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fgl
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Consolidation Tool in Virtual Center 2.5

Does anyone know how to get the Consolidation Tool in Virtual Center 2.5 to refresh the list of computer it finds and caches. The help section said "To refresh the list, click the refresh button. Refresh the list when systems are newly added to the domain and are not yet cached." but there is NO refresh button that I can see.

Another question is how long is the status suppose to stay at "Analyzing"? Mine never change from the analyzing status so I have no idea if it's done or hung.

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djdeceit
Contributor
Contributor

You can press f5 to refresh the window.

My status was "Analyzing" for several hours before it said "Ready for consolidation". Its confidence gets higher as time goes on and it can benchline the host better.

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fgl
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

F5 does nothing. Any new machines I add to the domain does not show up in the "add to analysis" list and even if I select another domain and go back to the original domain the list of computers does not get refreshed. And I don't even see a way to manually add a computer to the analysis section.

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ejward
Expert
Expert

This may sound stupid but, I had this problem in the beta. For me, even though I clicked on the name heading to sort by name, vmware would sort it any way it felt like. the new servers were in the list, they just showed up towards the bottom of the list no matter how many times I re-sorted. I haven't tried the release version yet.

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fgl
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I've created a new AD account called vcenter and gave it domain admin rights, added it to the local administrator group on the Virtualcenter server and granted it "logon as service" rights, used it as the login for both the service credentials and default credentials. At the point this account has all rights short of being an enterprise admin and schema admin and still nothing works.

I also followed the instuctions in the troubleshooting section of the help where it tells to add a row called "dontStartConsolidation" with a value of true and restart the server to clear the cache, which does absolutely nothing as the entire cache is still there afterwards.

If anyone has been able to get this functionality of the Virtualcenter 2.5 working please tell me the step you took to make it work.

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fgl
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

After a lot of searching and troubleshooting I am pretty sure that the consolidation population of machines from any domain is a one time deal. I've tested this in a completely different domain with a similar setup and also had a friend in another company tried it on their ESX setup and they report the same problem.

There has to be a way to purge the database or cache where ever this list of machines are stored to get the consolidation to do another initial population in order to see any new servers added after the first inital population.

In my opinion this is a completely useless new function of VC 2.5 unless you never ever plan to install anymore new servers into your domain then you're fine.

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tabmunch
Contributor
Contributor

If you click the Help button, in the Add to Analysis dialogue, the troubleshooting section of the help file states that: To disable Guided Consolidation and/or clear the cache

Select Administration > VirtualCenter Management Server Configuration.

Select Advanced Options.

Click Add Row.

Enter the following in the Key field:

dontStartConsolidation

Enter the following in the Value field:

true

Restart the VirtualCenter Server.

To disable Consolidation without clearing the cache, uninstall the collector service. There is no need to restart the VirtualCenter Server.

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>Now the question is how to manually add systems to the analysis, rather than hoping the tool will discover the systems you desire.

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