Career and Virtual Musings
VMware vSphere’s lifecycle enhancements continue to get better with every release. The following video goes through upgrading from 8.0 Update 1 over to 8.0 Update 2.
Please note that the following feature used is only good for single self-managed vCenters, configurations using vCenter HA or Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) are not supported.
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’
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.
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.
Shipping logs off to a repository for the benefit of troubleshooting, root cause analysis, post mortem reporting and today with AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, particular findings and trendings in logs can be proactively shared to an operator.
For the following article will demonstrate integrating vSphere with Aria Operations for Logs and ensuring your hosts get updated to point to your instance. Keep in mind that my instance is deployed as a ‘Small’ which is primarily targeted for POC environments, in an enterprise you should have a minimum of 3 appliance nodes and should have a VIP assigned. I do have ESXi 8.0 installed and have configured vSAN ESA.
From the vSphere console the following advanced setting for a host will shows Syslog.global.logHost is configured with a blank entry. After we are done, this will be populated.
Access your Aria Operations for Logs instance via Virtual IP or single instance name, if you receive the following prompt, this is generally an indication your instance has never been configured.
Click ‘Configure vSphere Integration’
You will be taken to where you can integrate a vCenter instance, (Do not use a local SSO account, create a service account separately)
If we leave the checkbox highlighted in yellow, this is what will be pushed out to configure ESXi hosts send logs to Aria Logs.
When clicking ‘Advanced option’ it will display and allow you to select specific hosts and even a syslog protocol. Just note, you must click ‘Test Connection’ and Accept thumbprint from the vCenter before it can poll hosts.
For our write up, I will only select esxi01 with UDP. Click ‘Save’ and ESXi hosts will be configured in addition to any vCenter logs. Once completed your vSphere Integration will like this. You can click next vSphere for refresh, VC Collection status is healthy and if you click ‘View Details’ it will show hosts configured and not configured in vCenter.
When you go back to the host and check the Advanced Setting, you will now see it populated with Aria Logs instance
If you want to go back and makes changes to what ESXi hosts and collections, you can go back into the vSphere Integration and then have options, in our case, I will come back and configure my 2 other hosts.
By now you should have logs from hosts and vCenter shipped to Aria Operations for Logs.