VMware vExpert 2018 award Announced

After lots of delay VMware finally announced the list of vExpert 2018…. I am very honored to be named a VMware vExpert again, this is my fourth vExpert award…..

Congrats to all those who named as a 

Here is the full list of vExpert 2018... https://vexpert.vmware.com/directory 

vExpert 2018 Announcement on VMTN Blog,

https://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2018/03/vexpert-2018-award-announcement.html

That's it... :)

Unable to power-on a VM in nested ESXi, hanging at some random point with a question in the events

I would say this is the most weird issue I ever faced, it took me so long to find a solution so thought of making a note of it.

My setup is all nested, VMware workstation on my Lab Windows PC and then ESXi, vCenter and everything else as VMs running on workstation.

After building a vSphere 6.5 lab environment, when I deployed my first VM and tried to power it on it got stuck at a some point, after waiting for few minutes when checked the task and events, found following info event there,

"Running VMware ESX in a virtual machine will result in degraded performance. Do you want to continue"

Then I created few other VMs but they all got stuck at some random point during power-on operation and the same event was there in events.

However there is no way to answer the question, nothing in VM summary and no pop-up nothing.

A quick search about the issue lead me to VMwareb# 2108739 however adding msg.autoAnswer = "FALSE" in host .vmx file or /etc/vmware/config didn't make any difference.

Initially I thought this is something related to ESXi 6.5 so, just to check deployed another VM with ESXi 6.0 but even on nested ESXi 6.0, VM power-on operation stuck at random point.

Earlier, I had a working vSphere 5.5 nested lab on this system so, thought of checking with ESXi 5.5 but to my surprise VM power-on operation got stuck with same "Running VMware ESX in a virtual machine will result in degraded performance. Do you want to continue" question (without any way to answer it) for ESXi 5.5 too.

Then I thought this is something related to VMware workstation so, downgraded it from version 14 Pro to 12 Pro but there was no difference.

This is when I started looking at other things and eventually found that its my antivirus which was causing this issue.....Avast Antivirus...... enabling or disabling the features in the software did nothing however uninstalling Avast worked like a charm and now everything working again as expected.

Hope this would help...

That's it ...:)

How to Check, Start, Stop or Restart Windows version of vCenter 6.x Services

Today while working on something I rebooted my vCenter server and post reboot when tried to connect to vCenter using Web client, end up with following error,

This error is something which usually occurs when there there is some issue with vCenter Web client, probably the service is set to manual or somehow got stopped.

Ideally Web client service should have startup type set as Automatic and in start state.

To verify this, opened Services and to my surprise couldn't find the vCenter Web Client Service listed there, even vCenter service was not there (ideally this shouldn't be the case).

So, here how would you check the status of Web Client Service or for any other service not listed in Services.

For Windows version of vCenter, to list the vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,

• Open command prompt as Administrator and change the directory to C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\bin (or any other relevant path, if you didn't install vCenter on default location)

  Now we will use Service-control utility, available here to check the status of service or perform a related operation on it.

      To view the available option, run service-control --help

• Run following command to list vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,

          service-control --list-services

• Run this command to view the current status of all vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services: 

    service-control --status

     To check the status of individual services, use this,

      For Web client Service:

    service-control --status vsphere-client

  For vCenter service:

         service-control --status vpxd

    

 From here, you can start, stop any of vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller   services using below cmd,

service-control --start 'Service Name'

Or to start all services,

service-control --start --all

Note:To perform a dry run of the command, add the option --dry-run to the command, doing so will display what actions the command will run without executing the actions. 

Hope this would be helpful.

Reference: VMware kb# 2121043 & 2109881
Related Post: VMware vCenter Server 6.x Appliance services: how to find service status or start/stop

That's it... :)

How to find and install VMware PowerCLI Module

As most of us would be already aware that, VMware PowerCLI is now available as a PS module and can be installed directly from Microsoft Powershell Gallery, in this post I'll summaries the process of online and offline installation of PowerCLI.

PS commands to be used:

Get-Module : To list the available/already installed modules on you local machine
Find-Module : To find the available modules in an Online PS Gallery
Install-Module : To download and install the specified module from an online gallery
Save-Module : To download and sad save a PS module for offline use

Online installation of PowerCLI : To install the PowerCLI from Microsoft PS gallery, follow these steps,

• If you are not sure about the name of the actual VMware PowerCLI module, use below cmd to find the same,

Find-Module -name *VMware*

• Once you have identified the module name, use Install-Module CMD to install it.

          Here we will install VMware "VMware.PowerCLI"

Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI

Press Y [yes] or A[yes to all], when prompted.

Depending upon your internet connection speed, it would take some time in downloading and installing the requested PS module, once done then close the current Powershell sessions and restart it, now newly installed PowerCLI module will load and you can use it.

In case if you want to limit the scope of this module to current-user only then use following command instead, 

Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI –Scope CurrentUser

Offline installation of PowerCLI: To download and install VMware PowerCLI Module follow these steps,

• On a a system which is connected to internet, you can save the VMware PowerCLI module to your desired location using Save-Module cmd.

• Now, we can copy this module (downloaded folders) to a system which is not connected to internet, and place them in a location where PowerShell can find them, modules folders can be confirmed by typing $ENV:PSModulePath at the PowerShell prompt.

Local User: $home\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules 

All Users: $pshome\Modules

Once you copied these folder to the the modules folders and restarted the PowerShell window, the modules will automatically load this time and you can use them now.

Reference: PowerCLI Installation Walkthrough

That's it... :)

How to reset iLO login password from within ESXi Shell

This is something could be useful if you are unable to recall the HP iLO login password.

Follow these steps to reset iLO password from esxi host: 

Create a file named reset_ilo_pwd.xml in tmp folder under root with the below info and add the new password in the password section:

<ribcl VERSION=”2.0″>
<login USER_LOGIN=”Administrator” PASSWORD=”password“>
<user_INFO MODE=”write”>
<mod_USER USER_LOGIN=”Administrator”>
<password value=”YOUR-NEW-PASSWORD”/>
</mod_USER>
</user_INFO>
</login>
</ribcl>

Alternatively you can create this file by copying these lines to notepad and then saving it as reset_ilo_pwd.xml file, now upload it to /tmp directory of your ESXi host using any ftp client like Winscp.

Now use the following command to commit the administrator password information from the file (reset_ilo_pwd.xml) to iLO using the below command

 ./hponcfg -f /tmp/reset_ilo_pwd.xml

This is it, now you should be able to login to iLO of your ESXi host using the password specified in the above xml file.

Additional Info: HPE offers support for the iLO features available on ProLiant servers with the HP Online iLO Configuration aka HPONCFG utility. HPONCFG can be used to set up and reconfigure the iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) management controller of a server.

HPONCFG is an online configuration tool used to set up and reconfigure iLO without requiring a reboot of the server operating system. The utility runs in a command-line mode and must be executed from an operating system command line on the local server. HPONCFG enables you to initially configure features exposed through the RBSU or iLO.

You can also use HPONCFG to reset the ILO from ESXi host and many other things.

Browse to /opt/hp/tools and execute the below command to reset the HP ILO configuration.

./hponcfg -r 

Before using HPONCFG, the iLO Management Interface Driver must be loaded on the server. HPONCFG displays a warning if the driver is not installed.

In case if its not already present on the server, you may download and install from following links: 

* HPE ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle for VMware vSphere 6.0 *

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_296f7134edb64f83822c7de198#tab-history

* HPE ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle for VMware vSphere 6.5 *

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_6be6cedecfee4ffe9f6c808711#tab-history 

That's it... :)

How to reset HP iLO over ssh or remotely

Lately I faced this issue, where I was unable to login to iLO of one of my HP ProLiant server instead there was a ssh connection related error on login page.

I had seen this error during the iLO firmware upgrade in past but not any other time.

As I did upgrade this ProLiant server’s Firmware/Drivers last day using the latest HP Service Pack forProLiant (aka HP SPP) so, it had the latest iLO firmware ver 2.55 installed and I was sure everything was working as expected post SPP upgrade.

We tried few things to resolve the issue and eventually resting the iLO fixed the issue, as iLO web login was not available so we had to reset it via command line by connecting to iLO over ssh.

You would be able to access iLO over ssh only if you didn’t disable it during the initial iLO configuration (By default iLO ssh access is enabled).

The steps to reset the HP iLO over ssh are follows:-

1. Open Putty (or any other ssh client) and connect to the iLO controller using its IP address or FQDN
2. Login with iLO administrator credentails (or an account with equivalent rights)
3. Once connected to iLO, issue the following command:

   cd /map1

Press Enter

4. Then type

   Reset

Press Enter

Command and its output would be something like this on CLI:

hpiLO-> cd /map1

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED

hpiLO-> reset

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED

Resetting iLO.

CLI session stopped

The iLO controller will begin to reset itself. Resetting the controller fixes a lot of hung-up and freezes issues on the interface.

Note: In case of any issue, HPE always recommends upgrading the firmware on the iLO controller as the first thing and as it doesn’t require reboots or downtime so can be done anytime.

Additional resources:   

HPE iLO 4 Scripting and Command Line Guide - HPE Support Center

http://www.softpanorama.org/Hardware/HP/ILO/command_line_interface.shtml 

https://community.hpe.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/DL360p-gen8-ilo-4-not-available-responding/m-p/6987976#M159786

That's it... :)

Extended LUN size but unable to increase the datastore size from vCenter

You might have seen this issue where in vCenter managed environment, you want to expand the datastore size and Storage team has confirmed that they have increased the respective LUN size and the same is reflecting in datastore properties under Device capacity however when you click on increase under Volume Properties, there is no extent available.

I had seen such issue in past but when adding additional extents, not when increasing datastore size.

vCenter Server calls a specific function to get all the available extents for that datastore. After getting extents, vCenter Server displays the extents as available if they meet these criteria filters:

• LUNS are not used as datastores on that host or on any other host (with exceptions to force mounted volumes).
• LUNS are not used as Raw Device Maps(RDMs) on that host or any other host.

vCenter Server applies these filters to stop any possible data corruption on already used LUNs by other host.

VMware recommends you to not to turn off the filters. Before making any changes to the LUN filters, contact the VMware Support team. 

When you connect directly to the ESX host, these filters do not exist and hence you can see the extents.

  

To work around this issue, you need to connect to the ESXi directly using 'root' credentials and then increase the volume size from there, once done then re-scan all ESxi hosts for storage. 

Once you do that the expended datastore would be visible to all other ESXi hosts as well. 

Related VMware KB article :- 1011754

That's it... :)

Conflicting VIBs error during ESXi upgrade using ISO image

You might have came across this error where, trying to upgrade the ESXi host using OEM provided Custom ESXi image or may be with VMware provided ESXi image and the upgrade got aborted with the CONFLICTING_VIBs ERROR.

In order to successfully complete the ESXi upgrade, one need to to do the following:

• Connect to host over ssh using putty and run the following command find the exact name of vib

       # esxcli software vib list | grep “displayed conflicting vib”

•  Once you identified the exact vib name, then just remove it by using following command

       #esxcli software vib remove -n “actual name of conflicting vib”

Note: Please do an impact analysis before you proceed with vib removal.

Now you boot up the host using ESXi ISO image and complete the upgrade (this time you shouldn’t see earlier previous conflicting vib error).

That's it... :)