Unable to consolidate guest, Vcenter 5.5U3

Forgive me but this was a week ago so I don;t have copies of the actual error messages.

So I logged into Vcenter last Monday and found two of my guests needed to have their snapshots consolidated.  Except looking under Snapshot manager neither guest had any listed!

So long story short: I contacted Vmware support and learned that since we use Veeam to backup our vm guests.. that Veeam proxy machines actually mount the VMDK's of my target guests as RO then backs them up.  Well turns out that for whatever reason one of my proxies did not un-mount a couple of guests VMDK files once the backup job was complete.

So if you run into this where you tell a guest to consolidate snapshots and it fails, *AND* you use Veeam then check your proxy machines to verify they have no disks mounted that do not normally belong to it.

vCenter 6.0 Failed To Deploy .OVF

So today I ran into an issue where I was exporting to template, a Cent7 image from vSphere 5.5 and importing into version 6.0.

I exported successfully enough, which generated three files: cent7-base template.ovf, *.vmdk and *.mf.
I needed to get these files from our ESXi server in-house to the states datacenter across a semi-quick VPN tunnel.  So I was able to browse the datastore in 6.0 and upload the three files from my local machine.

1.58 hours later..


Done.  So feeling good about myself I went to import OVF Template only to have it fail roughly 5 seconds later.  The error was: _deviceimage-0.iso was not found

Puzzled.. wait how the hell was there an iso involv... oh crap.  I forgot to disconnect the pending/failed VMware Tools installer.  So being the curious lad that I am, I (on a guess) tried opening the ovf file using Notepad.. primarily because it was small and I figured it might hold config info.  Boy was I right!  The .ovf file is laid out like an XML.. I found one reference to an iso file.. specifically: vmware.cdrom.iso.  So I removed it and instead placed the following: vmware.cdrom.passthrough which I recalled was an option in the GUI.

Saving the file I re-tried teh import to have it complete successfully!  WOOT.

PowerShell Script - Backing up ESXi Configuration

Crafted this guy today because I've been forgetting to backup our ESXi hosts configs in quite a while.

I used a small part of the PowerCLI script to load the modules for this..



# Loads additional snapins and their init scripts
function LoadSnapins(){
   $snapinList = @( "VMware.VimAutomation.Core", "VMware.VimAutomation.Vds", "VMware.VimAutomation.License", "VMware.DeployAutomation", "VMware.ImageBuilder", "VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud")

   $loaded = Get-PSSnapin -Name $snapinList -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | % {$_.Name}
   $registered = Get-PSSnapin -Name $snapinList -Registered -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue  | % {$_.Name}
   $notLoaded = $registered | ? {$loaded -notcontains $_}
 
   foreach ($snapin in $registered) {
      if ($loaded -notcontains $snapin) {
         Add-PSSnapin $snapin
      }
   }
}
LoadSnapins




$cred = Get-Credential
connect-viserver 1.2.3.4  -credential $cred
get-vmhost | get-vmhostfirmware -backupconfiguration -destinationpath "C:\vmware_backups"

pause

Backup and recover Vmware ESXi installs on SD cards

Here's a small piece on teh backing up and restoring of vmware 'firmware' most often used when running the hypervisor off SD cards.


Using the Vcenter-CLI:

Get-VmHostFirmware -Vmhost x.x.x.x -backupconfiguration -destinationpath c:\users\blah

Restoring:

Set-VmHostFirmware -Vmhost x.x.x.x -restore -sourcepath c:\users\blah\configbundle-<vmhost ip>.tgz -HostUser root -HostPassword <password>

Enterprise Virtualization Upgrade

So we finally.. and I do mean FINALLY got approval for one of our major projects this year.
Dum, dum DUUUMM,  creating a real, live, full-reaching virtualization structure.

Up til now in our main site we've cobbled together a vast array of VM provider setups.. XenServer (Before Citrix bought them out), Hyper-V (2008 flavor) and a few free ESXi hypervisors.  Since we have the dough dedicated for it now.. my plan is:

Replace all existing Hypervisors
'Upgrade' to a pay-for ESXi setup with support options
Introduce an actual SAN to the environment

The hypervisor hardware I'm looking at is HP Proliant DL360p gen8's.. a trio for the main site and a pair for my site.  The reasons will come shortly..
Anyway the Proliants will have:
      2 x Xeon E5-2643V2 cpus
      64gb PC3-14900E
      Intel 4-port gigabit nic
      Sandisk Extreme Class10/UHS Class 1 SDHC 32gb
      2 x 300gb SAS (Storing VM templates and ISOs)

Now for mass-storage.. we've decided on a Netapp FAS2552 with 24 x 1.2TB internal drives and a shelf with 12 x 600gb drives for roughly 14TB of usable storage.  It'll come with all the licenses netapp has to offer.. Snap Mirror being the primary focus.  Not only will this filer replace our aging file servers, but it'll store the VM data as well as (later on) replicated data from the other site.. my site :)


More to come..