App Volumes Manager UI loses volume attachments status when vCenter is restarted

[solgaeDK]

To all,

I am wondering if anyone is having a same problem. We have App Volumes 2.9 implementation with both AppStacks and Writable Volumes being used with Horizon View desktops.

At one point, our vCenter went down due to a database problem, and when I managed to get our vCenter back online, I noticed that within the App Volumes admin console, all volume attachments that were listed within the Attachments view were now gone. Even when you look at the Applications/Writable Volumes view, it will show that there are 0 attachments for AppStacks or detached status for Writable Volumes. This has created a messy situation where when the user logs off, the appstack/writable volumes were not being automatically detached, and I had to manually remove the appstack/writable volume from the desktop before the user could login with all the appstacks/user profiles visible again. I could see no way to make the manager re-read all the current attachments of all the appstacks and writable volumes. I already tried to rescan for AppStacks and Writables.

Then another time, our AD briefly had issues that were causing authentication to fail, which caused App Volumes manager to unable to connect to the vCenter. Once again, all the existing attachments were lost within the App Volumes Manager UI, and another manual intervention was required before the attachments status were in sync again.

Has anyone experienced this? This is a rather serious issue if I ever need to take down vCenter for maintenance. I can't afford to have App Volumes Manager just "forget" the attachments just because vCenter was not available temporarily. Any thoughts?

[Ray_handels]

There is a bug in the current version that does some very strict database maintenance and cleanup tasks and could cause information to be lost in the process which requires manual reconfiguration. We had to manually reconfigure over 200 machines, not fun .

I would raise a ticket with VMWare because my thought is that it is fixed in a newer version. Normally if vcenter is not available Appvolumes will generate an error that it can't reconfigure the machine and will try again in a few minutes, eventually failing but not changing the status of the attachment in the database.

Also, if you don't want to be to dependant of your vcenter you could try and go for direct attachment. This way attachments will be done on the ESX hosts intself instead of VCenter that deals with the reconfigures.

[solgaeDK]

Yes, we are using the direct attachment function within App Volumes - the one when you use vCenter as management point, but using ESXi direct attachment. It is still very sensitive to vCenter being unavailable and blows away all the attachment records...

[nevgeo01]

Hi ,

We have the same issue recently the team updated the vmware tools in the vCenter server.After the reboot all attachment records are lost in the app manager, is there a possible way to get the attachment tab up and running.

Please Advice

[Ray_handels]

There is a reset option that you could use and it will reset all appstacks and writables of all users but i'm not quite sure if it is something you should be using to be honest, it could cause a lot more harm that fix anything. I'd suggest contacting VMWare support about it.

That being said, how could it be that just updating vmware tools causes the manager to lose all connection information?

This information is stored in the database? Did they do soemthing with the database? What happens if you restart a machine that has appstacks attached but no user logged in? Does it fix it automatically? This normally should be the case.

And if you log in using a different user< Do they get the appstacks attached?