Tag: troubleshooting

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.

Home Lab

VMware – Error when using ‘Erase Partition’ on (vSAN) Storage Device – Failed to update disk partitions

sargonkhizeran

I’ve been going through upgrades in the homelab and one of the changes has been to prepare for destructing an existing vSAN cluster and creating a new vSAN cluster. While going through vSAN ESA configuration, disks were not showing as available, I needed to go in and delete the existing partitions for the old vSAN cluster.

When in vSphere from a host and attempting to ‘Erase Partition’ from a storage device, we encounter the following error, below that is the error in Tasks.

SSH into the host and run the following command to verify disks are still part of a vSAN Disk Group

esxcli vsan storage list

In my case, I had all 3 disks appear, the following command removes the disks from the group. First you will need to obtain the VSAN Disk Group UUID

esxcli vsan storage remove -u <VSAN Disk Group UUID>

After running the command it will take you back to CLI prompt and you can confirm the disk group is empty by re-running the first command ‘esxcli vsan storage list’

Go back into the Storage Devices and retry the Erase Partition, I live dangerous so I did all 3 at once 🙂

It completed, validated in Tasks that partitions were updated succesfully.

Let the vSAN configurations continue.

Home Lab

NSX-T 3.2.1 – Error: Failed to fetch System details.

sargonkhizeran

Running VMware NSX-T 3.2.1 on a clean install, no previous upgrade. Home lab is not sitting around doing much other than whatever idle tasks might be going on with the appliance. I decided to log in and BAM! The system section was not loading

Error code: 513002

Under System>>Configuration the following error would appear

I was able to navigate to check the basic health of my managers, and checked ‘View Details’ for each one; everything was up, all green, and space utilization looked good.

From the VM console logged in as admin, I tried ‘restart services controller ‘and no success.

While troubleshooting and looking for KBs and forums on the web, when running ‘get managers’ from admin console, one of my managers was in Standby, but then there was some intermittent activity where all went into Standby for a brief moment.

Not just this happening but my Appliances GUI was also now switching between ‘Healthy’ & Degraded.

Next step was to reboot one appliance at a time, which did not seem to fix the issue.

After taking a break and happen to be doing something else in the home lab, I had to shut down and restart the vCenter, well I happen to check later on in the day and NSX was able to load with no problems.

I’m going to keep this up in the event the issue comes around, I plan on updating.