VMware

This will be my first VMworld attending as an employee and quite a bit of things will be going on. Just in case anyone was interesting in vSphere Upgrades I wanted to share out some key sessions that I recommend including my own.

On May 22nd we released the first update to our vCenter Server 6.7 version, 6.7a. I will let you know how you can patch your 6.7 GA vCenter Server to 6.7a.

It’s finally out! vSphere 6.7 is the next major release of VMware’s virtualization software. I’ve been using 6.7 through the vSphere Beta Program and testing even newer features in my current role. I am here to talk to you about planning your vSphere upgrade and some planning and considerations you should have when going to the latest release. The first, thing I would like to mention is there is no supported migration from vSphere 5.

Another lovely Friday starting off with strange issues, when taking a host out of standard maintenance we noticed that HA would not reconfigure, and kept saying The object ‘vim.Datastore:datastore-1131’ has already been deleted or has not been completely created. This was strange because no other hosts had this issue. I proceeded to follow standard troubleshooting steps, reconfigure HA…same issue….disable HA for entire cluster and re-enable…..same issue…whoops thats not good!

So it seems to be that time of year again with new projects coming around. This time its all about vRA. This is probably my first of many blogs to come about things I have come across. My question today was how do I pre-create a computer AD account, join a device to the domain and then clean it up when the machine is destroyed. Turns out this is super simple in vRealize Automation 7.

vSphere 6.5U1 was released on July 27th. This is an incremental update a lot of people wait for before upgrading from a previous version. I have been lucky to have been running on vSphere 6.5 for quite some time and have been enjoying it very much. Obviously we never upgrade production first, if we can help it. I decided to attempt an upgrade on one of our QA vCenters that was deployed using the VCHA Advanced workflow.

I have been working on doing a vCenter Consolidation Project. This included migrating our systems to a new vRealize Operations Server. This particular one included 73 different vSOM keys, and as you may know there is currently no way to enter in multiple keys at a time. I reached out to Kyle Ruddy and he informed me there is an API to do this, and that started my adventure to get this working.

I have been working on doing a vCenter Consolidation Project. This has meant recreating multiple permissions groups. I couldnt find an easy way to apply permissions at a datacenter so I updated this script to be used. Pre-Requsites VMware PowerCLI Link to Script Set-vCenterPermissions.ps1 permissions.csv Preparing to Execute the Script The script is pretty straight forward, just need to update columns in the CSV such as Datacenter, Group and Role.

Warning: A few others and myself have noticed that when updating a VCHA Cluster to 6.5U1 it resets the hostname to localhost.localdomain stopping vCenter Web Client from Loading. It seems to be isolated to Advanced Deployments and not Basic. I would recommend destroying your VCHA Cluster, updating, then redeploying in this scenario. Warning2: It also seems that if you try to redeploy VCHA Advanced after an upgrade, it still resets the hostname, I have a case opened and will update here as neccessary.

One of my favorite new features of vSphere 6.5 is definately vCenter HA. I was checking out alerts when I noticed i had an alarm for vCenter HA being degraded. Looking through the GUI, I was unable to find anything in regards to why the Health was a warning and why the components would not sync. Then I remembered a previous case I had opened for VCHA. There is a log file located in /var/log/vmware/vcha