vSphere 6

vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 – A Fresh Install

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The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is a security hardened SUSE Enterprise 11 operating system baked with the vCenter server function. With vSphere 6.0 the appliance now has the same mins/max as the Windows installed version. This makes it very appealing to move over to the appliance! Before You Start: Pick a host and ensure it has a standard switch with a vmnic uplink. Because Distributed Switches is a vCenter function it wants to perform the upgrade on a standard switch. The installation media is a .ISO instead of a .OVA. You will need to burn it to a disc, extract it, or mount it. If you want to upgrade your environment instead of fresh deployment, check out my posts Upgrading Windows based vCenter 5.x to 6 and vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade from 5.x to 6.0 PluralSight: PluralSight has amazing video courses on VMware vSphere. If you haven’t checked out PluralSight it’s an amazing service! Highly recommended! What’s New in VMware vSphere 6 vSphere 6 Foundations: Install and Configure vCenter and ESXi vSphere 6 Foundations: Configure vSphere Storage Installation: The VCSA is no longer a .OVA but instead a .ISO image so burn/extract/mount it on your computer. First we need to install the VMware Client Integration 6.0 Plugin. In the vcsa folder there is the executable named VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe.  The installation is simple, once installed proceed to the next …

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VMware vSphere 6.0 available for download!!

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The wait is over!!! VMware vSphere 6, vSOM 6, vCloud Suite 6, SRM 6, and VSAN 6 are available for your downloading pleasure!! VMware has a notice message referencing KB2110293 with some scenario upgrade paths to get you started: HP already has their customized ESXi 6 image available, however at the time of posting this Dell hasn’t released their version. Watch for vSphere 6.0 documentation coming up right here in virtuallyBoring.com 🙂 Additional Reading: – What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.0? VMware Announced vSphere 6!!!

Not able to see the SD Card on HP Gen 9 during ESXi 5.5 Installation

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When trying to install HP ESXi 5.5 customized image on a HP Gen 9 BL460 blade server I was not able to see the SD card to install on. After trying a few things I found that switching the USB 3.0 mode to Auto instead of the defaulted On allowed ESXi installation to see the SD card. The internal card reader goes over the USB bus so this appears to be a bug and hopefully HP will have a update soon to fix it. Below is what I did to get through this issue: ESXi 5.5U2 Installation – If your not seeing the SD card, go ahead and reboot: Hit F9 on the boot screen to enter System Utilities: Hit Enter on the System Configuration: Hit Enter on the BIOS/Platform Configuration: Hit Enter on System Options: Hit Enter on USB Options: On USB 3.0 Mode, change the default value of Enabled to Auto. Now hit F10 to save and reboot. Now on ESXi installer screen you should see the SD card:

VMware announces vSphere 6!!!

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Today VMware announced vSphere 6 and will be accompanied with other releases such as vCloud Suite 6, Virtual SAN 6, and vSphere with Operations Manager. vSphere 6 has over 650 new features and innovations which makes this quite a release. There are many new amazing features to talk about so i’ll start easy with some of the key features with links for additional reading. Expect lots of vSphere 6 write ups in the near future 🙂 vSphere 6 –  New Maximums: Few of my Favorite Features: Infrastructure Controller (IC): Service that will provide the following functions: Licensing Certificate Store Certificate Authority Service Registration Single Sign-On Enchanted Web Client: Faster web client vs vSphere 5 (still isn’t HTML5) vMotion Improvements: Long Distance vMotion: Increased network latency tolerance from 10 ms to 100 ms vMotion across vCenters: vMotion across data center and vCenter boundaries that vSphere 5 had. vMotion across virtual switches: Basically enables the above, can vMotion across Virtual Standard Switch (vSS) and  Virtual Distributed Switches (vDSs). Fault Tollerance: Now supports 4 vCPUs, up from 1 vCPU. vVols (Virtual Volumes): New storage feature that allows virtual machines to interact with the storage directly without the need of VMFS LUNs. Content Library: Centralized management for VM templates, virtual appliances, ISO images, and scripts. (Wooooot!!!!) vCenter Appliance: Now has the same scalability numbers as the Windows installed vCenter: 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. Also supports linked mode!! (Post …

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VMware – Don’t Miss Event – February 2nd

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VMware announced an online event “that should not be missed” scheduled on February 2nd. There are many rumors floating around the net but I personally feel vSphere 6.0 will be announced.  Excited to see what is announced!! Register Here! This event is so BIG that we’re offering broadcasts around the globe the entire week of February 2…and continuing the excitement throughout February. All event registrants will automatically receive access to additional content, engagement, and activities via our online event platform. Event Times: AMERICAS Date: February 2, 2015 Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST / 4:00 – 5:00 PM EST EMEA Date: February 3, 2015 Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM GMT / 10:00 – 11:00 AM CET ASIA PACIFIC – ASEAN, Western Australia, Hong Kong Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM SGT ASIA PACIFIC – Sydney, Australia Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM AEDT ASIA PACIFIC – Mumbai, India Date: February 5, 2015 Time: 10:30 – 11:30 AM IST

Guest customization runs on every boot

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In our vSphere 5.1 update 2 environment we found that some of our Windows virtual machines were running guest customization every time they boot. This was causing them to loose their static IP address and take an additional 5 minutes to boot. To fix this issue, boot to Windows and open regedit. Navigate to to the following location: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ Edit the BootExecute key and remove all sysprepDecrypter.exe lines. We had some VMs with up to 10 entries! Your key should now look like this: Click OK. Now the VM will not perform the guest customization on every boot. To prevent future VMs you deploy from gaining this issue update your vSphere environment to at least 5.1 Update 5.

Multi-NIC vMotion

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In vSphere 5 a new feature was added that many people may be overlooking. It is called Multi-NIC vMotion. If you have a environment where you have 2 or more dedicated uplinks reserved for vMotion you can double the total bandwidth available by using this option. Do I have your attention? 🙂 Normally you would have 1 port group with both of your vMotion uplinks set to active like this: What if I told you when you are vMotioning a VM, the VMkernal is picking one of those uplinks and basicly ignoring the other? According to the VMware KB article 2010877, “The VMkernel TCP/IP stack uses a single routing table to route traffic. If you have multiple VMkernel network interfaces (vmknics) that belong to the same IP subnet, the VMkernel TCP/IP stack picks one of the interfaces for all outgoing traffic on that subnet as dictated by the routing table.” If you want to use both uplinks for vMotion traffic and double your total bandwidth you have to create two vMotion VMkernals and assign each one a uplink. There was some issues with multi-NIC vMotions if you were running ESXi version before 5.0U2. As always try this out in your test enviroments first 🙂 Here is VMware KB2007467 walking you through these steps that compliment my steps below. First we will create a new port group and rename …

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VMware vSphere Beta Program

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VMware announced on their blog that they are launching the vSphere beta program. While this is open for anyone to sign up it is still a closed beta, meaning NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement). For full details check out the link below: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/06/now-open-vmware-vsphere-beta-program.html