Vmware

Originally the VCP5-DCV Delta exam (VCP550D) was available until 30. November. I passed it on 22. November, about one week before the planned ending of availability. Yesterday, VMware announced the extended availability of the delta exam. You can find the announcement on the VMware Education and Certification Blog. The exam will be available through 10. March 2015. Previously requested authorizations are still valid.

This delta exam is focused on the differences between VMware vSphere 5.1 an vSphere 5.5, and it is available to existing VCP5-DCVs who took the VCP510 exam and need to recertify on or before 15. March 2015. The exam consists of 65 questions. You have 75 minutes time to answer them. If you’re a non-native english or japanese speaker, you will granted 30 minutes extra time.

When you want to go fast, go slow. Otherwise you will get into trouble… Today I tried to quickly deploy a VM from a template and customize this VM with a customization specification. The codeword is “quickly”. The fun started with this error message:

Fortunately I asked the VMware Knowledge Base, which lead me to VMware KB2086930 (Deploying a template with customization fails with the error: Authenticity of the host’s SSL certificate is not verified). This KB article is all you need to know to fix this error.

It’s a common practice to replace self-signed certificates, that are used in several VMware products, with CA signed certificates. I did this in my lab for my vCenter Server Appliance and my VMware Update Manager. While I was working with vRealize Orchestrator I noticed, that it is also using self-signed certificates (what else?). For completeness, I decided to replace the self-signed certificates with CA signed.

My lab environment

1. VMware vSphere 5.5 environment running a vCenter Server appliance (already using CA signed certificates)
2. vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 5.5.2 (not version 5.5.2.1,  because I had problems with this release)
3. Microsoft Windows CA running on a Windows 2012 R2 Standard server

You don’t need a Microsoft Windows CA. You can use any other CA. There is no need to use a special vendor. I use a windows-based CA in my lab, so the screenshots reflect this fact. The way how certificates are replaced differs between vRealize Orchestrator Appliance and the windows-based standalone or vCenter Server embedded version. If you use the in the vCenter Server embedded or Standalone Orchestrator check Derek Seamans VMware vSphere 5.5 SSL Toolkit. I used the Orchestrator appliance.

The clock is ticking… Current VCP5-DCVs who need to recertify their VCP can do this until 30. November 2014 by passing the VCP5-DCV Delta exam (VCP550D). The exam can booked online via Pearson VUE and it’s delivered as an online exam. This means, that you don’t have to visit a Pearson VUE test center to take the exam. The costs for the exam are 90,- € plus taxes (in my case ~ 107 €).

While preparing for a VMware vSphere 5.5 update at a customer of mine, I stumbled over VMware KB2085618 (ESXi host cannot initiate vMotion or enable services and reports the error: Heap globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size.Cannot expand.). I checked the HP AMS version in the latest HP custom ESXi image and found out, that version hp-ams-esx-550.10.0.0-18.1198610 is included (source). Unfortunately the bug is not fixed in 10.0.0, but it’s fixed in 10.0.1 (source).

This is not a brand new issue and it’s well discussed in the VMTN. After applying the ESXi 5.5.0 U2 patches from 15. October 2014, you may notice the following symptoms:

• Some Citrix NetScaler VMs with e1000 vNICs loses network connectivity
• You can’t access the VM console after applying the patches

VMware has released a couple of patches in October:

• ESXi550-201410101-SG (esx-base)
• ESXi550-201410401-BG (esx-base)
• ESXi550-201410402-BG (misc-drivers)
• ESXi550-201410403-BG (sata-ahci)
• ESXi550-201410404-BG (xhci-xhci)
• ESXi550-201410405-BG (tools-light)
• ESXi550-201410406-BG (net-vmxnet3)

More specifically, it’s the patch ESXi550-201410401-BG that is causing the problem. It is reported that the patch ESXi510-201410401-BG is also cause problems. VMware has published a KB article under the the KB2092809. Citrix has also published a KB article under the ID CTX200278. The VMware KB2092809 includes a workaround. You have to add the line

Today I was at a customers site. My attention was initially directed on a vCOps deployment. vCOps is a good startpoint if you need a quick overview over a vSphere environment. Unfortunately vCOps wasn’t working any more. The license was expired and the login page wasn’t accessable, but the admin login page was workingI restarted the vApp but this doesn’t solve the problem. The customer owns a VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus license and it would be a shame, if he wouldn’t use vCOps in his environment (> 15 hosts).

Today I changed the SCSI controller type for my Windows VMs in my lab from LSI SAS to PVSCSI. Because the VMs were installed with LSI SAS, I used the procedure described in VMware KB1010398 (Configuring disks to use VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters) to change the SCSI controller type. The main problem is, that Windows doesn’t have a driver for the PVSCSI installed. You can force the installation of the driver using this procedure (taken from KB1010398):

This morning I discovered a tweet from Derek Seaman in my timeline, that caught my attention.

Doing a #VCDX design? Take note of TPS being disabled in all future ESXi releases. http://t.co/qRXlABIJSs

— DΞRΞK SΞAMAN (@vDerekS) October 17, 2014

TPS stands for Transparent Page Sharing and it’s one of VMware memory management technologies. VMware ESX(i) uses four different technologies to manage host and guest memory resources (check VMware KB2017642 for more information). The preference increases from TPS to swapping.

Inspired by Chris Wahls blog post “Building a New Network Design for the Lab”, I want to describe how my lab network designs looks like.

The requirements

My lab is separated from my home network, and it’s focused on the needs of a lab. A detailed overview about my lab can be found here. My lab is a lab and therefore I divided it into a lab, and an infrastructure part. The infrastructure part of my lab consists of devices that are needed to provide basic infrastructure and management. The other part is my playground.