This new primary workstation is close to being ready for production.
One item at issue is the amount of traffic on the 100Mbps front end network. When performing installs, doing testing, and maintenance on vSphere components and VM's, this front end network becomes very congested.
The plan is to move all vSphere management, Active Directory, and storage traffic to the back door gig-e and run VMware Workstation on the new Win7 workstation for all management access to vSphere. This will ensure that only internet bound VMware traffic will travel over the slower network.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Issues with the vCenter Server
Attempting to log into vCenter, the cluster is unable to be found and an error is presented stating that VUM (VMware Update Manager) cannot be contacted.
Initial troubleshooting plan is to log out of vCenter and directly into northvale, log directly into alpine (win2k8 box housing vCenter) and check the logs to make sure these are no obvious errors. The only error is a Winlogon application error for GPClient.
More digging. Shutting down vCenter VUM services on alpine and moving to red-bank to ensure SQL Server is happy.
First step is to push all new Windows Updates to red-bank, and rebooting. The errors persist.
red-bank event logs were showing logon errors for a system request along with a SQL scheduled job failing for a database. It was not long before we determined that this is a task for a database that is no longer present.
After removing the task from SQL Management Studio, the errors are gone. We will give the SQL server 30 minutes or so to ensure the errors do not return before restarting vCenter and VUM services on alpine.
Initial troubleshooting plan is to log out of vCenter and directly into northvale, log directly into alpine (win2k8 box housing vCenter) and check the logs to make sure these are no obvious errors. The only error is a Winlogon application error for GPClient.
More digging. Shutting down vCenter VUM services on alpine and moving to red-bank to ensure SQL Server is happy.
First step is to push all new Windows Updates to red-bank, and rebooting. The errors persist.
red-bank event logs were showing logon errors for a system request along with a SQL scheduled job failing for a database. It was not long before we determined that this is a task for a database that is no longer present.
After removing the task from SQL Management Studio, the errors are gone. We will give the SQL server 30 minutes or so to ensure the errors do not return before restarting vCenter and VUM services on alpine.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Windows 7 x64
We are installing a few Windows 7 x64 VM to continue testing VMware View 4.5.
Due to some limitations on the previously decommissioned cresskill, only Windows 7 x32 will go on this puppy.
Due to some limitations on the previously decommissioned cresskill, only Windows 7 x32 will go on this puppy.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Maintenance Day
Today will see backups of vCenter, Installation of a (additional) 1TB drive in westwood, the decommissioning of cresskill (utility ESXi 4.1 host), and some data backups.
The additional 1TB of space will be used for additional VMFS space as well as for the testing of OpenFiler for iSCSI shared storage.
The additional 1TB of space will be used for additional VMFS space as well as for the testing of OpenFiler for iSCSI shared storage.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Uber backdoor Gig-E not up
Ran into a minor issue with Uber that has been here ever since Uber was moved from cresskill to northvale ESXi hosts. Decided to look into it.
The symptom was that northvale (or any of the ESXi hosts) never recognized shared storage on Uber and showed the Datastores as grayed out. This would also cause the VM's using the shared storage to be disconnected and inaccessible.
After some investigation this morning, it was found that the 2nd network card in Uber VM, that connects the iSCSI and NFS shared storage to the back door Gig-e would not come up without a forced sudo ifup eth7 command to bring it up.
We first attributed this to a race condition of the northvale host coming up completely and doing it's scan for storage before the launch of Uber. This may still be the case for iSCSI.....
Anyway, for those following along, you will remember that all VM's were moved from the utility host (cresskill) to northvale since we needed to move to Win2k8 x64 for vCenter Server and cresskill does not support x64 VM's.
Uber was the last to be moved. When a Ubuntu VM is moved, the NIC cards become different eth numbers. Some fun was had (and documented) getting the correct eth numbers set on Uber. The file "/etc/network/interfaces" on Uber had to be modified to update the eth numbers after the move. Of course, there was a typo in the update for eth7, causing it to fail to load at boot.
Once corrected, Uber's back door Gig-e was loading properly. After a reboot, northvale now recognizes the NFS and iSCSI shares from Uber once Uber is up.
The symptom was that northvale (or any of the ESXi hosts) never recognized shared storage on Uber and showed the Datastores as grayed out. This would also cause the VM's using the shared storage to be disconnected and inaccessible.
After some investigation this morning, it was found that the 2nd network card in Uber VM, that connects the iSCSI and NFS shared storage to the back door Gig-e would not come up without a forced sudo ifup eth7 command to bring it up.
We first attributed this to a race condition of the northvale host coming up completely and doing it's scan for storage before the launch of Uber. This may still be the case for iSCSI.....
Anyway, for those following along, you will remember that all VM's were moved from the utility host (cresskill) to northvale since we needed to move to Win2k8 x64 for vCenter Server and cresskill does not support x64 VM's.
Uber was the last to be moved. When a Ubuntu VM is moved, the NIC cards become different eth numbers. Some fun was had (and documented) getting the correct eth numbers set on Uber. The file "/etc/network/interfaces" on Uber had to be modified to update the eth numbers after the move. Of course, there was a typo in the update for eth7, causing it to fail to load at boot.
Once corrected, Uber's back door Gig-e was loading properly. After a reboot, northvale now recognizes the NFS and iSCSI shares from Uber once Uber is up.
Monday, September 27, 2010
PCoIP working properly
Now that the agent issues are resolved, some preliminary testing shows that the PCoIP issues experienced with View 4.0+ are resolved. Obviously, more testing is needed to make sure other issues have not popped up.
View vDesktop not recognized
After some testing of the failed vDesktop, we were unable to find anything wrong with the installation of the agent.
Finally, the primary connection server was bounced and the vDesktop agent was recognized. This is not a good story, saying that when a new vdesktop is provisioned, the only way to add it to a pools is to restart the primary connection server. More testing is needed to validate this.
Finally, the primary connection server was bounced and the vDesktop agent was recognized. This is not a good story, saying that when a new vdesktop is provisioned, the only way to add it to a pools is to restart the primary connection server. More testing is needed to validate this.
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