Category: vSphere

Installing the Home Lab – Installing vCenter 5.5 on Windows 2012R2

This post will detail all the steps required to install vCenter 5.5a on to a Windows 2012R2 guest machine, I should add that at the time of writing 2012R2 isn’t on the supported OS list and that there is an additional step that needs to be done to ensure that the installation succeeds first time.

You will need to get a copy of OCSetup.exe because for some insane reason Microsoft dropped the use of it in Windows 2012R2 (it’s present in 2012). As a side note you can also use a copy of the file from Windows 2008R2 if you don’t have 2012 available. Once you have a copy place it in the C:\Windows\System32 folder.

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1 December 2013
ESXi 5.5 Upgrade in 7 Steps

So with the release of ESXi 5.5 I decided to follow my previous instructions and upgrade my hosts using the esxcli commands.

1. Place the Host into Maintenance Mode and ensure that there are no running VM’s on the host.

2. Ensure you have SSH enabled

3. Make sure that the Outbound HTTP rule is enabled, either by using the console or via the command line later on (command line is esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient )

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23 September 2013
vCloud Suite 5.5 Announcement
VMware have announced updates to their vCloud Suite product.

VMware have extended the number of products that are included in the vCloud Suite 5.5, this includes vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) availability in all editions rather than just the Enterprise Suite. Prior to this announcement vCloud Automation Center came in a single version, however the announcement let’s us know that we now have Standard, Advanced and Enterprise versions available.
- vCloud Automation Center – Standard Edition offers the basic self service portal feature of vCAC.
- vCloud Automation Center – Advanced Edition offers the same functionality as the existing vCAC product.
- vCloud Automation Center – Enterprise Edition offers full vCAC functionality plus vFabric App Director for Release Automation.
vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security are not sold as standalone products anymore.

All editions of the vCloud Suite now include automation features (offered by vCAC) and Operations Management (using vCOPS).
26 August 2013
What’s new in vSphere 5.5
VMware has just announced the vSphere 5.5 product at VMworld 2013. Here are the new features and enhancements.

vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
- Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices
- Support for Reliable Memory Technology
- Enhancements for CPU C-States
Virtual Machine Enhancements
- Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi™ 5.5
- Expanded vGPU Support
- Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests
VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
- VMware vCenter Single Sign-On
- VMware vSphere Web Client
- VMware vCenter Server Appliance
- vSphere App HA
- vSphere HA and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS) Virtual Machine–Virtual Machine Affinity Rules Enhancements
- vSphere Big Data Extensions
vSphere Storage Enhancements
- Support for 62TB VMDK
- MSCS Updates
- vSphere 5.1 Feature Updates
- 16GB E2E support
- PDL AutoRemove
- vSphere Replication Interoperability
- vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention
- vSphere Flash Read Cache
vSphere Networking Enhancements
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements
- Traffic Filtering
- Quality of Service Tagging
- SR-IOV Enhancements
- Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture
- 40GB NIC support
More details can be found in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 Platform Guide
26 August 2013
vCenter 5.1 Logbrowser Error – Unauthorised access fix

After a recent upgrade to our vCenter 5.1 infrastructure we discovered that we were getting the following error when trying to use the log browser component of the web client.

Having tried a number fixes from the usual sources (Derek Seamans excellent blog) none of them seemed to resolve the issue, a reboot of the infrastructure, a re-install of the Web Client all resulted in the same error cropping up. In the end it took the eyes of a VMware BCS Engineer to have a look at our ca_certificates.crt file and discover some white space present.

The strange thing here is that there wasn’t any date change on the file since the initial deployment back last year and we had no issues with the log browser working before the upgrade.

If you experience any issues with the log browser it may be worth checking the C:\ProgramData\VMware\SSL\ca_certificates(_2).crt file to make sure that there isn’t any white space present in the file first.

9 July 2013
Home Lab 2013 – Storage

With the change to my Home Lab environment recently I decided to take a fresh look at my storage capabilities and came to the conclusion that whilst the home brew solution was nice I now wanted something a little more dedicated to my vSphere environment that would allow me to play with the likes of VAAI because although FreeNAS claims to be looking at implementing this in a future release but there are no current dates on the roadmap for this.

Having looked at the likes of Qnap and Synology I decided to go down the route of Synology for my new home lab storage, there were a couple of deciding factors in this which include the 4x1GB NICs and the nice web interface (so much nicer than the Iomega IX4 interface).

A couple of days spent looking over various blog\forum posts all seem to indicate that this was a good choice and when I discovered that both of my colleagues had gone down this route it made more sense to do the same.

It should be mentioned that the Synology is not a cheap unit with prices ranging from £620 – £700 per unit (excluding disks) so you have to make sure that you’re making the right decision before spending that much money.

In the end I decided to go for a Synology DS1513+ unit, this 5 bay device is expandable to a total of 15 disks with the additional purchase of the DX513 expansion unit so offers a lot of capacity if required.

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9 July 2013
Condusiv V-locity VM Testing

During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).

They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.

V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-
Increase application performance by 50%
Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
True "set and forget" management
What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).

I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.

It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.

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