I have a whole renowned respect for content creators, influencers, and video graphic artists. Content creation is no joke, even the tool vROps itself requires individuals in organizations to be created with designing dashboards.
I’ve always wanted to do this, it’s a means of getting better and giving back to the community. There is still much to improve on, I mean this is just a series of clips of me performing an upgrade task.
In this video, I run through upgrading vROps using VMware’s LifeCycle Manager appliance.
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.
If you have been working with any kind of virtualization software, you will generally encounter a set of drivers that provide software for hardware to interact with a virtual machine. These are known as ‘drivers’ and allow interaction, performance optimization and many other features. With VMware, VMTools (Windows or Linux) can be delivered in many different ways.
One way in vSphere 7.x to find the available Tools Package on a ESXi; highlight a host, click ‘Updates’, under Baselines click ‘Show Installed’
Once the installed host extensions appear, you can filter on the ‘Name’ column and search for ‘tool’
If you want to cross-reference the Tool build with version number, the following VMware URL is a great resource for that.
There are many other ways, please feel free to share. I personally would like to script the process to poll all hosts in an environment and report back what tools image is installed on a host.
We are 38 days away from the very first VMware Explore. Four years ago I had the opportunity to attend my first VMworld. My employer at that time allowed me to go as I was VCP certified and identified as a VMware SME for the enterprise. It was exciting being surrounded by so many like-minded individuals, I probably rubbed shoulders with so many future co-workers & customers I interact with today.
Attending VMworld was life changing for me personally and professionally. Attending sessions by Amanda Blevins would inspire me with how to navigate my career and what qualities to look for in mentors or leaders. I loved attending sessions that involved troubleshooting, it was relevant to my role and although sometimes it was redundant, the delivery was different every time. Some of the settings were intimate and it felt okay to ask questions without the fear of having a spotlight on you. Being able to speak to others and trade war stories was also beneficial.
The sessions were great, the parties allowed folks to break away from the serious stuff and show a different side. As someone I was with eluded to how I would feel “depressed” coming back to work because you see all this amazing technology and the possibilities of innovation and it may not be the vision of your enterprise right at that moment. It should encourage individuals to want to do better, motivate yourself and the people around your workplace.
For 2022, check out VMware Explore, VMware took a couple of years off going digital due to the pandemic but it is back in San Francisco again. Be sure to check out the sessions, the scheduler is live as well. Click on the image below to learn more!
Check out the VMworld 2018 playlist, as someone who keeps their ear to music, I was glad to capture this playlist.
The curated playlist I found on Spotify continues to bring back nostalgic memories of the event.
There are a lots of tools in the shed when it comes to overseeing the health of your VMware software-defined datacenter. One of those tools, Skyline, is a free SaaS offering on console.cloud.com when you have an active ELA or a Success 360 customer (Premier Support).
From VMware http://www.customerconnect.vmware.com you can go out to Downloads and obtain the VMware Skyline Collector 3.0. This will download an OVA file to deploy in your virtual environment.
I will be fast-forwarding through most assuming the audience is familiar with deploying Virtual Machines.
Some recommendations I would give is prior to deploying in any environment, come up with a hostname for the VM, reserve an IP address, create a DNS entry.
Choose to leave default name or create a custom vSphere object name (prefer making the name the same as your reserved hostname), everyone’s standard will be different. Click Next.
The next step, select cluster/compute resource the virtual machine will be deployed on.
Review the details of the appliance, the next screen will be EULA (End User License Agreement). Click Next
Select the storage for the appliance, click Next.
Select the desired network, click Next.
For the next step, create a custom ‘root’ account password, assign the networking, domain and DNS related entries to complete customizing the template. Once that is completed, click Finish
In the event you lose or forget the root password for the appliance or the ‘admin’ account, visit the following KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52652
Initially I got thrown the following error, all i did was refresh my session and run through the installation setup a little quicker, there were some delays while creating the post.
Once the VM is created, you will need to power it on. Once it’s full booted up and network services are on. You should be able to reach the appliance by its hostname.
The default password for the ‘admin’ account is ‘default’. Once you log in, you will be prompted to change the password immediately and then to log back in.
Once you log in with the newly changed password a setup wizard will begin the registration of the collector to Skyline Advisor and option to configure endpoints. There are some additional prerequisites that are recommended to perform prior to complete next steps, such as creating the suggested Read-Only accounts to be used for configuring the endpoints.
From the beginning 1. Test & Save the hostname configuration and configuring a proxy (optional), click ‘Continue’.
Next is the CEIP, click ‘Continue’,
As we are going through the wizard, step 3. Collector Registration, will require signing onto the console.cloud.vmware.com and from the Cloud Console home select ‘Skyline Advisor’
In our example, there is an existing Skyline under a cloud org and we will be adding an additional collector. Click ‘Add Collector’
You will now be presented with an option to Copy/Paste a generated token
Go back to the Collector configuration wizard, paste the token and click ‘Register Collector’
Create a ‘Friendly Name’ the collector will be identified as in Skyline Advisor, it’s recommended if you are deploying collectors are several sites to create names easily identified.
Enable Auto-Upgrade is off by default, I’m turning it on, this is a service that will not disrupt anything in the environment.
Starting with adding credentials, the following example is an Active Directory account that is configured with a Read Only role set in Global Permissions on the vCenter.
You may proceed with configuring additional products into Skyline. Fast forward through all the solutions, once completed, the Endpoints may come up red for a moment or show green immediatly.
If you go back to the VMware Cloud Console, the final step would be to click ‘Complete Setup’ This should then take you back to the Skyline Advisor and the number of collectors should increase by one.
I hope this document was helpful and there is plenty more of information and details pertaining to Skyline.
