This post shows how to Upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation v2.2.x to 2.2.x.
NOTE: This is a pretty old version of VMware Cloud Foundation we have in our Test environment as we are preparing it for an upgrade before we do it on our production environment.
The current version of VMware Cloud foundation is 3.5 (As of 03/11/2019)
First, we will login into the SDDC Manager Web UI
SDDC Main Page
The above screen is the main page once you login into SDDC Manager
SDDC System Status Page
On the left hand side, you need to click on Life Cycle Manager to check for your upgrade options and to actually perform the upgrade of all the components in the SDDC.
SDDC Life Cycle Manager
Select the Upgrade available and you want to go to and click “UPDATE”
Select the Target (In this case its the DataCenter Work Domain) and click Next
Update Scheduler
Select the Date and Time you want the schedule to start and click Next
Update Scheduler final selection to continue
Select the option “SCHEDULE UPDATE” to schedule the update of all the components.
Update Progress
In the next window, you can see the update progress. You can expand the Update option to see the actual status of the update.
View Update Details
After clicking on View Update Details option, you expand on the next screen to see the hosts/objects you are upgrading using the SDDC Manager (In this case I was upgrading the esxi hosts)
Check the Status of the Objects
Final Screenshot shows that the upgrade is complete. It generally takes a few hours depending on how many nodes are present in the cluster.
Upgrade Complete
This concludes on how to Upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation. More posts to follow soon.
This post details the installation and configuration of the vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager 1.2 which was recently released by VMware to automatically provision vRA components as part of their Cloud initiative.
First, Download the Life Cycle Manager ova from the vRealize Suite 2017 components and deploy it using the vCenter web client
Select Enable Content Management option to enable content management.
Provide the Hostname, default gateway, network IP address, subnet mask, DNS servers and the domain names in this window and click Next to finalize the deployment of the appliance.Click Finish to finalize the settings and to deploy the Life Cycle Manager Appliance
Once the vm has been deployed and powered ON, you will have to go to a web browser to configure the appliance.
use the following credentials to login into the life cycle manager web UI
username: admin@localhost
password: vmware
The first thing you get after logging into the web UI is to update the root password
Click start to get started with the Life Cycle Manager
Once you click Next, it will say Done!
Now, we will create a New Environment in the lab
Click on Create Environment option to get started
Once you click on Create Environment option, you will be taken to a tab where it mentions that you will need to take care of a few things before you create the environment.
Let us take care of the Product Binaries first.
Click on Product Binaries option on the tab
I have used my VMware portal credentials to get the product binaries as I couldn’t get the local and NFS to work to get the product OVA’s.
Once you add the product binaries, let’s go and create a Certificate
Once these two pre-requisites are done, Let us move ahead …
On the main page, click on the Datacenters option on the left-hand side to create a Datacenter before we create the environment
Click on Add Data Center to provide a name for the Datacenter
Next, we add the vCenter server
Now, Let us go ahead and create an Environment
Accept the EULA Agreement by scrolling down, once you accept it, the NEXT button will appear
Provide all the required information. I have provided an existing SQL server and IAAS server, I have used 1 IAAS server for DEM Worker, Orchestrator, Proxy serviceClick on RUN PRE CHECK option to perform the pre-checks before it deploys the environment
In this pre-check, you could get a validation failure which will need to be rectified before you run the pre-check again. its like shown in the picture below
Once you rectify the issue, run the pre-check again
Once the pre-check comes back clean, click on Next to move ahead
Click Submit and the life cycle manager will do the rest.
to check the progress, you can click on Requests icon on the left side of the page and clicking on in progress as the pic below
This process will take a long time … go, get some tea/coffee and it will still be deploying the environment …
This shows how to Install and configure vRealize Life Cycle Management and to create a vRA 7.4 environment.
Hello Peeps, Recently I was configuring vRA 7.4 at a customer’s place and came across an issue where the vRA appliance tries to talk to the external SQL server and fails with an error.
Here is the error:
After digging into the logs on both vRA and on the SQL server, here is what was determined as the issue
The SQL server has TLS 1.0 disabled and the vRA appliance was trying to communicate to the SQL server using TLS 1.0 instead of TLS 1.2 as the client has disabled TLS 1.0 on all its windows servers.
Troubleshooting steps tried:
Tried enabling TLS 1.0 and its Ciphers on the SQL server with no success
Checked with the Firewall team and they said that there is no firewall between the vRA appliance and the SQL server
Tried this in a different environment and it worked fine, just doesn’t work in this particular environment.
Conclusion:
Looks like the issue was with the SQL server and its Service Pack. SQL Server 2012 needs SP3 or higher to accept TLS 1.2 protocol. As soon as I upgraded my SQL server to SQL 2012 SP4, the communication worked fine and the vRA appliance was able to talk to the SQL server!!
Hope this helps in case you come across this issue.
I have been thinking of writing this post for a while and here you go…
In vSphere 6.0 U2, you can have an External PSC or an Embedded PSC. The below process is to add an External PSC to the Active Directory Domain.
Login into the vCenter server, go to Administration tab, go to System Configuration –> Nodes and click on the PSC node you want to add to the domain.
Click on the node, go to Manage tab, click on Active Directory and click on Join buttonProvide the Domain name and its credentials (It could be a read-only service account in the domain) to join the PSC to the domain
once credentials are provided, click OK to proceed.
Note that the only way for you to know that this process is complete is that you get no error and there is no entry in the recent tasks tab in the vSphere web client. If that is the case then the domain add is successful.
Now, you will need to reboot the PSC
Once the PSC is rebooted, you can go back into the vCenter server and to the node and you can see that this node (PSC) is now added to the domain.
In a similar way, you can add the remaining PSC’s to the domain and finally, you will need to add the Identity source to the vCenter server itself under single sign-on
In this post, I will be installing and configuring vSphere Data Protection 6.1.8 in vCenter 6.5 Environment
first, login into the vCenter 6.5 web client (flash) and Deploy the ova template and select the VDP.ova file to deploy.
Select the Storage (Datastore) you want to deploy this appliance in and click NextSelect the Network where you want to Deploy this appliance and click NextProvide the Network details such as DNS servers, IP address, Subnet mask, the default gateway of the appliance and click Next
Check all the information entered and click finish for the VM to be deployed in the environment.
In the Web UI, login as root and the default password is changeme , login into the web UI and change the root password
Check the Network settings as these settings will be automatically populated from the values you set while deploying the appliance
Provide a new root password for the VDP applianceOnce you enter the details of the External PSC under SSO FQDN you can hit ‘Test Connection’
We now create new storage as this is the first VDP appliance being deployed
Click Yes to start the configurationOnce the process completes, the appliance will restart and you can get into the main Web UIUse this URL to get into the VDP Configuration Web UI
This is the UI you see when you login into the vCenter Web Client and click on VDP menu item
Recently, I came across an issue while configuring a new instance of VDP 6.1.8 appliance while performing vCenter Registration to the vCenter appliance 6.5 with an external Platform Services Controller.
below is the error message I have been getting
I have provided the administrator account user credentials to the VCSA (vCenter server) with the default ports but still received the error.
Upon some deep troubleshooting, found out that the SSO server is the Platform Services Controller (PSC) since my environment had an external PSC and here is how you resolve this issue:
De-select the checkbox “Use vCenter for SSO authentication”, and add the Platform Services Controller hostname/IP in the new SSO entry line.
Now, you can test the connection and it will be a success
This is how the issue was resolved. Hope it helps someone out there.
This is with VDP version 6.1.8 connecting to VCSA 6.5 with External PSC
Its been a while since I posted and today I have attended the VMUG Virtual Event of June 2018 and here are two links to check out their On-Demand Webcasts
Recently, I have come across an issue with the PSC’s not joining to the domain (They disconnected from the domain automatically) after upgrading the vCenter components (PSC01, PSC02 and vCenter windows server) from 6.0 Update 2 build 3634791 to 6.0 Update 2a build 4632154 or to 6.0 Update 3b build 5326079. This issue occurred as the windows domain controller was 2012 R2 and SMB 2 was the communication protocol to the domain controller. we have to enable SMB 2 on the PSC’s for them to communicate to the domain after the Upgrade.
here is the process to enable SMB2 on the PSC’s —
login to PSC01 and run the following command to check the values
This process is repeated for PSC02 as well and once this is done on both the PSC’s, you can go ahead and add the PSC’s to the domain and the function works !!
The process to change the SMB value on ESXi 6.0 is a little different and here are the commands —
The above website clearly mentions on how to use the SUSE Linux Rescue CD to create a new root password and update it in the /etc/shadow file on the PSC itself and after reboot you will be able to get into the PSC with the new password.
Recently I came across an issue where SRM 6.1 skipped few steps during a Recovery Plan failover from Recovery site to Protected Site. I had to dig into the SRM settings to find out why and I found that I didn’t configure the Custom IP network rules on the Recovery site so the recovery plan skipped customizing IP address on the recovered VMs back in Protected Site.
here is the message as shown:
Explanation —
I have Two sites
Protected Site — NC
Recovery Site — Dallas
I have failed over from NC to Dallas fine because I put in the Network IP rules in the site NC under SRM –> Sites –> NC –> Manage –> Network Mappings, settings as shown:
As shown above, I have created the network IP Customization rule in Site_NC but forgot to do it in Site_Dallas. That is the reason why when the failback from Dallas to NC was initiated it skipped the IP customization of the VMs during the Recovery process.
NOTE: Make sure that you configure the Network IP rules on both the Protected and Recovery sites so that the IP customization is applied on the VMs at both the sites.
