appliance

In this post we will explore the Backup endpoints in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) REST API

Let’s see how we can get information about the version updates in the VCSA and how to perform an update programatically

I had the pleasure of giving a talk about how to do monitoring of the vCenter Server during the VMUG Oslo meeting in December. The session was an extension of what I presented during the VMUG meetings in May and the vBrownbag session during VMworld Europe. The demos showed how we can get health status and metrics from a vCenter Server Appliance utilizing the new REST APIs shipped in 6.5 and 6.

This post is a (late) follow-up on a previous post I did about exploring the monitoring endpoints of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and an addition to the vSphere Performance blog series. Now we will add performance metrics and health status of the VCSA to our monitoring solution. We’ll utilize the REST APIs in vCenter and feed the data into our Influx database and visualize it in Grafana. In vCenter we have the Appliance Management page also refered to as the VAMI.

This is a short post on how to extend the internal firmware repository in HPE OneView. The procedure is documented in the installation guide for 3.0, but if you are like me chances are that you don’t have that lying around so I thought I’d write up a short post on it for future reference. The process is pretty straight forward: Shut down the appliance Extend the hard disk to 275GB*

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.

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.

In my last post about upgrading vCenter to 6.5 I’ve outlined the steps I needed to do for the migration. Both pre-migration, the actual migration and some post-migration steps. Today we were about to upgrade/migrate one of our oldest and biggest vCenters which presented some additional steps to consider for the pre-migration checks and tasks. This is also described in the VMware documentation so it shouldn’t be a surprise to those reading that before migrating.

In a previous postI talked about the upgrade of our vSphere environment. The first post described the upgrade and migration of the Platform Services Controller (PSC) from a version 6 running on Windows to a 6.5 Appliance. Our upgrade path would be PSC -> vCenter -> Hosts. Our environment consists of several vCenters so this will take some time and we might upgrade hosts in a vCenter that has been upgraded to 6.