vHaridas's Accepted Solutions

Hi Everyone, Thanks Everyone for responding. I apologies for not responding earlier. Hareesh G from VMware support helped me to resolve this issue. Overall my observation is vSAN is not able to handle big VMDK's properly. It should provide errors or warnings if there is not enough resources available to satisfy big vmdk's. It is not moving VM object to other hosts when there is enough free space available on other host or once host is comes online from Maintenance. Hareesh came with a solution of disabling Vmkernel adapter of vSAN on affected host. This forced vSAN to rebuild all components to other hosts. With this out of space issue was resolved but still my challenges with this big disks are not finished. Current Status - I have applied new storage policy to all 6 VMs except 13.5 TB big vmdk. New Policy - FTT=2,  Stripe per object=2, Raid 5/6. Still, one set of VMDK object of this Vmdk is using 90% of physical disks capacity from only one of the host. while other host has free space. Next plan - am going to migrate this big Vmdk to other temporary SAN datastore, and then move back to vSAN with new raid 6 vm policy. This will split vmdk objects across all hosts. With above workaround, my all hosts disks would be equally utilized and objects would be placed properly on all physical disks. But next time when I will have long downtime on any of the host then vSAN will rebuild that Hosts object to other host in cluster. again, only one of the hosts disks will get fully utilized due to this. So what I want is, when failed/host comes out of Maintenances then vSAN should do rebalance of all objects and make sure all disks are equally used. I tried to run proactive rebalance multiple times but it is of no use when you have big size VMDKs. Hareesh, you have explained VM object placement very well but as I said big VMDKs are difficult to manage on vSAN unless we plan for big size physical Disk and more physical hosts. I have asked my team to not assign big Vmdk to vSAN Vms and trying to limit Vmdk size to 2 or 4 TB. 2 or 4 TB Disk is just a number, it matters how much is the size of physical disks and number of physical disks. small size Vmdk will help to split Vmdk size and place vmdk objects on multiple hosts across all hosts. Thanks, Haridas

Hi, I do not see any default role for update manager in vCenter 6.0 u2. I created new role as 'UpdateManager' with Below Update manager privileges. Then provide permission to user at vCenter level and assign this new role. This will provide Update manager permission to user to all below child object. Also user with this role, will able to see all the host, resource poo, datastore, networks and VMs but he cannot edit/delete any object except just using update manager feature. Thanks, Haridas

Please follow the steps mentioned in those KB. No need to disconnect ESXi hosts from vCenter before replacing SSL certificate. Most important, to avoid trouble, make sure you replace SSL certificates before it get expired. - Haridas Vhadade Virtual Admin

Try below commands.  txt file path - C:\temp\inputFile.txt $vmList = Get-Content C:\temp\inputFile.txt foreach ($vmName in $vmList) {Get-VM $vmName  | select Name, @{N="VMHost"; E={$_.VMHost.Name}}} - Haridas Vhadade

Select the top object like host, cluster, folder and go to Virtual machine Tab Select all Powered On VM, and from action menu select Power off or shutdown Guest. All selected Virtual machines must be in same Power State and VM tools should be installed if you choose to Shutdown Guest - Haridas Vhadade

as per release notes - The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.1 provides: Offline conversions for HyperV 2012 R2 virtual machines VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Release Notes if still fails, Power on windows 2008 VM and try v2v. - Haridas Vhadade

that's correct, you need to set cpu value in MHz not in GB ( may be typo error). more info about cluster advance options - Advanced configuration options for VMware High Availability in vSphere 5.x and 6.0 (2033250) | VMware KB - Haridas

VMware ESXi 6.0, Patch ESXi600-201605401-BG: Updates esx-base, vsanhealth, vsan VIBs (2144685) | VMware KB host fails with a purple diagnostic screen when the virtual machines have a Hardware Large Receive Offload for VMXNET3 (Vmxnet3HwLRO) NICs enabled and are running hardware version 11. Backtrace similar to the following is displayed: You can look for installing updates using ESXCLI Download required patches/latest. upload patch file to esxi datastore. Put host in MM. enable ssh/local shell. Login to ESXi console or SSH using putty. run esxicli command to install patches and reboot esxi server. “esxcli software vib” commands to patch an ESXi 5.x/6.x host (2008939) | VMware KB - Haridas

You have to create all the VLANs on Physical switch and trunk these VLANs to Physical Switch port where ESXi hosts NICs are connected. You can configure any VLAN as native VLAN ( again on Physical switch port ) Native VLAN is useful where you cannot add VLAN id in NIC network configuration. e.g. if you want to boot server from network, PXE boot. When you create virtual PortGroup, add the required VLAN id in Port groups. However make sure you are not adding native VLAN ID in PortGroup. if you add native VLAN id in PortGroup configuration, network communication will not work with that PG. - Haridas

Port Mirroring is a dvSwitch feature and you don't need to enable Promiscuous mode to use Port Mirroring. While creating port mirroring sessions define Source VM NIC Port number from dvSwitch/Portgroup and destination Port number. Is it  0-4094 for the VDS too to bel able to sniff traffic for all and not a specified VLANs ? 0-4094 ( all VLANs) is used to define VLAN number range for VLAN trunk configuration. In your environment if you have specific VLAN number/range then you can add it here. 0-4094 is added here for the simplicity. More Info - How to use Port-Mirroring feature of VDS for monitoring virtual machine traffic? - VMware vSphere Blog VMware vSphere 5.1 Port mirroring on VMware vSwitch/dvSwitch (dvMirror) | Andrea Dainese - Haridas

Am not sure if you can do this but you can try to automate Windows patch installation and power Cycle VM using VMware Orchestrator+PowerShell. something like Jason did for updating VM template but you need to adjust it for your running VMs. Virtually Jason: Updating VM Templates with vRealize Orchestrator, Part 1 If you can afford downtime for VMs running on those 3 hosts, I would suggest enabling EVC in Cluster - Disable HA in existing cluster. Disconnect those 3 hosts and then remove from vCenter. Add disconnected 3 hosts in vCenter under datacenter ( not in same old Cluster) Enable HA and EVC in existing Cluster which has 6 hosts and VMs running. Now Power Off VMs running on One of the three ESXi Host and move those VMs to old Cluster and Power on those VMs again. Once all VMs migrated from that hosts, add that ESXi host in DRS Cluster which has EVC enabled. You can automate these task using PowerCLI. Power Off VMs Migrate VM Power On VM Put host in MM Add host in Cluster you can accomplish this task with maximum 5/10minute downtime for each VM. At end of this migration, you will have HA/DRS Cluster with EVC enabled and then DRS will take care of balancing load across all hosts. - Haridas

Hi, Resource pool can be created only when DRS cluster is enabled or on standalone ESXi hosts. So in your case you have configured DRS cluster and created resource pool. Below are possible scenario- 1. If the virtual machine VM1, VM3, VM6 are moved to only esx3 and if VMs are utilizing all assigned resources and ESX3 don't have enough resources then DRS will try to move VMs to another host in DRS cluster and balance the load across all hosts in cluster. DRS will try to balance load in cluster based on DRS automation level. 2. if more RAM, CPU is configured for VMs than Reserved RAM, CPU in resource pool then still ESX3 can run these VMs but VM performance will be impacted when all VMs try to compete for resources. 3. if you reserve RAM, CPU per VM and if ESXi host/ESX3 don't have enough resources then you will not be able power on VM on ESX3 until esx3 host guarantee reserved resources for that VM so DRS will try to power on and run VM on another ESX host which can provide reserved resources. ESX cluster do not share resources across ESXi hosts. - Haridas vPRH » Virtual Admin

forgot you other two questions, You can reserve memory and CPU for Resource pool to guarantee memory, CPU to VMs from this resource pool. You can migrate VMs from vAPPs but not the vAPP. - Haridas vPRH » Virtual Admin

That's correct, PowerCLI scripts would really help you in this task. Before you make any changes to Old vCenter, Take a complete Inventory export using RVTools -  RVTools - Home Export RVTools report to Excel. Create PowerCLI script to export VM Name and VMX Path, VM Power Status. In new vCenter, create vSwitch, PortGroup same as old vCenter. Configure datastores as old Hosts. For all datastores keep the same old name to avoid issues. Run PowerCLI script to Register VM to inventory and Power on VMs. For exchange VM, You have to make sure all the Datastore names remain same and exchange LUN id should be same as old one. After registering Exchange VM, check all disk including RDM disk and its LUN are correct as it was before. Disk ID, SCSI Node number should be same. Even if Exchange RDM LUN ID get changed, before PowerOn you can reattach RDM LUN to same old SCSI Node Number of VM. Whatever you need to play with disk, do it before power on to avoid issues with services, db. Also make a note of LUN Drive Letter in Exchange VM before PowerOff in Old vCenter, services will not start Incase drive  letter get changed. - Haridas vPRH » Virtual Admin

That KB will not work. Refer this KB -  Back up and restore vCenter Server Appliance/vCenter Server 6.0 vPostgres database (2091961) | VMware KB Back Up the Embedded vCenter Server Appliance Database Back up the embedded vCenter Server Appliance database to protect the data stored in your vPostgres database. Prerequisite: Create the folder in which you want to create the backup file and verify that you have read and write permissions on this folder. Procedure: Log in to the vCenter Server Appliance Linux console as root.  Download the Linux backup and restore package 2091961_linux_backup_restore.zip attached to this Knowledge Base article and extract it on the Linux machine.  Make a backup_lin.py executable. For example to save the file as /tmp/backup_lin.py , run this command: chmod 700 /tmp/backup_lin.py Run the backup_lin.py file and provide the location for the backup file. For example, if you want to save the file as /tmp/backup_VCDB.bak, run this command: python /tmp/backup_lin.py -f /tmp/backup_VCDB.bak When the backup completes, you see a message that the backup completed successfully. - Haridas vPRH » Virtual Admin

You can have multiple vCenters in one Datacenter location and join them using Enhanced linked mode however each vCenter will have and manage its own Data Center, Cluster, Host, Vms, network standard or dvSwitch.....etc. Virtual Standard Switch, dvSwitch cannot be shared with two vCenters, each vCenter will have its own object. You can trunk VLANs for all Host from both vCenters and create separate dvSwitch, portgroups in both vCenter servers. If you want to map same datastores for Hosts from both vCenter then you can do so but you will not get correct datastore statistics in vCenter. - Haridas vPRH » Virtual Admin