Testing MS SQL Server connection with no tools

4th April 2020 No Comments

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).

Lab, VMware, vSphere

Deploy vSphere 6.5 Platform Services Controller – PSC

20th October 2017 No Comments

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:

The VMware Platform Services Controller group of infrastructure services contains vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate Authority.
The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere ESXi Dump Collector. vCenter Server for Windows also contains the VMware vSphere Syslog Collector. The vCenter Server Appliance also contains the VMware vSphere Update Manager Extension service.

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.

VMware, vSphere

Scratch location set to /scratch – vSAN node on SD card

3rd October 2017 No Comments

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.

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% --

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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.

Lab, VMware, vSphere

Home Lab Environment

5th October 2016 No Comments

Setting up the Home Lab Environment

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

VMware, vSphere

Platform Services Controller (PSC) Replication Latency – Enhanced Linked Mode

8th December 2015 No Comments

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.

Lab