A note of what’s New in vSphere 6.5

Yesterday, VMware announced vSphere 6.5 at VMworld Europe 2016 and in this post I am listing some useful links related to what’s new and related feature introduction of this version for future reference.

Beside other new features here are the few big things introduced with vSphere6.5,

VM-level native encryption via SPBM

Encrypted vMotion

vCenter High Availability

Proactive HA 

Orchestrated VM Restart using HA

Network-aware DRS

HTML5 vSphere Client

Automatic Space Reclamation (UNMAP)

Support for VVol Replication (VASA 3.0)

External protocol support for VSAN (iSCSI) 

Photon Platform support for VSAN

For Quick summary of all the new  features of vSphere 6.5, please have a look here, Quick summary of What’s New in vSphere6.5 

 

For detailed info please go through below links,

Introducing vSphere 6.5 

What’s New in vSphere 6.5: vCenter Server 

What’s New in vSphere 6.5: Security 

What’s New in vSphere 6.5: Host & Resource Managementand Operations 

Other link,  New features and functionality at a glance.

In future would add other related links to this post.

That’s it… :)

How to Log off window user remotely

Back to basics.....This is something that we have a do every now and then because people (most of the time fellow IT guys) are so lazy ;) and tends to close the windows remote session directly instead off logging off properly and due to this when you try to login on a remote server, end up with Terminal server exceeded maximum connection limit message.

Note: This is basically useful on legacy windows OSs, like 2003 and prior, yeh  some of us might still have those servers. In windows server 2008 and later, if maximum remote sessions are in use, apart from this method during remote login it pops up a window to request or forcefully disconnect any active user (if you have adequate rights to do so). 

If you have the adequate windows privilege then can easily clear remote sessions remotely ;)

To do so, open command prompt on any other machine and run below commands,

First run following command to get a list of connected users,

C:/>quser /server:target _server_name

The output of this cmd would be a list of logged in user with corresponding session ID, note down the session id of remote user (eg. 1, 2, 3,…) you want to logoff, now

C:\>logoff session_ID /server:target_server_name

Once you hit enter, the user will logoff from remote computer and you are done here.

That's it... :)

Getting error while trying to add a new virtual disk to VM

I have seen this error couple of time and every time it takes me some time to recall the cause, so thought of making a note of this very basic thing that one need to remember when adding a new drive to a VM.

You might have came across this error while trying to add a new drive (Thin or Thick Lazy zeroed) to a Virtual Machine,

VMware ESX cannot open the virtual disk "/vmfs/volumes......vmdk" for cludtering. Verify that the virtual disk was created using the thick option.......

This error is nothing but you have a RDM drive attached to VM in Physical mode and newly added drive is trying to use the same drive controller.

Only Thick Provisioned Eager Zeroed drives can be added to a disk controller having physical mode RDM attached. Here to add a Thin or Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroed dive, either we need use any other existing non physical mode disk controller or add a new one .

That's it... :)

vCenter Server 6.0 u2: The vSphere Client displays Revert to Current Snapshot as enabled while there is no snapshot

You might have noticed this, while connected to vCenter 6.0 via vSphere Client, you would see the VM snapshot option “revert to current snapshot” option always available even if the VM doesn’t have any snapshot.

Same can be seen in Snapshot Manager.

When you cross check the same using Web Client, you will find revert to current snapshot option grayed out.

As per kb# 2111363, it’s a known issue in vCenter Server 6.0 while accessing via thick client and currently there is no resolution.

To work around this issue, ignore the vSphere Client snapshot controls and use the vSphere Web Client for snapshot management.

That’s it... :)

vCenter 6 : Inventory search failed with the error, login to query service failed

We recently upgraded to vCenter 6.0 and today when I tried to search for virtual machines with the vSphere Client 6, the search failed with this error,

*I didn't see this behavior when checked via Web Client.

Initially I thought, its due to some DNS issue however when checked, was able to ping the vCenter server with its FQDN.

On further checking, came across VMware KB# 2143566, which is about the exact same issue.

As per this KB,

This is an expected behavior.

Searching for Inventory objects when logged in to the vSphere Client using the Use Windows session credentials option is not supported.

To work around this issue, log in to the vSphere Client by manually entering the login credentials.

Note: Using the same vSphere 6 client, I didn't see any issue when connected to vCenter 5.5 so this is something expected with vSphere 6.0.

That’s it… :)

VM crashed during backup and now getting error when trying to power on : sparse disk

Today while taking backup of a Linux VM, it got crashed during backup however backup completed successfully. When tried to power on this VM, end up with this error,

An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM Test-VM01

Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/5e4eb348-00341c9a-a87d-011d296158e2/Test-VM01/Test-VM01-000001.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

The system cannot find the file specified

VMware ESX cannot find the virtual disk "/vmfs/volumes/5e4eb348-00341c9a-a87d-011d296158e2/Test-VM01/Test-VM01-000001.vmdk". Verify the path is valid and try again.

Here I was able to quickly get the VM back in working condition by just pointing the disk back to original disk file however now I noticed this VM is using a Sparse disk which is spirited into 2Gbsize files.

This kind are disks are disallowed on all ESXi 5.x and later hosts and ideally we wouldn't able to power on VMs with such disk (VMware kb#1022242) however here I was/am able to power on this VM, noticed any issue only after backup.

Here one thing is worth to point out, this VM was not created on Esxi 5.x host but was imported from Virtual Box to VMware environment.

To fix this issue, power off the VM and clone all the sparse disks to a compatible format with vmkfstools by running this command,

# vmkfstools -i /vmfs/vloumes/.../source/VM_Name.vmdk -d disk_format(thin/zeroedthick/eagerzeroedthick) /vmfs/vloumes/.../destination/VM_Name.vmdk

Once completed then from VM edit settings, remove the old sparse disk and add this thin/thick vmdk file and now you can power on the VM.

As above process required downtime so alternatively I tried storage vMotion and it worked for me...so here the preferred fix is.. just Storage vMotion the affected VM to another Datastore, this will change the disk format on the fly and we are done.

Then just to check if we can restore the VM backup which was taken using Dell vRanger backup, when we tried to restore the backup it failed with the error: Error: API Call failed with message: The device or operation specified at index '9' is not supported for the existing virtual machine platform.

When checked about the error found a kb article on Dell support site, kb#104897, 19559960, according to this kb, we may take backup of a such kind of VM running on ESXi host but wouldn’t be able restore the same, and in order to fix this behavior we need to change the Sparse disk to thin/thick VMDK file. The process of converting the sparse disk is same a described above.

That's it... :)

Intermittent network connectivity issue with a Physical server having physically disconnected NICs in NIC Team

Last week I came across this issue where a physical server was losing network connectivity every now and then.

When checked, found this Windows 2012 server having four network cards but out of four only two were connected to network and for other two NICs, network cable was unplugged.

When checked the network teaming properties,

Server manger => Local Server =>from right side console, NIC Teaming and click on enabled => now under Team, select your NIC Team and go to its properties

Here as you can see,  disconnected NIC cards were also part of “NIC Team” so we suspect due to this the dynamic load balancing is having issues and so the server having Intermittent network connectivity problem.

We removed the disconnected NIC cards from NIC Teaming (just uncheck and click ok) and from then to till now didn't hear back any network connectivity issue for this server. 

Please share your thoughts in comment area if thinks otherwise and have any other solution. 

That's it... :)

Unable to add host to vCenter, getting error like: The evaluation Mode license assigned to Host has expired

Last day I received a question from one of my friend, in his lab environment he was trying to add an ESXi host to vCenter inventory but was unable to do so (both host and vCenter are at 6.0 update 2) and was getting an error like,

"The evaluation Mode license assigned to Host hostname has expired. Recommend updating the license"

As he was just configuring the lab so of course the trial period was not expired so what’s the issue here.

The other thing which can cause this kind of issue is system date and time, there is a VMware kb# 2011655, which covers this issue.

This issue occurs if the date and time in the BIOS is incorrect.

When you add an ESXi/ESX host with an incorrect system time to vCenter Server, the license is converted to an evaluation license that immediately expires.

To resolve this issue, one need to correct the date and time in the host BIOS, once done then you will be able to add the host to the vCenter Server inventory.

That’s it… :)