I am going through a project at home to centralise my ESXi and Windows Event Logs using Splunk and Snare and part of that process was going through my Event logs to try and fix any niggling issues.
Going through my vCenter event logs I discovered some errors in the ADWS logs that I did a Google for and came across a post from Gregg Robertson over on his site that resolved the issue.
For those of you interested in Freenas 8 it’s now been officially released and can be downloaded from here, expect testing results shortly.
In the second part of my series of testing home lab NAS/SAN solutions I tested Open-E’s DSS v6.
I had been planning on testing the current release candidate of FreeNAS, RC5, unfortunately during initial testing this proved to be a little unreliable in it’s current state as you can’t mount iSCSI targets, even from the command line, NFS shares however do work ok. Until FreeNAS release a version that I am comfortable working with I am stopping testing with FreeNAS at this time.
With the recent release of Openfiler 2.99 there has been an on-going issue with an inability to create certain software RAID arrays. This is present in the beta and final release of the software and was getting frustrating, however there is a fix.
If you are going to be installing Openfiler 2.99 and discover that you’re not able to create software RAID 1 arrays then the following will resolve that for you.
In this new NAS\SAN Shoot-Out series I will be testing available NAS\SAN solutions out there for those of you wanting a free\cheap home based Lab NAS\SAN solution for your vSphere labs.
I will be providing the testing results of the following software solutions:-
Iomega IX4-200D
Openfiler (2.99)
FreeNAS (7.2 and 8.0RC5)
NexentaStor (3.0.4)
OpenIndiana (Build 148 – using napp-it)
Oracle Solaris 11 Express (using napp-it)
Open-E DSS (6)
Having installed Veeam FastSCP onto my Windows 7 (64) Ultimate workstation I was getting frustrated with the error messages I was getting "Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID [5F1555F0-0DBB-47F6-B10B-0AB0E1C1D8CE} failed due to the following error: 800700c1", a quick google search found the answer for me.
Looking into the fix I found here I realised that it’s a tad long winded and bloated (no disrespect intended, as it is the fix). So I thought to myself, did I actually need all of that for the fix to work. The answer is no.
Having looked at what was required (running "corflags "C:\Program Files (x86)\Veeam\Veeam Backup and FastSCP\VeeamShell.exe" /32BIT+" to resolve the issue with FastSCP not working on any 64bit Windows OS resulted in the above error message when trying to copy files between Datastores) I decided to see what happens if I just took the corflags.exe file and ran that instead of having the entire SDK installed, the results were that the program now works.
My hardware raid controller (Lenovo branded M1015) simply isn’t recognised by OF or Freenas 7.2 and FreeNas 8 (RC2 and RC3) has a penchant for just crashing during the installation.
I have been toying with NexentaStor but haven’t been overly impressed with my SSD failing on it (the SSD works fine in Windows but fails under Nexenta), I have noticed that there were others experiencing the same issues with the OCZ Onyx 32gb SSD so I tried using an external SATA card.. which of course wasn’t recognised by NexentaStor, Solaris or Open Indiana, so that blew out my chances of getting the L2ARC working on any of them.
Today I reinstalled my vCenter server so that I could manage both of my vSphere Hosts centrally, the installation itself went as smoothly as possible but there was one small blip.
When connecting to the vCenter server I discovered that I couldn’t browse to the Hardware Status page but if I connected directly to the host with the vSphere client I had no issues.
A Google search later found that this had been an issue back in 2009 but I hadn’t really found much since, the methods to fix this differed slightly with me probably down to the fact that I had installed vCenter onto a 2008 R2 SP1 installation.
To fix the issue on a 2008 R2 installation do the following.
1. On the vCenter server go to Start – Run – ADSI Edit
2. Select connect to and ensure the following is selected under connection settings
– Connection name – vCenter
– Connection Point – Distinguished Name is selected and name is “dc=virtualcenter, dc=vmware,dc=int”
– Computer – Server name : localhost
– port : 389
– Click ok to connect
4. Once in Adsi Edit browse to
Right click on the CN=VIMWEBSVC and choose Properties.
Scroll Down to vmw-vc-URL
Here we can see that this is populated with a DNS name, we are going to change it to an IP address.
Click OK and exit out from ADSI Edit.
At this stage I then launched Services.MSC and restarted the two following services.
However, when trying to restart the VMware VirtualCenter Server service (which requires a restart of the Webservices service anyway) I had an issue where the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service wouldn’t restart, at this point a simple reboot resolved the issues.
Once the vCenter server had restarted (and I reconnected back via the vSphere Client) I then went to the Hardware Status Page and was presented with the following screen.
All fixed 🙂
Hi all, as some of you may know I recently experienced issues with my IX4 whilst using the paid for TZO subscription service for remote access, having diagnosed the fault down to one of two different avenues.
1, Jumbo Frames
2, Bonded NICs
I disabled both and over the last two weeks have re-enabled NIC teaming, I can now advise you that during that period I had one issue with the device losing connectivity (not the old message, something new this time that I am putting down to my changing things on my Netgear switch rather than the IX4), since the reboot (over a week ago now) I haven’t experienced any further issues with the performance or availability of the device.
