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Virtualization Vmware

Adding an IDE Storage Adapter for an OVF that is supposed to run in vSphere? What were you thinking???

A few weeks ago I had the misfortune of having to deal with a .OVF that was sent by a support team to one of our engineers so we can run a Virtual Machine in our lab environment.

That seems pretty cut and dry, except when I go to import the .OVF and I get this message when the import gets to the Validating Step.
I had never seen this message before, but after seeing the part of the message that says DiskControllerReference, I automatically assumed that there was an issue with the .VMX file on the VM. Well because this is not a VM, but an .OVF I decided to open the .OVF file in Notepad ++ and found this.
I do not know why the person who created this .OVF selected a IDE controller for the HDD., but here we are.
I informed my Engineer of the issue, and he said that they told him to use VMware Converter to change it into an acceptable VM image. 
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I downloaded the lastest copy of VMware Converter Standalone (which took me a day, because VMware’s Download site was not working) and tried to convert it.
Guess what, It didn’t work!!
This is also not the first time I have run into this issue with this particular vendor (who shall remain nameless). Their .OVA files will give you the same error message.  So needless to say anytime I run into this vendor, I immediately tell my Engineers to get me an .ISO and I will build them a VM from Scratch. 
I hope you find this post helpful, and if you would like to know more information about this, please feel free to DM me on one of my social media accounts. 
Thanks for reading, and check back soon for more articles. 
Categories
Virtualization Vmware

VMware Home Lab 1.0

GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING!!!!!

Alright I had to find a different way to start this post, so I decided to borrow Pierre Roberts Catch phrase. I don’t think it worked so he can have it back. 
I wanted to take the time to talk about my home lab that I am currently using. As I mentioned in a previous post I have a Razer Blade 2018 which I will be using to run my lab for now. 
Stock the laptop comes with:
  • 8th Gen Intel Core i7 – 8750H Processor 6 Cores/12 threads up to 4.1 GHz
  • 1 TB M.2 SSD
  • 16 GB of RAM. 
I have been wanting to upgrade it to 32 GB of RAM since I purchased it, however $400 for 32 GB of RAM was just too much for me to swallow at the time. 
I had been watching the price of RAM (particularly for this laptop) for the last few months and saw that it was steadily declining. I finally decided to pull the trigger when it was down to 49% off on Amazon. 
The RAM Arrived a few days ago, and I installed it in the laptop, and I have to say it is awesome. I have never seen a laptop run this good. 
I installed VMWare Workstation Professional 15 (Thank you VMUG Advantage) and I will have a install guide out for that soon. 
I am also beginning to Spec out my VMware Home Lab 2.0 which will also be a Nested Solution. I will probably leverage my Kit.com account to show my parts list once I get it running. 
I hope you find this post helpful and stay tuned for updates.

I didn’t know this was even possible…. SSL Certificate weirdness

 So I was working on the post about how to resolve the SSL Certificate error message that you get if you do not have the Root certificate for the ESXi host installed on your machine. Well in the process of taking screen shots for that post I discovered something that I have never seen before.  Rather than starting from the beginning, lets pick up at the end of the last post.

So right after you finish installing the Root CA on your machine, you have closed out of your web browser and reopened it and go to the URL and you get this message.

On first glance it looks like the certificate install failed, but it didn’t, Upon closer inspection of the message you will see that there is an issue with the CN is invalid. 
For those who do not know CN means Common Name which is usually the FQDN or Host name of the server. So I went back to check the CN of the Certificate of the ESXi host and I found what you see below.  This is where things get crazy….

So according to the image above, the SAN or Subject Alternate Name (AKA a list of CN’s, usually up to 5 on one Certificate) is an IP Address!!! How the heck is it an IP address? 
So what I tried next was typing in https://172.26.96.44 in my web browser and I was immediately presented with the image below. 


So wait, it worked like it should using the IP address instead of the name. How did that certificate get issues at all.

WELL….. It would appear that one of my co-workers added this host to vCenter with the IP address instead of the name.

Needless to say I am very disappointed in my Co-Worker for not following our naming convention.  But if I had to guess it looks like VMCA (VMWare Certificate Authority) which is included in the PSC (Platform Services Controller) and issues Certificate to hosts when they are added to vCenter must have issues the certificate to the IP address because he added it using the IP. Having dealt with several different Certificate Authorities in my time, this is crazy to see. 
Anyway this is just a heads up just encase you run into something like this in your travels. 

RVTools – A VMware Admin’s best friend

Today I would like to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use both internally and with my clients.

RVTools – https://www.robware.net/rvtools/

RVTools is a free utility that you can use to discover what is going on with your VMware Environment. All you have to do it install the client on your machine and in a few minutes you are able to log into your vSphere Environment (using your normal vSphere Credentials) and it will give you a read out of your entire environment.

From the login Screen the look and feel is very reminiscent of the old C# vSphere Client used back in 5.x and 6.0 days.

Once you log in you are presented with the vInfo tab which is a summary of everything going on with the vSphere/ESXi host you Connected to.

Along the top you will see a series to tabs that will drill down into the various components of your environment such as the ones seen below

I am only going to cover a few of these features, but I encourage you to try it out for your self.

 vCD will show you what Virtual Machine has a CD Drive installed on it, if it is connected, and what .ISO is currently connected to it. So ,.for instance, if you have a Virtual Machine that will not vMotion, you could use this tool to see if it is attached to a .ISO that is on Local Storage.

vSnapshot will show you all the Virtual Machines that have snapshots associated with it. It will report back to you the name of the Virtual Machine, the name of the Snapshot, the Date/Time it was taken, and the File Name of the snapshot.

And Lastly we will touch on the vHealth tab. This tab will give you advice on things that you may not realize is going on in your environment such as inconsistent naming, Host logs not being stored on persistent storage, VMware tools being out of date, and Zombies (Files that exist on Datastores, but are not in inventory).

On a final note that I forgot to mention, If you go up into the file menu you are able to export everything you see in the tool to a .CSV which can become very handy for documenting your environment. 
I hope you find this post useful and if you do download this product, please consider donating to it’s creator. Without tools like this it would make all of our jobs much harder. 

How to add Target Servers to vMA

I have had this one post sitting around for a while and I figured I should get it written before it gets lost.

Earlier I was working on getting vMA stood up in my lab environment and I figured that I should do a post about how to configure vMA to connect to a target. Adding a Target Server in vMA is a faster way for you to be able to issue commands. Rather than having to specify which server you want to run commands against (especially if you are running several commands on the same box) you should set the server as a target. In this instance I will run through the steps of setting a target for an AD Authenticated host or vCenter. 

From the vMA console you will type the following command out:

vifp addserver <vcenter server name.domain.local> –authpolicy adauth –username <AD DOMAINUserName>

and press Enter and you will be prompted for the Password of the AD account that you referenced.

To verify that the server is connected you can use the following command:
vifp listservers –long

This will tell you the server name as well as the method of authentication. Now anytime you want to run a command against that host you will be able to do so without having to re-authenticate every time.

To set your Target server you can use the following command prior to running your actual command or script.

vifptarget -s <servername>

VMWare Virtual Machine will not Start in vCenter

So I was asked by a client to do up “hardware upgrades” on one of their virtual machines. This VM is not production and is not running anything at the moment, but will soon become an SQL Server running an application. So I went and powered off the VM, logged into the C# vSphere client (they are running vSphere 6.0), and doubled the memory as requested by the client.

After making the change I went to power on the VM and I get presented with this pop up error message from VMWare

The message itself seems pretty generic but I have actually seen this one before. This error has to do with  an issue with the management agents on  your ESXi host.

I followed the instructions found on this KB article but it did not resolve my issue. I also found this KB article which might yield better results but as this whole environment is production, I will need to wait to test that.

WORK AROUND:

In order to get this VM powered back online, I needed to log directly into the virtual host and power on the machine.

The VM powered on with no issues.

I hope you find this helpful and I will update this when I have a solution.