When building the lab environment you may only want to have the 1 Datastore setup. If so you may encounter the above Warning
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vcenter
“The password change operation failed” on VCSA
vSphere agent does not exist or may not be running – vRA
I have spun up a vRA and vRO Lab quickly to perform some testing recently and came across the above error when trying to at my vCenter endpoints into vRealize Automation.
Upload to Datastore failure – Self Signed Certificate Error
When uploading file to Datastore you receive: The operation failed for an undetermined reason. Typically this problem occurs due to certificates that the browser does not trust….
VIRTUAL LAB – PART 7 – Adding Shared Storage
Now we have the Networking in place, we need some Shared Storage. Im going to refer to a few older posts of mine to set this up with FreeNAS which works really well. I may look at other solutions at some point but for now this does exactly what I need.
Installing FreeNAS into VMware Workstation Pt1
Installing FreeNAS into VMware Workstation Pt2
Installing FreeNAS into VMware Workstation Pt3 (iSCSI)
This should be enough to get going (May add some NFS Later)
VIRTUAL LAB – PART 6 – ESXi and vCenter Networking
This post will cover the setup of the Hosts networking. I plan to simulate (as much as possible) a real world deployment, so separating all traffic over different networks. This will mean adding a few additional Interfaces to each Host and deploying a few Virtual Switches to them also.
The first thing I need to do is add a few Network Interfaces to each of my Hosts, Im going to add 3 Interfaces; 1 for Shared Storage, 1 for FT and 1 for vMotion.
Open up Virtual Machine Settings and select Add…
Select Yes if the User Account Control appears (more…)
VIRTUAL LAB – PART 5 – vCenter Setup
So my VCSA is now up and running, I just need to go into vCenter and do some config
- Licenses
- Create Datacenter, add Hosts etc..
First thing to do is log in using URL structure: https:////vsphere-client
NOTE: If you just go to the IP of your vCenter it will give you options to use either HTML5 or Flash
I selected the Flash client which uses the URL above
VCSA (vCenter) Log Locations
Here are a few log files I found useful when deploying the VCSA (vCenter Appliance)
- /var/log/firstboot
- rpmInstall.json – A JSON formatted file containing status messages. Contains progress information, and error messages.
- cloudvm.log – Log messages created throughout the vCenter Server Appliance installation process.
- firstbootStatus.json – A JSON file containing the current status of the installation process.
VIRTUAL LAB – PART 4 – VCSA (vCenter) Setup in VMWare Workstation (Not Nested)
The first thing i’m going to do is add DNS entries for both ESXi Servers and the VCSA Im about to deploy. I added Forward and Reverse Entries for the VCSA
And check Name resolutions works with PING and NSLOOKUP
Installing Nested ESXi VM Tools
Ensure SSH / Port 22 is open and the Services are started as per previous post Enabling SSH
Download the relevant VIB File from the Flings Website here:
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-tools-for-nested-esxi
Open up your SFTP / FTP Application; In my lab I am using WinSCP
Copy the VIB to a Datastore on the ESXi Server
PuTTy onto the host and run:
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/esx-tools-for-esxi-9.7.1-0.0.00000.i386.vib -f
After a short while you should receive the following Successful message:
Summary – From the Official FLINGs Website: https://labs.vmware.com/flings
Note: See Instructions tab for downloads.
This VIB package provides a VMware Tools service (vmtoolsd) for running inside a nested ESXi virtual machine. The following capabilities are exposed through VMware Tools:
- Provides guest OS information of the nested ESXi Hypervisor (eg. IP address, configured hostname, etc.).
- Allows the nested ESXi VM to be cleanly shut down or restarted when performing power operations with the vSphere Web/C# Client or vSphere APIs.
- Executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
- Supports the Guest Operations API (formally known as the VIX API).
Enabling SSH for ESXi Servers
Quick guide to enabling SSH on an ESXi Server
Navigate to the ESXi Server in vCenter and select the Configuration Tab and then Security Profile
Navigate to the Firewall Section and select Properties…
VCSA – Failed to execute, during Setup Wizard
When running through the Setup Wizard in the vCenter Server Appliance version 5.5
you receive:
Failed to execute ‘/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ‘db’ write’…..
This occurs for SSO and the Database Setup
Connect to the VCSA via Console and Stop the vmware.vpxd service
Once this is down – go back to the GUI and re-run the Setup Wizard
DVSwitch ports Blocked – Nexus 1000v
Recently, Ports on the Nexus1000v became blocked after performing a Nexus 1000v Upgrade.
After the upgrade a whole bunch of the VMs lost network connectivity, whilst IP Storage Etc.. Stayed up
In vCenter, Under Networking the Ports on the DvSwitch were showing as blocked
Removing Unwanted Plugins from vCenter
Some of the plugins for vCenter don’t offer an uninstaller.
To unregister a plugin from vCenter follow this method provided by a VMware KB:
Open a web browser and go to http://vcenterserver/mob
Click on Content
Click on ExtensionManager
Copy the name of the plugin you want to unregister
extensionList[“com.emc.EMCStoragePlugin”]
Click on UnregisterExtension
In the text field paste the text into the box and delete all but the part in quotes(e.g.com.emc.EMCStoragePlugin)
click InvokeMethod
Refresh the browser and the plugin should be gone from the list
Reconnect to vCenter using the client and the plugin should be gone from Plug-ins-> Manage Plugins list.
Performance Data is currently not available for this entity on a single ESXi Host
When no performance data is available on a single host, restart the hostd and vpxa services
From the Local Console or SSH:
- Log in to SSH or Local console as root.
- Run these commands:/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restartNote: In ESXi 4.x, run this command to restart the vpxa agent:
/etc/opt/init.d/vmware-vpxa restart
- Alternatively, to restart all management agents on the host, run the command:services.sh restart
