Personal knowledge blog/portal for Virtualization, Storage, Linux and Automation
At work, there was a requirement to upload an ISO to the vSphere Content Library in an automated fashion (no GUI).
With PowerCLI 11, New-ContentLibrary commandlet seemed to do the job and creates and uploads the ISO file.
However, it creates and uploads the file as type: ‘file’
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New-ContentLibraryItem -ContentLibrary vgnosis_cl -Name $item -Files $file_name |
I created this page to summarise Home Learning Links for children during the lockdown. I’ll keep updating as I find more ( some of them already published at our School’s page)
IXL – Personalised Learning
BBC Bitesize
I thought to create a series of posts on Ansible, mostly for my own benefit of learning the tool. So what is Ansible ?
Ansible is a lightweight, open source configuration management, provisioning, application deployment and orchestration system which has an agentless architecture. This means that the nodes do not require to install and run background daemons to connect with the main control node.
Ansible has been bought and it is now sponsored by Red Hat.
There are a lot to be covered and I will try to put everything in here, firstly for on my own learning experience, and then for anyone that might find it useful.
Installation:
If you are using a 64 bit version of Windows 10 and a version later than Build 1607, you can install the Linux Subsystem and use Ansible from it.
Check if it’s 64 bit:
run msinfo from a command prompt and check the below details:
Recommendation is to install all the windows updates prior to the installation of Linux Subsystem.
Installation of Linux Subsystem for Windows:
Control Panel – Programs and Features – Turn Windows features on or off
Check Windows Subsystem for Linux
I am in the process of creating a Horizon 7.12 Lab, and when I was configuring the Event Database, I couldn’t connect to my Events Database on default port 1433. As I don’t have much experience with MS SQL, I found out that you can test connectivity with just a simple file with *.udl extension (Universal Data Link).
Process:
Open Notepad and do a “Save As”, then type the name of the file with the .udl extension in double quotes (so notepad doesn auto add .txt).
The purpose of this document is to go through the installation of the Platform Services Controller PSC version 6.5, as part 1 of the vCenter Server (Appliance) deployment with an external PSC.
vCenter Server and the vCenter Server components are deployed on one system, and the services included in the Platform Services Controller are deployed on another system.
The following components are included in the vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance installations:
For more information about vSphere 6.5 please refer to the official VMware vSphere documentation here.
For What is Νew in vSphere 6.5 click here.
Let’s start with the installation of the external PSC.
Download the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ISO from VMware downloads.
You will see below that the VCSA installer has changed dramatically, it’s a lot cleaner, simpler, and many deployment options (install, upgrade, migrate, restore) are bundled into the same one installer.
Let’s do it.
At the place I work, we experienced continuous “The ramdisk ‘root’ is full” issues on our vSAN ESXi nodes.
The first thing we did was to raise a support call and have vmware check what is filling up the ramdisk.
Support suggested that we need to limit the size of vsantraces to 200MB, and pointed to the below KB Article
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150320
This puzzled me, as the vsantraces was not full.
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Ramdisk Size Used Available Use% Mounted on root 32M 32M 0B 100% -- etc 28M 5M 22M 18% -- opt 32M 368K 31M 1% -- var 48M 728K 47M 1% -- tmp 256M 492K 255M 0% -- iofilters 32M 0B 32M 0% -- hostdstats 1553M 17M 1535M 1% -- snmptraps 1M 0B 1M 0% -- vsantraces 300M 167M 132M 55% -- |
I kept digging and I found out that the scratch partition on the hosts was not pointing scratch -> /tmp/scratch
but it was on / instead.
The main reason behind building a Lab at Home, like many others also do, is to help me study and learn.
The specification of the hardware I used for the Lab can be found here.
To give you a better understanding of the setup and the nesting that is happening, I have drawn the below diagram. You can see that everything is on a single physical machine running VMware ESXi 6.0 U2, and the picture below represents the logical design of my lab. A physical switch, a physical server, and everything else virtual.
Logical Design
The Main Lab “Infrastructure” Setup
Let’s outline what our basic infrastructure components will be for the Lab.
| Hostname | OS | Description | Hardware |
| vgnosisesx01 | Vmware ESXi 6.0U2 | vGnosis Physical ESXi Host | HP Proliant DL360 G7 |
| vgnosis2k01 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis Domain Controller and DNS | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap01 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis PSC (Platform Services Controller) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap02 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosis2k03 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis VUM (Vmware Update Manager) | Virtual Machine |
| sw01 | Cisco IOS | vGnosis Cisco Switch | Cisco WS-C3750E-48PD |
At work, we have deployed a PSC / VCSA 6U1 in Singapore, and linked it to our London PSC on the same domain,
so we can use Enhannced Linked Mode.
Below diagram diagram describes the PSC / VCSA deployment.
Tried to logon to VCSA01 which is in our London vSphere and it took 10 minutes for the web client to load.
VCSA02 which is in Singapore appeared on the screen and couldn’t be expanded.
Hosts and Clusters on VCSA01 didn’t show any tabs. So, Web Client wasn’t responding as it should, and couldn’t do any work.
c# client worked OK.
As soon as we powered off PSC02 / VCSA02, Web client started responding as it should.
It seems that PSC replication is affected by high latency, which in our case is ~ 200ms.
Question here is why VMware or any of the nice blogs around hasn’t got any maximum latency numbers around PSC replication.
We have based a design around Enhanced Linked Mode with our upgrade to vsphere 6 around the globe, if latency is an issue we need to change everything.
The Kit I use for my Lab:
PHYSICAL SERVER:
HP Proliant DL360 G7
Specs:
CPU Cores: 12 CPUs x 2.666 GHz
Processor Type: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @2.67GHz
Processor Sockets: 2
Cores per Socket: 6
Logical Processors: 24
Hyperthreading: Active
Number of NICs: 4
Memory: 288GB (16x16384MB @1333MHz
SWITCH:
Cisco Catalyst 3750E-48 2x10GE
HOME ROUTER:
TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750
