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A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 11:52

Why?

I wanted to create a list of free tools that you can use with vSphere. Not just 30-day trial tools, but actually *free* tools. I will be testing out all these applications in the next 2 months in preparation for a Top 5 or 10 blog and presentation at the Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting May21st

**UPDATE** 9/8/2011 -  Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

The Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities post has been released. (2010 Article)

Let me know if I missed something because I would like to add it. kendrickcoleman [at] gmail [dot] com or @KendrickColeman on twitter.

 

If you want to dive into performance, take a look at VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools for Advanced Tasks

 

Utilities & Programs

Veeam Monitor Free Edition - VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting.

Veeam Business View - an add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for your VMware vSphere environment.

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 12:52
Read more... [A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools]
 
How to Install VMware vCenter Chargeback and Data Collectors- Step by Step Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Wednesday, 23 January 2013 15:52

So I have installed vCenter Chargeback before, but i remember the installation being a little tricky. I tried doing a quick google search to see if there were any good detailed step by steps out there and nothing really turned up (or their blog doesn't have good SEO). So let's get going

 

1. Make sure your Windows VM is set with a static IP address.

 

2. Create a database. Oracle and SQL can be used. I'm going with SQL. Pretty Simple to do and no advanced options to change.

 

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 January 2013 17:03
Read more... [How to Install VMware vCenter Chargeback and Data Collectors- Step by Step]
 
VMware View Certificate Issue After MS Update kb2798897 Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Tuesday, 22 January 2013 11:52

This was something sent by one of my readers and felt it was a worthy post.

 

Yesterday, I installed MS Update kb2798897 on my View Connection Server. After the update none of my users were able to connect to their desktop. I could not even get to the View Administrator page.

The cause of my issue was that this MS Update takes any friendly name that it feels is invalid or revoked and makes that field blank. For VMware View, the friendly name of the certificate has to be vdm.
To fix the issue, replace the friendly name back to vdm and restart. After that, everything should be good.
Figured this may help some people.

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 13:20
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How to fix ghosted NIC adapters and Windows 2008/7 vmxnet3 cloning Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Wednesday, 12 December 2012 18:00

I thought the whole time i knew what I was doing when it came to building templates. I think this is a very important step to NEVER forget if you plan on using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 (have not tried this with 2012 or 8 and all documentation does not exist for it yet).

 

This bug bit me hard this week. I'm planning out multiple SRM testing environments. My goal was to build a single vApp, and clone it a few times. Each clone will keep the same IP addresses and I will only have one environment on at a time to do testing. Of course, this would all be fine within vCD, but I took the old school route.

 

I have my vCenter/SQL/SRM server all on a single 2008 R2 VM. When I cloned this VM, the IP address didn't stay the same. in fact, a new vmxnet3 adapter was added to the VM and the old one was never found. No big deal, right? I'll go ahead and assign the same IP address to the new adapter. Once I did that I ended up with the dreaded error message "The IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter Name of adapter. Name of adapter is hidden from the network and Dial-up Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer or is a legacy adapter that is not working. If the same address is assigned to both adapters and they become active, only one of them will use this address. This may result in incorrect system configuration. Do you want to enter a different IP address for this adapter in the list of IP addresses in the advanced dialog box?" as seen in Microsoft KB 269155.

 

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 18:39
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VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools For Advanced Tasks Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Thursday, 13 December 2012 08:53

I have compiled a list of free VMware vSphere tools that any administrator can use. I even made a Top 10 list out of that. But what about some more advanced tasks?

 

Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can. I do not want to take any credit for any of the programs or scripts packaged. I simply took the time to place all of them in one spot. Take a moment to thank the creators of scripts and programs that I have linked within every ReadMe in every folder.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 13 December 2012 09:54
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Provisioning Fails when Disabling Storage Profiles in vCloud Director Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Saturday, 17 November 2012 10:29

This is a bonehead move. I mean, seriously boneheaded. I spent probably 2 weeks trying to wrap my head around what was going on. I was tasked with getting vCloud Director and Nexus 1000v working hand-in-hand on a Vblock for documentation and testing purposes. I had 2 vCenter servers built, one used the vDS and the other used the 1000v. I had followed the setup on Tom Fojta's Cisco Nexus 1000V and vCloud Director 5.1 guide. My setup was using the latest GA of vCloud 5.1.1 and Nexus 1000v 4.2.1.SV2.1.1 which was a bit newer than Tom's, but the process didn't change.

 

During the configuration, I could create Provider vDCs and the VXLAN pieces would populate without issue. VXLAN Virtual Wires were being created by the Nexus 1000v and that could be seen in both the vSphere Client as well as seeing the port-profiles on the VSM. So I was certain I had configured everything correctly.

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Last Updated on Saturday, 17 November 2012 11:37
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Optimized Pet Clinic App for Quick vCloud & Spring Demonstrations Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Monday, 21 January 2013 16:55

There is a pretty cool little mulit-tiered Spring application that comes from VMware called Pet Clinic. I got the chance to play around with it for a little while during a current POC process and using it as an easy way to get apps spun up for tradeshows.

 

Pet Clinic has 2 virtual machines inside the vApp. An Apache Server and a Tomcat + Database Server. The vApp itself comes configured with static IP addresses, pre-configured application based on IPs, and a CentOS at a default.

 

When playing with the vApp, it took about 5-8 minutes to boot because of the all the standard services set to boot. That was the first thing that needed to be fixed. Second, customizations needed to happen. vCloud Director does a good job at doing the customization because it's done natively. Once the customization is done it breaks the spring application because the apache server is hard coded to point to the TC+DB server. So I figured it needed a little bit of automation.

 

First, I turned off a bunch of un-needed services which most were taken from this page. Now the vApp boots in about 1 minute exactly. A much better turn around time. This time doesn't include customizations which takes another reboot. So calculate 1:30-2 minutes for total boot time.

 

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Last Updated on Monday, 21 January 2013 18:42
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vSphere Replication Cannot Pair VRMS Servers with VRM Server generic error Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Tuesday, 04 December 2012 17:05

I was following along this blog that showed me step by step how to setup vSphere Replication with SRM - SRM 5 vSphere Replication – how to install and configure. And I got down towards the end where I have to Configure the VRMS Connection. During my setup attempts I kept getting this error: "VRM Server generic error. Please check the documentation for any troubleshooting information. The detailed exception is: 'Unexpected status code: 404'."

 

This led me to this VMware communities post: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/330733

 

I followed along with the suggested work around to use FQDN vs IP in the configuration setup and that still didn't work for me. I use DNS in my home lab because I'm a good sysadmin. But for some reason I kept on getting this error popping. So I went into the appliance and found out that the two sites couldn't ping each other without the FQDN. If i just used the simple hostname, then it would not be able to ping. If i used FQDN, then I could ping. /etc/hosts to the rescue.

 

If you are having a problem with getting these two pairing to work, then DO NOT sit there and remove the appliance and rebuild it 4x like i did. simply edit the hosts file of each VM and add the vCenter servers of both sides. To do so

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vCloud Director Storage Allocation with Thin & Fast Provisioning Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Monday, 26 November 2012 15:23

This has been something I've been meaning to get to the bottom of recently. When you give an Organization vDC storage from a specified Storage Profile, how does that react to VMs that have been provisioned with Thin or Fast? If I allocate 200GB to an Organization vDC, where does it get capped?

 

If you have provisioned a lot of VMs before, we may have seen this screen: The requested operation will exceed the VDC's storage quota.

 

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Last Updated on Monday, 26 November 2012 16:43
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Sharing Organization Networks in vCloud Director Print E-mail
Written by Kendrick Coleman   
Sunday, 11 November 2012 23:14

 

I'll admit, I ran into this by accident. But now that I know how and why it works, it makes perfect sense.

 

There are multiple places to enable the sharing of a network

  • During the configuration of an Organization vDC when a new vShield Edge Gateway and Organization Routed External Network are created.
  • Viewing the Properties of an Organization Network, including Organization External Direct, Organization Routed External, and Isolated
  • During the configuration of a new Organization Network, including Organization External Direct, Organization Routed External, and Isolated

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