Tag Archives: VMware

VMworld Europe 2016 – Day 1

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Early morning day 2 of my VMworld 2016 trip seems like the time to do a short recap of yesterday.

Yesterday started with the General Session keynote where Pat Gelsinger and several others presented the view from VMware. Amongst his points I found the following things most interesting:

  • THE buzzword is Digital Transformation
  • Everyone is looking at Traditional vs Digital business
  • However only about 20% of companies are actively looking at doing this. 80% are stuck behind in traditional IT and spend time optimizing predictable processes.
  • Digital Business is the new Industrial Revolution

In 2016 – 10 years ago AWS was launched. Back there were about 29 million workloads running in IT. 2% of that was in the cloud mostly due to Salesforce. 98% was in traditional IT. Skip 5 years ahead now we have 80 million workloads and 7% in public cloud and 6% in private. Remaining 87% still in traditional perhaps virtualized IT. This year we are talking 15% public and 12% private cloud and 73% traditional of 160 million workloads. Pat’s research time have set a specific time and date for when cloud will be 50% (both public and private). That date is June 29th 2021 at 15:57 CEST. We will have about 255 million workloads by then. In 2030 50% of all workloads will be in public clouds. The hosting market is going to keep growing.

Also the devices we are connecting will keep growing. By 2021 we will have 8.7 billion laptops, phones, tablets etc connected. But looking at IoT by Q1 2019 there will be more IoT devices connected than laptops and phones etc and by 2021 18 billion IoT devices will be online.

In 2011 at VMworld in Copenhagen (please come back soon 🙂 ) the SDDC was introduced by Raghu Raghuram. Today we have it and keep expanding on it. So with today vSphere 6.5 and Virtual San 6.5 were announced for release as well as VMware Cloud Foundation as a single SDDC package and VMware Cross Cloud Services for managing your mutliple clouds.

vSphere 6.5 brings a lot of interesting new additions and updates – look here at the announcement. Some of the most interesting features from my view:

  • Native VC HA features with and Active, Passive, witness setup
  • HTML 5 web client for most deployments.
  • Better Appliance management
  • Encryption of VM data
  • And the VCSA is moving from SLES to Photon.

Updates on vCenter and hosts can be found here and here.

I got to stop by a few vendors at the Solutions exchange aswell and talk about new products:

Cohesity:

I talk to Frank Brix at the Cohesity booth who gave me a quick demo and look at their backup product. Very interesting hyper converged backup system that includes backup software for almost all need use cases and it scales linearly. Built-in deduplication and the possibility of presenting NFS/CIFS out of the deduped storage. Definitely worth a look if your are reviewing your backup infrastructure.

HDS:

Got a quick demo on Vvols and how to use it on our VSP G200 including how to move from the old VMFS to Vvols instead. Very easy and smooth process. I also got an update on the UCP platform that now allows for integration with an existing vCenter infrastructure. Very nice feature guys!

Cisco:

I went by the Cisco booth and got a great talk with Darren Williams about the Hyperflex platform and how it can be used in practice. Again a very interesting hyper-converged product with great potential.

Open Nebula:

I stopped by at OpenNebula to look at their vOneCloud product as an alternative to vRealize Automation now that VMware removed it from vCloud Suite Standard. It looks like a nice product – saw OpenNebula during my education back in 2011 I think while it was still version 1 or 2. They have a lot of great features but not totally on par with vRealize Automation – at least yet.

Veeam:

Got a quick walkthrough of the Veeam 9.5 features as well as some talk about Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux. Very nice to see them move to physical servers but there is still some ways to go before the can talk over all backup jobs.

 

Now for Day 2’s General Session!

Upgrading SSO 5.5

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*EDIT* After 3 hours on the phone with VMware Technical Support we are finally running again. Permissions on one vCenter were wiped and have to be recreated and a bug with Win2k12 domain controllers has hit is meaning that we had to create each domain as an identity source. But we are running again! *EDIT*

 

This is going to be a short post about my current experiences with upgrading the SSO component of vCenter. Short because it is still not working and I am waiting for VMware support to contact me.

So after VMworld I was pushing to upgrade to vSphere 5.5, atleast web client and SSO as this would solve a lot of our AD problems. So planning began and in November I revived my old test environment for the vSphere 5.1 upgrade. I dusted it off, got it running (more on that in a later post) and started the upgrade. The upgrade went fine – as such. After coming online again I could not enumerate users in SSO groups. I could search the AD via the new Integrated Windows Authentication Identity Source but not enumerate members of SSO groups. The web client would be “loading” for a LOOONG time and the following could be seen over and over again in the vmware-sts-idmd.log:

07:07:04,885 WARN   [LdapErrorChecker] Error received by LDAP client: com.vmware.identity.interop.ldap.WinLdapClientLibrary, error code: 81
07:07:04,885 WARN   [ServerUtils] cannot bind connection: [ldap://ADSERVERNAME, null]
07:07:04,885 ERROR  [ServerUtils] cannot establish connection with uri: [ldap://ADSERVERNAME]
07:07:04,885 ERROR  [ActiveDirectoryProvider] Failed to get GC connection to domain aau.dkLdap_sasl_bind failedServer Down

I purged dates and servernames from the log. But in essence it was looking like the SSO was attempting to make a Global Catalog (GC) connection to an AD server but it was selecting an AD server which was not running the GC service and when attempting to connect it decides that the server is down but keeps trying to contact it. Our AD forest consists of 1 root domain and about 20 subdomains and in total about 55 domain controllers where a bit over half run the GC service. There is no setting to tell SSO which server to talk to in the AD forest. So no change.

I got the following from VMware technical support a few days later:

Procedure

1 Log in to the vSphere Web Client as administrator@vsphere.local or as another user with vCenter Single Sign-On administrator privileges.

2 Browse to Administration > Single Sign-On > Configuration.

3 On the Identity Sources tab, select an identity source and click the Set as Default Domain icon.

In the domain display, the default domain shows (default) in the Domain column.

Please restart the services and login to the web client/ vi client.

When I tried that it seemed to work. I reverted and it still worked leading me to think that it was not the above that fixed it but simply time as it would at some point select another server. I was assured over the phone by VMware technical support that customers that had seen the above error had fixed it with the above.

But now, to tell you the truth, the above log snippet is from today. I went ahead and upgrade SSO and Web client yesterday and got stuck with this error after spending about 2 hours reconnecting/repointing a vCenter 5.1 to the new lookup service. It requires you to change the vpxd.cfg file as it has hard coded the path to the STS service in that file and it points to the old /ims and not the new /sts url. It also caused a total wipe of permissions on the one vCenter I repointed causing some incosistent behavior in the web client. Looking under vCenter I cannot see it but if I browse down through Administration -> licensing and find it there I can see all objects with the admin@System-Domain account. The only account left with permissions on the vCenter.

I’m back at the office early this morning, slept like crap due to this. This is going to be a long day!

Since the last time

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So it’s been a while since my last post, a lot has been going on. I have been through my first “employee performance interview” (Medarbejderudviklingssamtale or MUS in Danish). It was good and a lot of things were discussed in regard to this new organization. Some steps to increase my skills were also planned and I will get back to that later.

Since last time I attended VMWorld Europe 2013 in Barcelona! It was an awesome conference as always and I got a lot of new things with me home. One of the things I did different this year as compared to the previous two years was spend a lot more time on the Solutions Exchange. I focused primarily on storage vendors as I have taken fancy in new flash accelerated or all-flash storage systems. So I think I visited every booth with just the slightest connection to storage.

I also had the chance to discuss some of the new technologies coming out of VMware and also discuss the upgrade procedure for vSphere 5.5 when running with an SSO behind a load balancer. That was really useful and insightful and provided me with most of the information I need to perform an upgrade of the SSO and Web Client in our environment to vSphere 5.5 to relieve all the AD problems we have had. I will post a blog article on this later as there are still some hick-ups in the documentation and procedure that I need to test out and receive confirmation on from VMware support.

Our consolidation process has not been moving that much. Shortly after returning from Barcelona I took part in a live migration of VMs between our data center and a remote server room across a distance of about a kilometer. Without going into details about how everything was connected suffice to say that we had a single 10Gbit Ethernet connection between our one of our data center routers and one of the server room’s routers. We also had a single FC connection between a storage array in the data center and the blade chassis in the server room. This allowed us to evacuate a single blade in the server room and move it to an identical blade chassis after this we used another blade in the server room as the “transport host”. We vMotion VMs onto it as it could see both data center and server room storage arrays. The Storage vMotioned the VMs to the data center array and finally vMotion onto the host in the data center. Then one by one we evacuated all blades in the server room and moved them to the data center. The process took about 2 days including the move of a few physical hosts as well and was all in all very successful.

We had a single error during the move which caused an unexplained HA restart. The largest of the VMs (1TB storage spread on 4 different VMDKs) was set to change format to thin provisioned during the Storage vMotion. But at some point during migration we got an unexpected error (This was the actual message from the vSphere client). 30 seconds later HA spontaneously rebooted the VM even though Virtual Machine monitoring was disabled and the host didn’t crash. Luckily the VM handled the reboot well and it occurred close to midnight with no users online.

Right now my colleagues are planning the consolidation of two other VMware installation which will most likely be done with cold migrations. The amount of VMs is small and the fiber connections and licenses of these installations will not allow us to do a live migration. They are also planning a move similar to the one I worked on which we hope to complete some time in December. I am working on a cold migration of VMware installation as well where most of the VMs will be reinstalled on a new cluster rather than migrating them.

That was a status on what we are working on. Also back to the “I will get back to this later”. During the next month I will be working on a test installation of vCloud Automation Center to experiment with it and research if this is something we can use in our organization. The initial tests will be confined to the infrastructure department but if it works out it might be scaled up.

The Missing Pop Up

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During the work with consolidating several VMware installations into a single platform I have to manage permissions. Most of the installations were maintained by a single person or a smaller group of people thus permissions were not that complex, however they were all mostly the same; assign Administrator role to all people given at the vCenter level.

When moving to the new platform this is not really possible. I, as part of the virtualization group, of course have administrative privileges on the two vCenter servers and everything below. But the old administrators still need their permissions due them continuing to maintain legacy systems. We decided to grant this access on a cluster level. This also required us to create a folder in the VMs and Templates view, the Datastores and Datastore Clusters and the Networking view for each old installation. On the clusters and these folders we granted Administrator rights.

Now comes the funny part of this. We had not noticed the problem of a missing popup until a persistent administrator was testing his new rights out. We had the cluster he was on set on DRS Manual mode. This of course requires you to choose which server to start a VM on when powering it on. But he wasn’t getting the popup in the web client. I, at first, thought it was a web client problem but it turned out it was something else.

He would choose the action as below, Power On:

01

In my C# client I could see the following happening:

02

But the VM wasn’t powering on:

03

I tried powering it on manually and saw the popup in my client and wondered what was wrong since he didn’t get it. That is when I realized what might be the problem and tested it out. The problem being that powering on a VM and selecting which host to run on when in DRS Manual mode is a Datacenter privilege and as the user only had permissions on folders and clusters below the Datacenter he was not seeing the popup. If I added his permissions on the Datacenter (and not propagating) he would see the popup as below. This only happened when in DRS Manual mode:

04