-
vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 limitations
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 has been gaining huge attraction lately, especially with many of the major limitations affecting the vCenter Appliance in previous verions have been lifted. This is including the limitation where it was only supposed to support 5 hosts and 50 VMs when using the embedded database. In fact the all shiny…
-
Deploying VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance
Lately for most of my labs and even for many customers I have been deploying the VMware vCenter 5.5 Appliance, as it is much quicker to install and give less chances for error. Further it saves customers a Windows license and not to mention being much easier to maintain, patch and upgrade. Further, with many…
-
Assign Domain Users vCenter Single Sign Administrator Privileges
If you have upgraded your Virtual Infrastructure to vSphere 5.1 or 5.5, you are already aware of the addition of Single Sign On. When installing Single Sign On, a default user Admin@System-Domain is created for you with a password that you have assigned to it during the vCenter Single Sign On installation. The Admin@System-Domain user…
-
vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 5) – vSphere Web Client Step by Step
Alright now that you got your vCenter 5.1 up and running & ready to start managing it. I know vSphere Client will be the first thing to come to your mind in here, but its worth mentioning that all the new features in vSphere 5.1 is only included in the vSphere Web Client not the…
-
vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 4) – vCenter Service Step by Step
As covered in my previous three posts, vCenter Service is the third component to be installed. As a reminder the order of installing vCenter 5.1 components is as follow: Single Sign On ==> vCenter inventory Service ==> vCenter Service. In this post, I will demonstrate in a step by step fashion how to install the…
-
vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 3) – vCenter 5.1 Inventory Service Installation
In my previous two posts, I have demonstrated how to prepare the databases required for the different vCenter 5.1 components(SSO, vCenter Service, & Update Manager) as well how to install vCenter Single Sign On. If you have not went through these earlier two posts, then you will need to follow them before proceeding with this…
-
vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 2) – Single Sign On Installation
During the installation of vCenter 5.1, you will need to install 3 components in the following order: Single Sign On => Inventory Service => vCenter Service. In a new installation I would normally install the Web Service after installing the vCenter Service, though during an upgrade I would install the web service right after the…
-
vCenter 5.1 Installation(Part 1) – Preparing the Databases
After the introduction of vSphere 5.1, there seemed to be a lot of fuzz about the installation of the new vCenter components. I believe most of the hype was caused about how the initial vSphere 5.1 release behaved differently against expired certificates from how vSphere version prior to 5.1 behaved. In earlier releases, vCenter has…
-
VMware vSphere 5.1 new vCenter architecture & Single Sign on
With the introduction of vSphere 5.1, VMware has introduced a new vCenter architecture & SSO ( Single Sign On). This is seems to be the first thing being noticed by customers when deploying vSphere 5.1 as its not exactly what they used to. Prior to vSphere 5.1 all vCenter services were installed at once on…
-
How to Export your VM Inventory list from vCenter
Time will come when you need a quick inventory of the VMs in your vCenter with their IPs, Computer name, power on status & all these simple things. You might just need that sheet b/c you need to keep an inventory of what you have or just the for the simple cause that the management…
-
VMware vCenter Server Appliance Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation.
While playing with VMware vCenter Server Appliance in my home lab, I have been surprised with the following error: Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation. This error has came up while trying to change authentication to active directory authentication and kinda seen the same error when trying to change the database to…
-
vCenter to Manager Hyper-V is a reality
Working for VMware has always been filled with surprises since the first day I joined. I really believe we have one of the greatest engineering departments out there. I mean when your engineering team create a plugin that allow vCenter to Manager Hyper-V in their own spare time, it just get you really proud to…
-
ESX host disconnect from VirtualCenter or vCenter Server
VMware ESX host can disconnect from VirtualCenter & have a problem connecting to it again for many reasons. Below I will cover few ways to diagnose the problem, few common resolutions to this issue. In these cases usually the first thing you want to do is to log on through ssh, vcli, or directly on…
-
Running vCenter in a virtual machine within a distributed switch is not supported
Update: This post has been updated on Feb 23, 2011 as I have been kicked right and left by my colleagues at VMware, as this post used to be titled “Running vCenter in a virtual machine within a distributed switch is not supported”, where its actually supported. Unfortunately, this info was communicated to me by…
-
Configured DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver error while upgrading to vCenter 4.0
One of the errors my customers repeatly complain about while upgrading to vCenter Server 4 or even when trying to install it from scratch is the following error: “The DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver. Please re-configure your DSN to use one of the supported drivers.” If you face this problem the first…