Consolidation/Capacity planner service

[Optic_Nerve]

Hi,

The documentation for the Consolidation service is very specific - it requires you to setup a service account for the Capacity Planning service to run as. The account must have local administrator rights to the VC server (and Log On as a Service right).

When you add a machine to scan, you specify credentials to scan/gather the data as.

I am finding that the Capacity Planning service actually does the scanning. Eg, whatever service you have set the Capacity Planning service to run as must have administrator rights to the machine you want to scan (regardless of what credentials you specify when adding the server to be analysed). This is not what the documentation says at all.

The credentials you specify when actually adding the machine to be analysed don't seem to be used at all.

Is anyone else finding this?

Regards,

David

[mstahl75]

How far do you get? I have the Capacity Planner service as Local System at this point after finally getting it installed again (initial install issues).

The first time I attempted to connect to a couple of servers I received an error that "The collector is in a trusted domain, but was not able to discover any Active Directory domains. This Could be due to running with credentials that do not have AD privileges." I just used my username and password (domain admin and admin on servers).

I then changed the credentials to include my domain name (domain-name\username) and it connected this time, showing the CPU and Memory Info. However, I get the following error: "Connection to 'perfmon' failed. Remote registry disabled or the collector service is not running with 'administrator' privileges." Checking the Application logs shows the connection is attempted as "Anonymous Logon".

Checking the Security logs shows a logon failure on the target with unknown username or bad password for the initial failure. It is obviously not passing domain information and is looking for the account on the target server.

So I guess the question is if you get even as far as seeing any data from the target servers? I don't administer the servers I'm attempting to monitor so I'm going to have to find out about the secondary errors but think it might be something pretty easy to rectify.

[Optic_Nerve]

Hi,

To answer your question - yes, I was able to completely scan servers and have the entire system work.

However - my problem is that it doesn't seem to work the way that the documentation says that it works. When you add a server to be scanned, it prompts for credentials. However, when you do the actual scanning it does NOT use these credentials (and you get the 'perfmon' error). I found that it actually uses the credentials of the account that the Capacity Planning Service is running as on the VC server. By default this is Local System Account (which obviously means it does not have the right to scan any other machine).

There is an option in the VIC somewhere to set the name of the account that the Capacity Planning Service actually runs as (or you could probably just use the Services snapin on the VC server itself). If you set this service to run as your domain admin account and restart the service, you should find that you can scan machines successfully.

I still believe that the way it works is not the way the documentation says that it works.

Cheers,

David

[mstahl75]

I'll have to look at the documentation (if I can find it :smileygrin:) and then test on my end some more.

It is strange that it doesn't use the credentials supplied with the exception of the initial connection (apparently).

[fletch00]

I fired up perfmon on a target server and now I get failed to connect to remote registry errors

[ascheale]

I suffer the same ... remote registry error and perfom error...

Didn´t spend much time on it. Would be interesting to get it work.

Alex

[fletch00]

The error I was getting was resolved by entering the authentication info (my domain login) into a the consolidation service properties

After analysis, I initiated a test consolidation to the recommended ESX host - I was surprised I did not get a chance to configure the destination datastore, VMWare-tools and the rest of the normal converter options - support says that is not currently an option for the consolidation module...

thanks

[alhamad]

I solve my error by running the Consilidation service in virtual center under an administrator account.

[LJM73]

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 Build 84767.

I have configured the Consolidation Settings/Credentials and Capacity Planner service to use a domain admin account, granted that account 'Log in as service' rights on VirtualCenter server.

The Analyis tab is displaying this same message -- "The collector is in a trusted domain, but was not able to discover an Active Directory domains...". However, I am able to see a list of domains and pick servers from a list. I suspect this is not a list being pulled from AD, but a Network Browse list...

If I add a physical server for analysis, the servers status is displayed as "Collecting system information", but never completes and does not populate any of the other fields (CPU info, Memory info, CPU Usage, Memory Usage). I have let these run for days.

[vmkillies]

I solved my error by running the Consilidation service in virtual center under an Domain administrator account.

[Martin1916]

Confirmed, this is how I also solved this issue.

[atomita]

This appears to work, but does not seem very secure. That is a lot of rights that the service now has.

[Jay35]

Run the VM Capacity Planner Service under Domain Account.

Add this domain user acccount to the local administrators group of VC server.

Modify Local Security Policy on VC server to allow this domain user account to log on as service

Open VC server console > Go to Administration > Consolidation Settings > Credentials

click on change and provide domainname\domainuser account and password

verify that vm capacity planner service is running under this domain account

[GFFG]

I confirm this worked for me to, setting credentials.

[gfrenkel]

I've been having the same problem,but only when my target is a 64-bit Windows 2008 machine. I can get it to work againt 32-bit Windows 2003 machines. Any ideas?

[Jay35]

Stop Windows firewall service and try again

[gfrenkel]

Thanks - but it's already off.