Last week I did a session about Performance monitoring at VMworld Europe in Barcelona. The session was part of the VMTN Techtalks with vBrownBag. The slides (without the video demos) and the script used in the demo is available at Github. The session was recorded and can be seen on Youtube. Thanks to all that attended the session and to those watched it live on Twitch or have seen the recording afterwards.
VMworld 2018 is over. As always I’m leaving with lots of great impressions and lots of content to digest and further explore over the coming weeks. I think it has been even clearer after this year that VMware is focusing on their Cloud strategy together with partners like AWS and IBM, that vSAN is the storage solution they want you to go forward with and that together with NSX this will be the base for the future.
This week I’ve been playing in our vCenter lab and tested the upgrade to 6.7 U1 and also changing the deployment type to vCenter with embedded PSC. I must say that the vCenter team has done a great job on the upgrade process over the last year. Both our migration from the Windows vCenter to the VCSA as well as the upgrade of a VCSA works well and there are lots of great documentation.
Recently we received lots of new hardware destined for a customer that has multiple locations world-wide. They need a robust server solution for their production environments locally. The environment is small in terms of number of VMs, but there is high demands on the environment and we need local hardware at the sites as the connections to these sites varies and they are not fast enough at all times. Lots of racks
Recently there was a new release of Telegraf, a monitoring agent from the guys that built InfluxDB. This new version, 1.8.0, comes with a plugin for vSphere which I’m pretty excited about! Previously I’ve been testing Telegraf for monitoring some Linux VMs and also my InfluxDB servers and the agent works as expected and it’s as easy to use as the other products in the TICK stack from Influx. If you’ve followed my blog series about building a monitoring solution for vSphere and other infrastructure components you know that I’ve pulled metrics with PowerCLI scripts.
The schedule builder for VMworld Europe 2018 in Barcelona is finally live and sessions can be scheduled. For the first time I will have a session at VMworld, as one of the vBrownBag/VMTN community sessions, and I’m really excited about this. It is very cool that these community sessions are available in the schedule builder and can be scheduled as other sessions. My session is: Realtime Performance Monitoring - For FREE [VMTN5524E]
The last months we have had several issues with ESXi hosts going in a «Not responding» status. The VMs are still active and online in this scenario, but the ESXi cannot be managed. This also affets backup as it won’t be able to reach the VMs through the APIs. Previously we have normally just restarted the management agents on the host and it has been able to connect to vCenter and after this we have managed to migrate the VMs off the host.
For a long time, actually since we migrated to the VCSA in 6.5 last year, I’ve wanted to utilize the REST API in the appliance to have some monitoring of them. For several reasons I’ve had to put that on hold, one of them being that there seems to be something wrong with the back-end authentication calls. I get authentication errors on certain calls no matter which user I am logged in with (also the vsphere.
This month I was accepted as a vExpert for the first time! In total VMware announced 233 new vExperts this summer for their second half announcement in the program. The vExpert program is not a technical certification. VMware states: The judges selected people who were particularly engaged with their community and who had developed a substantial personal platform of influence in those communities. I am very proud and honored to be included in this community.
When trying to upgrade our lab vcenter from 6.5 to 6.7 this week we encountered a strange error. Our lab environement is running vSphere 6.5 on VCSA and we are running with an external PSC. So when starting the upgrade of the PSC I got an error early in the process, while connecting to the source VCSA. Error when deploying appliance I had remembered that I’ve seen some strange errors before if the root password of the appliance was expired.
