Slingsh0t Tracker

Re: vSphere Web Client 5.1 error when using Linked Mode

Slingsh0t — Fri, 02 May 2014 02:54:58 GMT

My environment had the exact same issue. Tried many fixes from many KB articles including restarting services and rebuilding the Inventory Services database. I was just about to break the Linked Mode on my vCenters when I performed the steps here:

(I stopped the Inventory Service first)

VMware vSphere 5.1

And now its fixed! Hope this helps others with the same issue.

The VC that was showing the error in the web client had two nics configured so I assume the Inventory Service must have been binding itself to the incorrect IP address. The nic binding order was correct.

Basic allocation cost/usage report

Slingsh0t — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:12:02 GMT

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to wrap my head around Chargeback manager but struggling a little bit here.

Hopefully someone can offer some advice as to how I can achieve what I'm after so I'll provide the basic overview: I charge customers an amount based on the number of vCPU's, GB RAM and GB Storage allocated. For instance, 1 allocated vCPU may be $50 per month and 2 allocated vCPUs may be $100 per month, etc... Memory might be something like $20 per GB allocated per month. A VM with 1 vCPU, 2GB memory and 20GB storage might total something like $110 per month, whether the VM is powered on or off, or actively used or not used.

So what I would like to do, is be able to create a heirachy that consists of a resource pool (with child VMs), and run a report that spits out the above metrics in a nice output showing how much to charge based on the actual hardware allocated to the VMs.

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Also is there a way to just get the cost results as a flat $50 instead of $2.40 if I only ran the report on a single VM for the duration of a day?

Re: VXLAN cluster preparation issue

Slingsh0t — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:07:20 GMT

In the latest test, I isolated a single ESXi host in its own cluster and created a new empty DVswitch. I bound two physical vmnics to the dvswitch and then tried to prepare this one-host-cluster and the same thing happened. The portgroup was created but no vmk port?

Re: VXLAN cluster preparation issue

Slingsh0t — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:30:07 GMT

Thanks for the reply. I have read that article before (throughout my endless googling to try and identify a cause) but the first steps are the ones that aren't working for me?

Steps 1 - 4 are exactly what I'm trying to do and it fails on Step 4 where it says "New dvPort Groups and vmknic interfaces are added and automatically created on the Distributed Switch associated to the VXLAN". The portgroups are created but the vmknic interfaces aren't.

I have enabled Jumbo frames on the switching infrastructure and confingured the DVswitch MTU to 1600 before attempting to prepare the cluster.

Any other ideas or is there something I'm missing?

VXLAN cluster preparation issue

Slingsh0t — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:09:12 GMT

Guys I have successfully deployed vCloud Director 5.1 along with the vShield Manager and have deployed a few vApps and VCDNI networks etc... All seems to be OK there.

The issue I'm having is I want to test VXLAN. When I go to prepare a cluster, I see a new portgroup appear on the DVswitch "vxw-vmknicPg-dvs.....blah" however no vmkernel port is created on the port group. From what I've read, a vmk port should be created and its on this interface that DHCP waits for an address. I'm unable to manually create a vmk port on the newly created VXLAN port group as I get the following error message:

Call "HostNetworkSystem.AddVirtualNic" for object "networkSystem-1944" on vCenter Server "PVPVC01P201.poc.pvp.lon5.telecity.net" failed.
Operation failed, diagnostics report: Sysinfo error on operation returned status : Would block. Please see the VMkernel log for detailed error information

In the end I need to unprepare the cluster to remove the portgroup. I have rebooted the hosts, vSM and vCenter. This has made no difference.

Sharing an Internet port group to multiple organisations

Slingsh0t — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:03:39 GMT

Is it possible to have a vSphere port group that carries the internet made available to all organisations within vCloud Director AND sub-allocate IP addresses to the organisations?

It seems that if I create an "External Network" in vCloud Director, then add the external network to an Organisation, there is no option to sub allocate IPs to the organisation specifically. This means that if the same External Network was available to two Organisations, one of them could directly attach VM's to the external network and consume all available IP addresses within the range specified at the vCloud Director level... is this correct?

How are you all managing your internet access for your Orgs? (is there a best practice when it comes to this?)

vCD 5.1 - allocating a vSphere port group to an Org?

Slingsh0t — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:58:20 GMT

I thought this would be easy (I distinctly remember this was a simple part of vCloud Director 1.5.x) but it doesn't seem to be so simple:

How can I present a vSphere port group to an Organisation's vDC and then configure VMs to connect to said port group?!

All I seem to be able to do on the Org vDC's is create external networks or internal networks and the internal network option doesn't seem to allow me to put any VMs/vApps onto the network.

Could someone please do me a massive favour and outline the exact steps from putting a port group into a network pool through to actually putting a VM nic onto the same port group in vCloud Director?

Note: I have read the documentation and trawled the internet and so far found lots of information about what network pools are and the concepts around them but nothing specifically for what I'm after.

Re: Storage vMotion takes ages

Slingsh0t — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:05:07 GMT

Ok so I tried adding an additional 50GB thin disk on a test windows VM I had already deployed. The VM and all it's disks sat on the NetApp FAS storage (NFS) I have here.

I formatted the disk and analysed and windows reports the disk as 0% defragmented. When trying to do a defrag it says the same and doesn't run. Anyway I tried the storage vmotion with only the new disk and unfortunately I'm seeing the same result. The target is an iSCSI device and again looks like the whole 50GB of unused data is being sent over the wire... I'm wondering if this is just expected behaviour when migrating between file and block storage or perhaps this is just the way storage vmotion works in vSphere 5.

Thanks again for the responses and help, guess I'll have to sit here twiddling my thumbs for the next 10 hours, waiting for my VM's to finish moving :smileysilly:

Re: Storage vMotion takes ages

Slingsh0t — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:04:18 GMT

Thanks for the response

If I spin up a brand new VM and give it a 100GB Thin disk, then immediately storage vMotion the empty VM container, I can see the 100GB of empty data being "read" by the host from the NFS appliance. But just so I understand, you're saying I would need to install an OS into the empty VM container, defrag, then perform a storage vMotion and it will run much faster?

I will test this out although I must say I do have doubts as to whether this will actually work.

I've used vmkfstools in the past to copy vmdk's which will only move "in-use" data and thus function much faster, however I can't use this utility to live migrate a VM and my requirement here is that none of the VMs can suffer downtime.

Storage vMotion takes ages

Slingsh0t — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:29:39 GMT

Hi Guys,

I'm svMotioning VMs between an NFS datastore and an iSCSI one and noticed that the process takes ages. All vmdk's are thin across the board.

I noticed that the network usage on the host is very high (to the point of link saturation). It seems that the "used" space of the VM is being ignored and the storage vMotion is actually migrating the provisioned size of the VM instead!

As an example:

A VM could have a 500GB Thin disk with 3GB in use. I see 500GB get sent across the network from the NFS appliance and then only 3GB gets sent onto the iSCSI device....

How can I live migrate VM's from one to the other but only have the "in-use" data transferred? This would be MUCH faster than what I'm enduring at the moment.

Stopping SSH on ESXi 5.1 produces error

Slingsh0t — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 09:47:03 GMT

Getting this error message when trying to stop the SSH service on newly upgraded ESXi 5 hosts:

Even though the error appears SSH is actually stopped on the host. vCenter never seems to be properly aware of the hosts service status.

- This is happening on BOTH ESXi hosts in the environment.

- The hosts have been rebooted, also removed and re-added to vCenter.

- The service has been stopped/started from the DCUI, powerCLI and vSphere client, none of these seems to remove this error message or stop vCenter reporting the SSH service as running.

After additional testing this looks to be caused by the attempt to disable the SSH firewall rule when the SSH service is stopped. When manually trying to disable the SSH rule on the firewall we also get the above error. When disabling any other rule in the firewall policy, no error is produced. It only seems to be related to SSH and the firewall.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour and have an idea of what is causing it and/or a fix?

Re: What should the MAC of vmk0(management) be?

Slingsh0t — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:12:37 GMT

Thanks for the response, I've seen that article before and it kind of relates to what I'm seeing.

Many of the hosts I work with are HP Blades with flexnic's provisioned from a VC Flex10 module. This means the Host gets a profile, and the profile has MAC addresses tied to it. If the blade is moved to a new chassis, it gets a new profile and thus a new set of mac addresses.

In this case (aligning with the kb article) the vmk0 MAC address did not update when the new profile was applied. But I've also seen a number of blades with a VMware MAC address (I have no idea how this happened, it was not intentional for it to be this way) and they seem to be just fine.

I figure if all vmk0 ports on all hosts could be configured with a VMware mac then there would never be any issues when blades are moved or nics are replaced?

What should the MAC of vmk0(management) be?

Slingsh0t — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:25:27 GMT

Should it match one of the underlying physical uplink adapters or sit within the VMware range (00:50:56)?

I have checked across 30+ hosts in the environments I have here and can see a small number of hosts with a vmk0 MAC of 00:50:56:x:x:x while the rest all have MAC's that match the physical NIC. All hosts management traffic seems to function without issue.

Just looking for clarification around this, perhaps people out there can compare with their own environments?

Host networking setup for vmotion and management

Slingsh0t — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:46:25 GMT

Hey Guys,

Just wanted to get some feedback on this setup for some hosts I'm building soon. The hosts I have 2 x quad port nics (1 onboard, 1 pcie - a grand total of 8 1GigE ports) and we've decided to dedicate 3 physical nics for both management and vmotion.

The intention is to use two physical ports on the onboard quad card for dedicated roles: one for management, the other for vmotion. These will both connect to the same switch. The quad port pcie nic will have 1 physical port that will be used for both vmotion and management and connect to the second switch. Thereby multi-nic vmotion will be able to run across two physical ports and two physical switches, and management traffic will also have the potential to use two physical nics and the two switches. This setup should still be able to maintain management and vmotion connectivity in the event of either a nic or switch failure.

802.11q will be used to segregate the management and vmotion networks as the three vmk ports and three physical nics will all reside in the same vSwitch.

I'm struggling to identify any serious issues with this setup but thought I'd put it to the community for feedback. So can you see any blatant issues with the above setup that I may have missed?

I know the setup isn't "symmetrical" in cabling to switches etc, but I don't see that really affecting performance much.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Retrieve list of alarm descriptions in C#

Slingsh0t — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:36:51 GMT

Thanks for the responses guys, Here is the code I've got so far, any ideas why its not working?:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using VMware.Vim;

namespace ConsoleApplication2

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

VimClient c = new VimClient();

ServiceContent sc = c.Connect("redacted", null, null);

UserSession us = c.Login("redacted", "redacted");

ManagedObjectReference alarmMOR = new ManagedObjectReference();

alarmMOR.Type = "Alarm";

alarmMOR.Value = "alarm-3";

AlarmManager alarmMg = new AlarmManager(c,alarmMOR);

Console.WriteLine(alarmMg.Description); <- alarmMg.Description always seems to come back as null!

c.Disconnect();

}

Retrieve list of alarm descriptions in C#

Slingsh0t — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:42:57 GMT

How do I do it? It seems like such a simple thing yet I'm struggling (I can do other things like get VMs, DC's, etc but I am still learning...). I can get the alarm ID's, just having trouble with the descriptions.

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Re: Automatic deployment of VM's

Slingsh0t — Fri, 11 May 2012 08:10:36 GMT

Thanks guys, appreciate the responses. I have been working with PowerCLI for quite a while now and aware of the ability to provision VM's en masse...

It's more a question of how a VM provisioning script could be triggered, by a load balancer in particular. I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that this won't be a simple solution and will have to start planning something complicated to get the job done...

Automatic deployment of VM's

Slingsh0t — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:02:55 GMT

Hi guys, bit of a general/broad question here...

What products or solutions do you use when you need to deploy VM's automatically?

For Instance: I'm currently looking into ways where a Netscaler VPX can trigger the creation of Virtual Machines based on the load of the active member servers. The reciprocal is also true... it will then need to shut-down and delete VM's that are no longer required, etc...

So far I'm struggling to find any helpful info on the web and will soon have to resort to writing lots of scripts and putting together some intricate, custom built solution, but before going down that road thought I'd put the word out on the forums for advice.

Thanks in advance,

Andy

Possible host network config, thoughts?

Slingsh0t — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:17:29 GMT

Hey guys,

Currently on our hosts we have 2 x dedicated NIC's for management and 2 x dedicated NIC's for vMotion. The hosts are housing very few VM's, most of which are inactive and therefore DRS rarely instigates a vMotion (maybe one or two a week).

I'd like to change this setup and would like thoughts on what I'm proposing, if you spot any issues please let me know:

MGMT VLAN = 100

VMOTION VLAN = 101

I'd like to have 3 physical NIC's in a single vSwitch, which are all trunked network connections with vlan's 100 and 101. I would like to set the management vmk port to use NIC's 1 & 2, and setup 2 vMotion vmk ports using physical NIC's 2 & 3 respectively (with the other as failover for multi-nic vMotion). The idea here is that now management traffic will have two NIC's, as will vMotion. Should a vMotion occur, management will still have a dedicated NIC yet still maintain resiliency.

Just helps us save a NIC on the host to use for other purposes So thoughts or obvious issues I've missed? Hope this all makes sense.

Re: Nimble Storage

Slingsh0t — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:53:30 GMT

Wow no need to be so overly-dramatic guys! :smileysilly: The old adage comes to mind: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!". I saw a post on an emerging vendor/product with many positive reviews from zero/low posters and nary a negative comment in sight and naturally became suspicious...

Anyways back on topic! Has anyone done any IOPS testing in their specific environment and is able to post some stats? Details of the test like %rand%read, block sizing, datastore path selections, number of san uplinks on their hosts etc?