vcenter

Vmware CapacityIQ Unregister a Vcenter Server via the CLI

/ Christopher Paquin

Vmware-logoOk two in a row, now thats strange. Anyway.. I was working on a rebuild and re-ip of my Vcenter Server as I was in the process of changing over to the Vcenter appliance, when i realized that I was going to have to lay hands on a lot of tools and change them to point/connect to my new Vcenter Server instance. Anyway. I started of with VCOPS, and I was surprisingly sucessful. So I figured I would move on to Capacity IQ.

Again, being the Linux guy that I am, I hit up the cli and stated fiddling around. I stumbled across the ciq-admin command and was able to find the following

[ciqadmin@ciq ~]$ ciq-admin register status
vCenter Server Registration Status = Registered
vCenter Server address             = https://vc00.lab.localdomain/sdk
vCenter Server user                = LAB\user

 

Hey ok, that looks good so far. Lets see if we can unregister.

[ciqadmin@ciq ~]$ ciq-admin unregister
Connection to VC failed. Disconnected CIQ, but could not remove CIQ extension from VC.

 

Well crap, you will never be able to connect to my original Vcenter Server… it's dead and its not coming back. Luckily it appears that we can force the registration of a new Vcenter Server

[ciqadmin@ciq ~]$ ciq-admin  register –vc-server vc01.lab.localdomain –force  –user root –password mypasswd
Stopping CIQ :                                             [  OK  ]
Starting CIQ :                                             [  OK  ]
ciq-watchdog is now enabled

 

Now head back on over and get a gander at the webUI. Still shows the old Vcenter Server? Just logout and log back in again and life should be good.

 

Related articles

Vmware VCenter Virtual Appliance – Death to Windows.. I think.
ESX 5: How to Power On A Virtual Machine from the Command Line
VMware vCenter Operations Manager Essentials – Introduction to vCenter Operations Manager
vCenter Operations Manager: VMware's move into cloud monitoring?

Vmware Vcenter Operations Manager Unregister a Vcenter Server via the CLI

/ Christopher Paquin

Vmware-workstation-17-535x535So my Windows based Vmware Vcenter Server went belly up again. Something to do with the SSO database not starting. Not being a lover of Windows I decided to give the Vcenter Server Appliance a shot. Install was great and I am kicking myself a bit as to why I spent so much time fighting with Windows. My new Vcenter Server, which has a different IP address then the original Windows box (might make a great Veeam server) was not registered with Vcenter Operations Manager. I was not prepared to reinstall that thing again. So I needed to figure out how to manually unregister a Vcenter instance and add register another one in its place.

Since VCOPs runs Linux, I decided to ssh into the server and see if I could figure it out. First thing I found that I needed to do was figure out the registered Vcenter Server name and Vcenter Name (whatever that's supposed to be) I was able to do this using the vcops-admin command.

admin@vcops:~> vcops-admin summary

 

This command output a bunch of stuff, but the important bits for this task are below.

Registration Details
——————–
vCenter Server address  = https://vc00.lab.localdomain/sdk
vCenter Server name = Lab Vcenter

 

So now we need to unregister the sucker above. Note that this command takes a bit to unregister

admin@vcops:~> vcops-admin unregister –vc-name Lab\ Vcenter –vc-server https://vc00.lab.localdomain/sdk –user LAB\\userid –password mypassword–force

vCenter Server unregister = success

 

So flip on over to your browser and log in. The unregister process will cause the webUI to reload, so if you were already logged in you will find that you still need to log in again.

Now you can register your new Vcenter Server via the webUI.

Related articles

Vmware VCenter Virtual Appliance – Death to Windows.. I think.
ESX 5: How to Power On A Virtual Machine from the Command Line
vCenter Operations Manager: VMware's move into cloud monitoring?
VCOPs – VMware's Move into Cloud Monitoring

Vmware VCenter Virtual Appliance – Death to Windows.. I think.

/ Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

6a00d8341c77ee53ef01630028e663970dI am, and have always been, a Linux/Unix Administrator, until VMware forced me to learn a bit of Windows.

This, above all, has been the very WORST part about Vmware. Just to run Virtual Center, I had to BUY Windows, I had to Install Windows, and I had to try to learn Windows.  Oh, and then I had to slap some sort of virus protection on it, and figure out how to patch it. And then worst of all try to authenciate to it, as I am not administering Active Directory. No, I use Openldap, as any Linux/Unix admin would.

Then on top of that I needed Windows to even run the VCenter Client and Connect to my VCenter Server.  Well hell, I don't run Windows, not even on my desktop, not even on my laptop… not at home and not in the office. Its been this way for 5 years and VMware, is not going to make me change this.

Now, flash forward to VSphere 5.1, and low and behold, what is this. A real, fully functioning, web client for VCenter. Ok now we are getting somewhere. Now, I have not had a ton of experience with it, but my first impressions are pretty good. Its flashy, its fast, and it appears to be fully functioning.

To further make my day, the Vmware VCenter Appliance is now no longer beta (this is probably old news to most). For those who are not in the know, its Linux (albeit Suse).  So I am downloading it now and am going to give it a spin. How fully functioning is it… I have no idea. Do I need a database somewhere or does it have one built in? I do know it can connect to oracle, which is really neat, but not as neat as postgres or mysql. Also, how awesome would it be if I could configure the thing to use Openldap for auth?

Dunno all the answers yet, but I should have more insight on the topic soon, so stand by.

 

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Raising A Virtual Machine From the Dead, or How I Screwed Up a VM and Resurected It

/ Christopher Paquin / 2 Comments

Big-girl-zombie Something really nasty happened to me when I was working on storage vmotioning a ton of VMs onto new datastores. Basically I was not paying attention and tried to manually remove a Virtual Machine from the datastore using the datastore browser. This basically wiped out the .vmx and.vmdk files, leaving only the flat.vmdk file which could not be removed as thankfully it was in use.

Anyway once I had realized what I had done, and got my mini panic attack out of the way, I found the following kb from Vmware. Reference it here.

In order to get your VM back up and running you must create a matching .vmdk file to go with your flat.vmdk file. You do this using the command below. Note that you must know the size of your flat file in bytes.

# ls -l vmdisk0-flat.vmdk (gives you size in bytes)

Create a new virtual disk/vmdk file and a temp flat file.

# vmkfstools -c 4294967296 -a lsilogic -d thin temp.vmdk

Now delete the temp flat file that you just created.

# rm temp-flat.vmdk

Rename your temp.vmdk to match the name of the flat.vmdk from your vm

mv temp.vmdk vmdisk0.vmdk

Now vi the .vmdk file and point it to the flat file at the line below. You may also need to remove the last line if you did not use thin provisioning on the original vm.

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=fb183c20
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 8388608 VMFS "vmdisk0-flat.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "522"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"

Now you can go through the process of creating a new VM via VCenter, only instead of creating a new virtual disk, you use the vmdk file that you just created. You should then be able to power on your rescued VM.

Scary!

 

Other HA Configuration Error in ESXi and ESX cluster

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Big-frame-hammer Ran into the error below yesterday after rebuilding an ESX 4.0 host as ESXi 4.1 and attempting to enable HA after the newly rebuild ESXi host was added back to the cluster.

Cannot complete the configuration of the HA agent on the host. Other HA configuration error.

Since error message was dissapointingly unspecific, I called VMware Support and asked for their guidance. According to my tech, they are actually getting a lot of calls on this error, as may who are doing in place upgrades to esxi from esx are running into this.

Specfically the error has to do with the fact that ESX has both a Service Console and VMkernel port used for host management, and ESXi only has a VMkernel port. To correct the issue and allow ESXi and ESX to place nice in the same cluster you must add the following.

First under VMkernel Properties make sure that both VMotion and Management traffic have a check mark to indicate that they are enabled.

Second right click on your cluster, and select VMware HA. Then click on Advanced Options and add the following 3 entries.

das.allowNetwork1 = Service Console

das.allowNetwork2 = VMkernel

das. allowVmotionNetworks = true

See screenshot below.

 

Snapshot1

 

 

UPDATE: Note that by default the original name of the management port group is,   Management Network. You must change this to VMkernel for this to work.