vExpert – Page 3 – vthistle.com

Nutanix – Patch ESXi

January 30, 2017 By Dave

Nutanix does it again with Prism and their “One-Click” upgrades. With Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.0, you can now patch your hypervisor with Prism via “Upgrade Software”.

Pre-Reqs:

Ensure HA is enabled on your cluster
Ensure DRS is enabled

To patch your hypervisor, follow these steps.

Before you patch/upgrade your hypervisor, I would recommend running the “Nutanix Cluster Checks” (NCC) to check the health of your cluster. Select “Health” from the Prism menu
Select Actions| Run Checks – This usually takes less than 5 minutes and you will receive an email report with the results
To upgrade the software, click “Settings” and then “Upgrade Software”
Click on the “Hypervisor” tab and click on “Upload Hypervisor binary”
1. For ESXi, you will need to go to the my.vmware.com site and download the ESXi offline bundle – Nutanix recommends only updating your hypervisor to when it is qualified – If it is qualified, Nutanix will provide a JSON file. This can be found on the Nutanix Support Portal.
Once you have uploaded the files Click Upgrade | You will be prompted for vCenter credentials to proceed.
Click upgrade

Nutanix – Registering vCenter with Prism

January 27, 2017 By Dave

With the release of AOS 5.0, you can now perform basic core VM operations with Nutanix Prism. To do this, you will need to register your Nutanix cluster with vCenter. You can perform the following operations from Prism after vCenter is registered.

Manage VM Guest Tools – This includes VMware tool and Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT)
Create, Clone, and delete Virtual Machines
Update Virtual Machine configuration – CPUs, Memory, Disks and NICs
Power Operations (example below of VM that is powered on – Give you “Power Off” options.
Open and Launch Console – HTML5

vCenter Registration

1. Once you are logged into Prism, go to “Settings” and choose “vCenter Registration

2. Populate the username and password fields and click “Register”

This will take about 10-15 seconds to register and you will be notified via the menu bar when its successful.

After vCenter registration is successful. You can manage your virtual machines.

Click on the virtual machine you would like to manage – you will see the following options below the VM tableThese features are great if you want to do all of your basic administration in Prism. One quick thing to be aware of.

When you take an action in Prism on a VM, you will see a “Nutanix” user made a change in the task list in vCenter. You won’t actually see who made the change. You will have to look at the events in Prism to see when and who made the change.

Nutanix – Bully VM – Troubleshooting with Prism

January 6, 2017 By Dave

I recently received a call from one of my favorite customers who was experiencing some slowness in their environment. They are running a Nutanix block that is about a year and a half old, utilizing hybrid storage. In larger environments, I would immediately open the customers vRealize Operations Manager and take a peek to see who is the causing the issue. In this case, the customer doesn’t use vRealize so that wasn’t available. I then immediately turned my attention to Nutanix Prism. For those not familiar with Prism, it is a single pane of glass to manage and monitor your Nutanix environment. You can retrieve a ton of information on each virtual machine running in the environment.

So what did I do to find the issue?

When I logged into Prism, I immediately noticed that cluster IOPS more than tripled single the initial call into the help desk. (example of graph below)
I then selected VM from the menu. This will bring you to the “VM Overview” page. This page gives you the following information by default. Top users VMs by IOPS, VM Alerts, Latency, Memory usage and CPU usage.
I could immediately see that the customers backup server was the suspect in this case as it was generating a ton of disk activity. This is the information I needed to log into the VM to find out what was going on.

Customer = happy!

To show you the kind of information and graphs you get when you click on the “table” section of VM, this is a snapshot of your virtual machines.

If you want to drill down into a specific VM – click on that VM and you will see the following information.

Hope this helps you when troubleshooting “bully” VMs in the future.

vSphere 6.5 – Enhanced Logging

November 23, 2016 By Dave

This could be one of the best features that VMware added to the vSphere 6.5 release, Enhanced Logging. As a IT consultant, we often get calls such as, “X isn’t functioning, it was working 10 minutes ago”. You will immediately ask the four “W’s” – What, When, How – then someone will always ask “Who” once the issue is resolved. With enhanced logging, this is now all possible. Enhanced Logging might not be the sexiest thing, but its going to save you a lot of time troubleshooting.

In prior versions of vSphere, when you made a change to the VM, all you would see is “Reconfigured VM” and who made the change. How many times have you asked yourself, “What was the &*#* change”?

Lets look at how you can utilize Log Insight to view the “enhanced logs”.

After you make a change to a VM, you will the answers to our questions. – you can hover your mouse over “vc_username” to see made the change.

In this example, you can see the at 21:35, that the VM “ViewCS-01” had a change that disabled the NIC at Startup. You can also see what the value was prior to the change. As you can see below, the original state was “True” and was changed to false.

At this point, you can edit the configuration to the VM, and revert the change that was made – and the customer is happy.

Here is the awesome thing. If you didn’t know, if you are entitled to vCenter – you are also entitled to a 25 OSI license of Log Insight for your environment for FREE. Hopefully you will never need to use Log Insight, but it will ensure you have the logs necessary if you need to engage VMware GSS or see who made a change in one easy place.

vCenter – Upgrade from VCSA 6 to VCSA 6.5 – CLI

November 16, 2016 By Dave

I recently have been on a mission to eradicate all vCenter Servers running on Windows and replacing them with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I’ve been very successful with this with the customers I have worked with, with very little push back. The only down fall with the 6.0 release was that Update Manager (VUM) still had to be on a Windows Sever. I got around this in most cases by creating a vCenter “Helper” Server. I would install VUM, PowerCLI and RVTools – All the essentials!

So, after doing a TON of these migrations by using the GUI, I thought I would give the CLI a shot.

Since vCenter 6.5 was introduced today (11/15/2016), I thought I would try to go through the upgrade process via the CLI. I will be going from VCSA 6.0U2 to VCSA 6.5. This upgrade will migrate your database, as well as migrate you from a Linux appliance onto VMware Photon OS.

Why do it from the CLI? Because, its the cool thing to do!

Note: Make sure all of your plugins are compatible with vCenter 6.5!

Note: Make sure SSH is enabled on your source vCenter prior to upgrade/migration.

First you will need to pick the template that you want to start from. VMware does a great job of telling you what you need to do to get this to work from these templates. To find it, mount the ISO and go to “X:\vcsa-cli-installer\templates\upgrade\vcsa6.0” – Pick the template that works for your scenario and save it locally so that you can make changes that are necessary. I will be using the “embedded_vCSA_on_ESXi.json” template.

I’m not going to spell out what each option is, because VMware has done a great job of spelling that out in the Documentation Center for vSphere/vCenter 6.5.

Second, lets go through the upgrade. If you have VUM deployed on a windows server, you will want to run the upgrade script from the VUM server.

On the VUM server, run the Migration Assistant – Can be found at “X:\migration-assistant\VMware-Migration-Assistant.exe”. When the Migration Assistant starts, it will ask you for the Service Account password for the account you used to connect VUM to vCenter. *Note: Don’t close this window until the migration is completeNow we are going to execute the upgrade via the CLI –

This will kick off 8 Steps:
1. Verification of the template you specified above
2. Verify Configuration
3. Execute OVF Tool Command (Deploy the new appliance)
4. Install Services (on the new appliance)
5. Export Data (from old vCenter)
6. Configure vCenter Services
7. Import Data (to new appliance)
8. Result and Log Files

SUCCESS!!

The HTML5 version still has limited functionality – but damn its fast! In my opinion even the FLASH site is quick. Yes, you get to choose!