Tag: troubleshooting

Cloud Management, vCenter Server, VCF Operations

Re-registering & Upgrading the Aria Operations vSphere Remote plugin

sargonkhizeran

vSphere plugins have always been a touchy subject with engineers, as many plugins in the past might’ve impacted the performance of the vSphere UI. Local plugins are deprecated in vSphere 8.x and future releases at this time. You can read more about that in the VMware By Broadcom article; vSphere Client Local plugins are deprecated.

Recently it caught my eye that vSphere was not capturing the correct version of Aria Operations, the functionality of the plugin still works. I’ve upgraded my version of Aria Operations to 8.18.1, however the plugin shows an older version

From the vSphere Client >> Go to the stack menu >> VMware Aria Operations, from the drop-down menu in that interface for the instance, you should see a version number. In our case, we’re at 8.16.0.0

I’ve found no clear way of upgrading the client, when you go back to vSphere Client >> stack menu >> Administration >> Solutions — Plugins, you should see the ‘VMware Aria Operations’

We have options where we can click on the plug-in, select to Remove it and then re-deploy it using Aria Operations console.

An additional option is simply re-registering the plugin using Aria Operations. From Aria Operations Console go to Administration >> Integrations >> click on one of the vCenters

Scroll to the bottom of the vCenter integration settings and click ‘Manage Registrations’

You can select the box to use ‘Use collection credentials’ and click Register

You should receive the following message

vCenter will display the following banner

When you go back into Aria Operations within vSphere, you should see the new version

vSAN

vSAN performance service alarm ‘Stats DB object conflicts’ Fix

sargonkhizeran

In the homelab I came across an error message at the vSAN cluster object level, I wanted to dig further into it and after some help from Google, I did locate the following VMware By Broadcom KB – Article ID: 317847 vSAN Health Service – Performance Service – Stats DB object conflicts check

Always ensure to take proper precautions and contact Broadcom support if needed.

This did come down to a slam-dunk fix, the following will go through how I dug a little bit for it and eventually resolved.

This is the following error that appears at the cluster

From the cluster object in vSphere selected click ‘Monitor’ >> Skyline Health >> it appeared under the ‘Unhealthy’ category and click ‘TROUBLESHOOT’

The next screen will display the renamed folder that exists and it’s important to note “you cannot merge the files” however you can always backup the folder or rename it.

Within vSphere I went to locate the vSANdatastore and found the directory that was renamed and causing the conflict, I browsed the directory and there are some files older than the root folder above you.

In order to delete you have to click on the root of the datastore on the left-pane and then select folder >> then ‘Delete’
The following is a screen grab from deleting the vsan trace-1 folder

After a few minutes, the error cleared up.

Home Lab, NSX

Fix NSX 4.1.0 ‘Install Skipped’ During Host Preparation in a vLCM Cluster

sargonkhizeran

With VMware vSphere 8.x out and vSphere Lifecycle manager making the shift from individual baselines to cluster images, there are some additional encounters you may have when integrating with our solutions from VMware or even other vendors.

I encountered an error recently in NSX 4.1.0.2.0.21761693 during host preperation I received the following error.

When clicking on the error for details and steps, you see

Go to the VMware Cluster >> Updates >> Image

You can perform an Image Compliance check manually or you will find there is my problematic host not showing compliant because it is missing NSX vibs

Click ‘Remediate All’, review your remediation settings and click ‘Remediate’. Once Remediation completes, I decided to reboot the host and once it came back up, inside NSX Manager I located the node and to the far right clicked on ‘View Details’ and click ‘Resolve’ to the prompt.

Monitor the installation status

This completed successfully, as the host now shows as prepared and ‘Success’

Home Lab, Skyline, Uncategorized

Registering Skyline Health Diagnostics vCenter Plugin

sargonkhizeran

The number of tools available for proactive insight into your vSphere environment continue to expand. When someone nowadays says ‘Skyline’, well which component? I will begin by reviewing some of the various Skyline options and then will follow with the actual plugin-in installation.

Skyline Collector Appliance – On premise Photon appliances which runs in a customers private data center and responsible for the collection of data and logs to send to VMware Cloud. Click here to learn more

Skyline Advisor – VMware’s cloud offering in VMware’s Cloud. This is what ties into the Skyline Collector appliances referenced above.

Skyline Health Diagnostics – This is an appliance ran in your private datacenter to perform healthy checks against your vCenter appliance and vSphere environment. This is a handy tool to check for plugins, interoperability checks and upgrade preparedness.

Skyline Health Diagnostics vCenter Plugin – Appliance deployed which integrates with vSphere. This is a new feature starting in vCenter 8.0 U1 & later. Review the following VMware documentation. Registration of Plug-in from vSphere Client 8.0 U1 and onwards.

Integrated vSphere Skyline – Inside vSphere at vCenter >> Monitor >> Skyline Health or vSAN Cluster >> Monitor >> vSAN >> Skyline Health there are various checks within.

In the home lab I already have Skyline Health Diagnostics deployed, when logging into it, there is a section for a vCenter Plugin Registration.

Click ‘+’ and authenticate with SSO credentials to the vCenter.

Once you click ‘Submit’, go into vSphere and you will find the solution successfully installed, you should also see the following banner.

After you Refresh the browser, you should now have an interactive solution within vSphere and you can kick off health checks and diagnostics straight out of vSphere.

Home Lab, Skyline

Skyline Health Diagnostics 4.0 – Running Analysis on a vCenter Appliance

sargonkhizeran

VMware’s Skyline product teams continue to make improvements to Skyline product portfolio, best of all, the product is Free!

You can review the Release Notes for 4.0 here and if your looking for documentation on deploying and configuring the appliance, visit VMware Docs: About VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics

You may be asking, “I already have Skyline, I deployed the collector and I access Skyline Advisor” You are correct, I like to consider SHD as another toolkit that you can run on-premises and most helpful for those “air gapped” sites and where security is strict about what goes in and out. The SHD appliance is key and helping you get a health check, troubleshooting and pro-active insights.

I’m starting this blog after a clean install of SHD. At the homepage, from Analyze >> ‘+ New Analysis’

Although there are various options such as Health Checks, Upgrade Checks & Log Analysis.

For now we will perform a ‘Direct Connect Diagnostics to the vCenter appliance

Input appliance authentication information for the vCenter and click ‘Next’

For me, I left this default

At the very end click ‘Run’ and it should then appear as a Task on generating and pulling down log bundles from the vCenter. Once completed you will find the results looking like this, next click ‘Refresh’ and the ‘Show Report’ option should become available.

The report is now available to display results, being this is vCenter was just recently deployed there is not much being called here. As you can see there is an ‘Error’ with hosts disconnecting..scroll down

You can see that the appliance parsed through the logs already and pointed out some specifics

Now report does open in another browser window, if you go back to the SHD page, you can go to Show Reports and you have an option to open it again or even download it to share out to peers or support for review.