked me to move the databases to a new MS SQL Server because the load of the VMware databases was more than expected. I prepared the move by reading a few VMware KB’s that...

When working on a design in which there would be two physical datacenters, I started to rethink about why I would create multiple datacenters inside vCenter Server. I noticed that almost all example designs I look at that cover two physical datacenters, also have two datacenters in the vCenter Server design. But why? When searching for an answer in the vSphere 5.1 documentation, the only reason...

Hope you enjoyed the previous series on VMware vCloud Director networking. In this post I will show you how to make the vCloud Cells available through a Load Balancer using the vShield Edge. By publishing two or more vCloud Cells behind a load balancer, it is easier to separate management network from user network and you make the vCloud more redundant because you can shutdown a cell without bri...

Today Mike Laverick drew my attention to his blogpost about BareMetalCloud. He writes about the possibilities to run your virtual ESXi host on their cloud offering. And best of all, by using a promocode, something like MikeLaverickIsAnAwesomeDudeAndThisWillGiveMeCloudForFree or maybe a shorter version, you can get free access. Read all about it on Mike’s blogpost: Bare Metal Cloud for you...

I don’t often publish news bulletins and especially not about products that haven’t been released yet, but today I made an exception. In my mailbox I found Veeam’s announcement of Veeam Backup & Replication v7. The announcement is about the ability to back-up vCloud Director VMs including the vApp, metadata and attributes. This is great news and something I’ve been wa...

It’s that time of year again, Eric Siebert launched the new vLaunchpad top VMware/virtualization blogs survey and is asking you to vote for the best blogs on virtualization in 2013. Go to: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1165270/Top-vBlog-2013 and select your top 10 favourite blogs.  This year my blogging was mostly about getting to know vSphere 5.1 and my first steps in to the world of ...

Oh those little things in life that sometimes cost you a whole day before you figured out that you we’re doing it all wrong. This was one of those days where I got alerted by some colleagues about vCloud Director reporting “Disk space red threshold crossed.” When looking at the “Datastores” in the “Manage & Monitor” section, I noticed that there was...

(Shamelessly copied from Yellow-Bricks.com) Would like to hear more about Software Defined Datacenters from experts like Frank Denneman, Mike Laverick, Cormac Hogan, Kamau Wanguhu and many others? VMware and IBM are organizing an awesome event in the Benelux. Yes this is a full day event, and it is free for everyone, if you just want to sign up… go here. If you need to be convinced keep readi...

I’m still getting used to the important part vCenter SSO (Single Sign-On) is playing in vSphere 5.1. In my home lab I was switching domain controllers from W2k8 to Windows 2012. Transferred FSMO roles, integrated DNS, changed IP addresses for DNS on all servers and all seemed fine. My w2k8-dom01 server was demoted and removed. Few days later when trying to make a vCenter connection, I coul...

In my last VMware vCloud Director project I ran into an issue that I want to share with you. Initially the design was to create two OrgVDC to use different allocation models, but the resources would be almost the same because it was only a fairly small environment. I created one Edge Gateway and two OrgVDCs connected to this Edge Gateway, with a shared Org network. The first OrgVDC was meant to ...

When creating NAT and firewall rules in a vCloud environment, not everything works out directly the way you had planned. This post will show you how to use Splunk to collect sys logs from the vCloud environment and make it an easy to use tool when performing some network troubleshooting. Splunk comes in a number of flavours like Windows, OSX, Linux. In my environment I have a RedHat based NFS se...

In November 2009 I already did a review on StorMagic’s SvSAN and was then very pleased with the product. Now, three years later I’m again reviewing SvSAN and am anxious to see if in those three years SvSAN has improved. The Concept For those not familiar with StorMagic SvSAN I will shortly explain what SvSAN does. With SvSAN you will be able to use the local disks of one or two ESXi hosts a...

Too often I read upgrade plans or visit sites with plans to upgrade VMware products or buy new hosts and notice that the VMware Compatibility Guides have never been checked when making plans. First thing I always do when changing big parts in a virtual infrastructure is to dive into the compatibility guides to check if there are any issues that might occur. Too often there are small things to th...

Ran into a bit of a weird issue the other day. Suddenly non of my vApps could be started and all I got back was the following errors: “Batch update returned unexpected row count from update [0]; actual row count: 0; expected: 1″ (See screenshot). Some google searches didn’t give any results related to VMware, only a few pointing at databases and hibernation modes????? After ch...

In a two cell vCloud setup I was having trouble booting the second cell when the first cell was already running. When investigating this issue I noticed that there was something wrong with the permissions on the transfer directory. In the cell.log files I found the following error: ”Transfer spooling area is not writable”. The transfer spooling area is the NFS share vCloud needs whe...

Have a fresh look at your Backup – join this webcast with vExpert Gabrie van Zanten to learn how Veeam Backup & Replication version 6.5 works in real life! Independent experts all over Europe have conducted a test drive in advance on the new version of Backup & Replication and one of them – Gabrie van Zanten, VMware vExpert with outstanding experience in virtualization is now...

For an existing environment I had to change the VLAN and IP address that was used on the VMware vCloud 5.1 Cell. In VMware KB 1028657 is written how to change the IP address in the database and in the vCloud Cell config, but there is no mention of how to do this at Linux level. This post will show you the whole process. The starting config in my case was like this: HTTP nic connected to Managem...

Customer of mine was running vSphere with Enterprise licenses and wanted to extend his environment with vCloud Director. Since the minimal requirement for vCloud Director 5.1 is a vSphere Enteprise license, we did some checking on what features would be left out when using just an Enterprise license instead of Enterprise Plus. The environment is quite small, it will be used to deploy Develop-Tes...

This week I upgraded a customer running vSphere 4.0 Update 1 to vSphere 5.1 when discovering a strange DRS behavior. My upgrade path was to first install a fresh vCenter 5.1 and then move the ESX 4.0 hosts into vCenter 5.1. Next step was to put the first host into maintenance mode, shutdown, remove from cluster, perform a fresh install with ESXi 5.1 and then add it to the cluster. After the firs...

I hope you enjoyed part 1 and part 2 of my VMware vCloud networking series. At least I learned a lot from writing these posts and I have now much more confidence in being able to deploy a vCloud environment. In this part I’m going to explain how to publish a Web Site  from a vApp to the outside world (my home network) and since it would also be nice to manage that server remotely I would ...

In the first part I wrote on “VMware vCloud 5.1 Networking for dummies” I showed an easy way to setup and attach VMs to an organizational network and give them access to the external network and the internet. In this second part I will show you how to connect VMs to a vApp network and protect them from the organizational network, but make it possible for them to access the external n...

As you’ve read by now I’m making my first steps into vCloud Director 5.1 and stumble across some simple things. One of these is the quest on how to create a multi VM vApp template. Had been searching for this and was afraid it wasn’t even possible, but luckily it is possible, you just have to look where you don’t expect it to be What I wanted is a vApp with a two Ubuntu...

In April of this year I finally was able to take the “VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud“ course lead by  Mr. Eric Sloof himself. The training was based on vCloud Director 1.5 and I learned quite a lot and really thought I had this vCloud networking thing in my fingers. The exercises in class where easy to complete and made sense to me. Ok, Ok, I do admit I was somet...

VMware’s instructions on how to install multiple vCloud Cells are rather clear, you first create a NFS share and mount that to the location “/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer”. Then install both vCloud Cells and you’re done. In a single vCloud Cell install, the cell will use the local disk for the transfer directory. For a multi cell environment this is not the desired configurat...

Just got a call from a systems administrator who applied Microsoft Patch 2744842 on his vCenter Server 4.1.0 U3 / Windows 2008R2 and ran into some issues after that. You might want to think twice before applying this new Microsoft Patch without proper testing. As you know this MS patch fixed some issues with Internet Explorer. After asking around on twitter if anyone else has had these issues, I...