Linked Mode Problem

[eliot]

Setup:

Two VC's, primary and secondary site.

At the primary site I ran the linked mode configuration tool and pointed it at the secondary VC server - it gave some errors when joining,clicked yes on the option to force.

What I have got now is a bit odd;

At the primary site, when I launch the VI client I can only see my primary site.

At the secondary site, launching the VI client gives me both sites - and appears to work fine

I cant get the primary VC to show me both sites.

Furthermore I cant uninstall or unlink it:

At the primary site, I only get the option to link the sites (no option to unlink) - which confirms that it doesn't think its installed.

At the secondary site, I get the option to unlink (so at least it understands that it's linked) - but it fails, and refers me to a non existant jointool.log

So I cant go backwards or forwards. How can I unpick this manually? I did backup the VC databases at each site before starting(!) - As i was half expecting problems.

[admin]

Could you please check if the name resolution works on both the setups properly? ie, you should be able to ping to each other using IP, FQDN and hostname. If this is not working, you can add it in the hosts file manually and make it to work :).

Also try login to both the machines as domain administrator and confirm that you are not experiencing any AD issues.

-Sandeep

[admin]

Hi,

If possible, could you please attach VC logs from your primary site?

Thanks.

[eliot]

The support logs are 76Mb - is there something more specific you want to see.

[admin]

viminst.log, status.log, jointool-log in %temp% folder and latest vpxd logs.

Thanks.

[eliot]

These are some of the logs from the support file. my %temp% is now empty after a reboot. But the jointool log is the same as what I saw in %temp% during the install.

[admin]

Does the name resolution and login using domain account work on both the machines?

-Sandeep

[eliot]

My AD account is a "Domain Admin" on the AD tree in question (both VC servers members of a single Ad domain) and my AD account is an "Administrator" in both VC's at the highest level.

Pinging each vc host from the other resolves out to the fqdn and the correct name/ip. PTR records all correct.

AD runs 4xWin2k8 DC's and 1x2k3 DC. Forest and Domain Functional Level at 2003.

The two VC's are in different sites(subnets) accross 10Mb les circuit.

[admin]

Thanks.

Are you trying to login to VC using the option "Use windows session credentials"? If yes, please enter the username and password manually and try once.

-Sandeep

[eliot]

I was using local credentials - but using full account name doesn't make any difference.

I've just got a colleage to try also and we get SQL errors this time. This could be a SQL permissions problem with that particular user though (see attached)

[sbrad001]

Not sure if a solution to this was found.. but i have been dealing with a similar problem since I linked a 2nd vCenter server into my primary. I found that some people could log in at the primary and see the 2nd vCenter.. while others on the same network could not. Pretty much everyone could log into the 2nd vCenter server and see the primary.

What I found was that each person logging into vCenter had to have their ID in the local Admin group on the vCenter server for it to work. Once I added their domain IDs to the local Admin group of the primary vCenter.. all who logged in could now see the 2nd vCenter server.

Strange.. I do not remember seeing this in the Linked Mode doco.

[admin]

Visibility, in particular, should be symmetric, and independent of whichever VC you are first logged in to. I suspect replication between the instances is broken, leading to some vCenter Roles not being replicated over. That might be the reason some of your users are seeing both, and other's aren't.

Can you post the latest vpxd-xxx.log from the vCenter log directory (after attempting such a failed login)? (The location of that depends on the OS: ProgramData\VMware on Win2k8 and Documents and Settings\All users\Application Data\VMware\).

Also, can you upload a support bundle (or just the repadmin-* logs and ADAM*.evt,csv from it, if the bundle's large).

Jayesh