My completely ridiculous VSAN test
You find yourself sitting at your desk on a Saturday morning waiting for the cloning of a VM to finish. It seems to take forever and I just wished I could run VSAN in my homelab to get some more speed out of my kit. I have tried to run VSAN on my home mode ESXi hosts, but my RAID controller is not compatible (yet) with VSAN, so I had to remove it again and now I’m waiting for the official release. While waiting I browsed through some VMworld posts in my twitter feed and there was a link to William Lam’s post about his Barcelona session: “VMworld Barcelona #NotSupported Tips/Tricks for vSphere 5.5 Slides Posted”. Browsing through his slides, I got a really stupid idea. What if I would run Virtual ESXi with VSAN included in my home lab, would it be faster than my current NFS NAS that keeps me waiting forever? The virtual ESXi would only be used for offering the VSAN datastore to the physical ESXi hosts in the cluster there is no need to run VMs in the memory of these virtual ESXi hosts. Hmmm, sounds like a plan to test this config, let's do it. … [Continue Reading]
Can’t establish connection to the server at 7331
When trying to open the console of a VM using the vSphere Webclient with the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5, I received the following error: "can't establish a connection to the server at vcsa.vanzanten.local: 7331". It took me some searching through the VMware KB and finally found it. I'm posting it here merely for my self to find it quickly when I need it again. The solution is described in KB2060604 "HTML5 virtual machine console fails to open after restarting vCenter Server Appliance 5.5". The problem is that an environmental variable is not set correctly. To solve the issue: … [Continue Reading]
Installation vCenter Inventory Service hangs forever
Recently I was installing an additional VMware vCenter Server in an environment in which I had replaced all default certificates with official CA certificates and ran into an issue where installation of the VMware vCenter Inventory Service kept hanging when communicating with the VMware SSO server. In the installation wizard of VMware vCenter Inventory Service you'll be asked for the vCenter Single Sign On information. You enter the admin@system-domain account, password and the URL to the Lookup Service. Normally, in the next step you'll be presented with a default certificate and you continue with installation of the certificate. … [Continue Reading]
Be carefull with VMware SSO Master password bug
This week I installed a fresh vSphere 5.1 Update 1 environment and I wanted to configure it will real world certificates to get rid of all those "Do you really really reeeeeally accept this insecure website" messages. Using the VMware SSL Certificate Automation Tool I generated all the new certificates and then started changing the certificate on the VMware SSO server. When doing this, you'll be asked for the Master password. Since I learned a while ago in a very painful way that the Admin@System-domain password is not equal to the Master password, I had written down the Master password and was 100% sure I had the correct Master password. But updating the certificate failed with the error: Incorrect master password. Tried it a few times but it kept failing. Logged in with admin@system-domain in the vSphere Web Client and this was the correct password. … [Continue Reading]
The new Tintri VMstore
Recently I had a chat with Saradhi Sreegiriraju and Ed Lee from Tintri about their new version of their Tintri Storage appliance, Tintri VMstore. This new version is an update of their first model with some really nice new features. New features that (I think) make the Tintri VMstore a real Enterprise solution. Let me first explain what the Tintri appliance is. It is a box with a fixed set of SSDs for performance combined with a set of SATA disks for capacity. The utilization of the SSDs has been designed in such a way that by using compression and dedupe, between 98% and 100% of all read and write actions can be handled from the SSDs directly. Customer experience (Tintri currently has over 180 customers) has shown that only during backups a request is sometimes NOT serviced from flash. The Tintri T540 model offers 13.5TB of usable data storage of which 2.4TB is SSD storage (before dedupe and compression). … [Continue Reading]
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My completely ridiculous VSAN test
You find yourself sitting at your desk on a Saturday morning waiting for the cloning of a VM to finish. It seems to take forever and I just wished I could run VSAN in my homelab to get some more speed out of my kit. I have tried to run VSAN on my home mode ESXi hosts, but my RAID controller is not … [Read More...]
Can’t establish connection to the server at 7331
When trying to open the console of a VM using the vSphere Webclient with the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5, I received the following error: "can't establish a connection to the server at vcsa.vanzanten.local: 7331". It took me some searching through the VMware KB and finally found it. … [Read More...]
Installation vCenter Inventory Service hangs forever
Recently I was installing an additional VMware vCenter Server in an environment in which I had replaced all default certificates with official CA certificates and ran into an issue where installation of the VMware vCenter Inventory Service kept hanging when communicating with the VMware SSO server. … [Read More...]
Be carefull with VMware SSO Master password bug
This week I installed a fresh vSphere 5.1 Update 1 environment and I wanted to configure it will real world certificates to get rid of all those "Do you really really reeeeeally accept this insecure website" messages. Using the VMware SSL Certificate Automation Tool I generated all the new … [Read More...]
The new Tintri VMstore
Recently I had a chat with Saradhi Sreegiriraju and Ed Lee from Tintri about their new version of their Tintri Storage appliance, Tintri VMstore. This new version is an update of their first model with some really nice new features. New features that (I think) make the Tintri VMstore a real … [Read More...]
Add Fusion IO driver to VMware Auto Deploy
A customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped … [Read More...]
The Doctor is IN on SRM, Upgrade to vSphere 5.1, vCSA and VCAP-DCA
A few days ago I blogged about my new idea in this post: "The Doctor is: IN" and I received a lot of positive comments and even my first request for assistance. So… here we go !!! Tonight ( June 7th ) at 19:00 CEST the first session will go live. That is, if Google Hangouts works because last … [Read More...]
The Doctor is: IN
Many of us in IT read a lot of whitepapers, blogposts, how-to articles and view numerous Podcasts or training video's to learn all the details about new products or features. Still, I don't always get some of the details or can't find the info I need. Meeting people at VMUGs or VMworld gives me the … [Read More...]
How to move VMware Single Sign On (SSO) database
Customer had all his VMware databases for vCenter Server, Update Manager, Single Sign On (SSO), vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback running on one big SQL Server where they shared resources with other databases. They asked me to move the databases to a new MS SQL Server because the load of the … [Read More...]
Design question: Why vCenter Server Datacenter?
When working on a design in which there would be two physical datacenters, I started to rethink about why I would create multiple datacenters inside vCenter Server. I noticed that almost all example designs I look at that cover two physical datacenters, also have two datacenters in the vCenter … [Read More...]
