Thursday, April 7, 2016

New VMware Fling: vSphere HTML5 Web Client

Last day while looking at VMwareLabs Flings site, came across this vSphere HTML5 Web Client fling. Its good to see some progress towards HTML5 based web client, first VMware engineers came up with HTML5 based embedded host client and now this.
As per the given info, this web client is written using HTML5 and Javascript and available for kind of beta testing however this Fling is not fully complete yet.

As per the team behind this fling, we wanted to get it in front of our customers as soon as possible, and so we are only offering the following features for the time being (we feel that these are the most commonly used actions/views):
  • VM Power Operations (common cases)
  • VM Edit Settings (simple CPU, Memory, Disk changes)
  • VM Console
  • VM and Host Summary pages
  • VM Migration (only to a Host)
  • Clone to Template/VM
  • Create VM on a Host (limited)
  • Additional monitoring views (Performance charts, Tasks, Events)
  • Global Views (Recent tasks, Alarms–view only)
This Fling has been designed to work with your existing vSphere 6.0 environments. The new client is deployed as a new VM from the downloadable OVA.  Currently the installation instructions are command line-based, but we are working on a GUI installation and plan to release it as an update to this Fling once it is ready.
We intend to regularly update this Fling to both provide new features and address reported issues, based on feedback.

Are you ready? Click here to get started with the vSphere HTML5 Web Client.  

Make sure to check out the list of known issues and notes before jumping in.


That's it... :)


Friday, April 1, 2016

ESXi 5.x host not accessible/showing as inaccessible after reboot

You might have seen this issue where you rebooted an host and even after waiting for a long time it didn't come up and showing as inaccessible in vCenter inventory. Tried  to reconnect the host but end up with this error, 
"Cannot contact the specified host (ESXi1.mylab.com). The host may not be available on the network, a network configurati-on problem may exist, or the manageme-nt services on this host may not be responding."

Then I tried to ping this host but no luck, however when connected to host using physical server remote management tool, found the host up.

This is something that I had seen earlier, in this case what you need to check is, login to DCUI from server remote management console (hp iLO or Dell iDRAC or IBM IMM or whatever) and then check IP configuration of the host as well as test the management network.


Most of the time when you test the management network, you would see something like, host is not reaching to gateway/DNS or sometimes strangely DNS is not reachable but name resolution is happening.

In this case most of the time, fix of this issue as simple as restarting the management network.


  
Sometimes you may need to restart the management network more than once.

As soon as management network restart, host would be accessible (start pinging) again however sometimes you may also need to restart host management agents to make it available/accessible from vCenter console.

That's it... :)