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vCenter – Solution Extension Removal

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vCenter solutions extensions, everyone has them, everyone loves them. This post is going to focus on, what happens when you uninstall and extension, but the tags are still on the VM’s.

I recently ran into a situation with a customer that they were doing a VM migration with Zerto, they finished the migration and then uninstalled. Typically, no problem – however it appeared that after they uninstalled the product, vCenter was still showing that the “com.zerto.plugin” was still managing the VM.

zerto

This is actually very easy to fix. VMware KB2032366 references a similar issue with VMware Site Recovery Manager. Will will go through the steps listed in this KB, but removing the “com.zerto.plugin” extension.

  1. Download the “Managedby.ps1” script from the link above and extract the .ps1 file to a directory that you typically run scrips from.
  2. Open PowerCLI and connect to your vCenter “connect-viserver <vCenter hostname>
  3. I run the “.\managedby.ps1 -cmd scanVMs” to see what solutions are being used. This also ensures you are grabbing the exact name of the solution extension. This also lists all VM’s that are using this extension.
  4. Run – $hmsVms = .\ManagedBy.ps1 -Cmd getVms -extKey “com.zerto.plugin”
  5. To view the machines with the plugin, run $hmsVms
  6. Run – .\ManagedBy.ps1 -Cmd Clear -VMs $hmsVms
  7. Now, if you right click on the VM, you should not the the “confirm operation” dialog box you see above.

Complete! Wahoo!!

Zerto: Performing Host Maintenance without affecting Replication

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A question was recently posed to me from a customer. “What happens when I have to perform host maintenance and need to shut down the VRA on the host”. The answer was pretty simple, if you shut down a VRA with VM’s assigned, you stop replication of VM’s until that VRA is powered back on.

This is an example of a VM in a normal state – VPG Powered onPowered_OnThis is an example of a VM in a error state – VPG powered offPowered_Off

Most customers may not care if they lose replication protection for 10 – 30 minutes for a host update. Some customer won’t want to risk that for their business critical applications.

For those customer who don’t want to take that risk, there is a method to re-assign a VM to another VRA during this task.

Migrating a VM between VRA’s will result in a small bitmap resync. On average this takes less than 20 seconds

Powershell

Zerto offers PowerShell Cmdlets that makes this easy for you. These PowerShell Cmdlets can be downloaded from the Zerto Support Site.

There are two commands we will use to migrate VM’s to another VRA. They are “Get-VMsReplicatingToHost” and “Set-ChangeRecoveryHost”

  1. Add Zerto PowerShell Cmdlets to current PowerShell session. (Once downloaded and installed)
    1. Add-PSSnapin Zerto.PS.Commands
  2. Run “Get-VMsReplicatingToHost -HostIP <host you need to perform maintenance on> -ZVMIP <ZVM IP Address> -ZVMPort <9080 is default> -Username Administrator -password <Type Password>
    1. This will show all VM’s assigned to this hostget-vms
    2. If you want to put those into a PowerShell Variable: Get-Var
  3. If you want to move each VM one by one run the following command for each VM in the list:
    1. Set-ChangeRecoveryHost -VMname <Name> -CurrentTargetHost <Host currently on> -NewTargetHost <New Host> -ZVMIP X.X.X.X -ZVMport 9080 -username Administrator -password <Password>
  4. If you want to move all VM’s to another Host at one time, use a variable as listed in Step 2,2
    1. foreach ($thisVM in $VRAVms) {Set-ChangeRecoveryHost -vm $thisvm -NewTargetHost <new host> -CurrentTargetHost <old host> -ZVMIP <ZVMIP> -ZVMPort 9080 -Username administrator -Password <password>}buk

To move those VMs back to the original host protecting the VM’s you would change the “NewTargetHost” to the host you just performed maintenance on  – then change the “CurrentTargetHost” to the host you originally moved the VM protection to.

GUI

  1. Log into your Zerto Virtual Manager Web page
  2. Click on the “Setup” Tab
  3. Place a checkmark in the VRA you want to migrate the VM Recovery from.
  4. Click on the “More” link in the top right hand corner and select “Change VM Recovery VRA” and click Save – *Note: you will want to take note of where you placed each VM so that you can move them back after your maintenance. GUI-Change

As noted above, it is a good practice to move those VM’s back to their original host to ensure everything is balanced out.

-Dave