Monthly Archives: August 2019

2019 08 27 13 01 39

VMware Ports and Protocols – All in one place!

Getting hold of all the VMware products various ports and protocols has sometimes come across like pulling blood from a stone.

However as announced yesterday at VMworld 2019, we have a new dedicated website just for this subject!

https://ports.vmware.com/

At a high-level, this system offers the following features:

  • A centralized system that is easy for our product teams to publish and modify and update the ports and protocols for each product.
  • Provides capability to customers with several Search filters on products, releases, port number, protocol, purpose and so on.
  • Download feature filtered data for offline view.

And for all you dark theme lovers out there, yes there is also a dark theme option!

VMware ports and protocols screenshot

Regards

Dean

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation – SDDC Manager License key is not valid

Quick blog post, there has been known issue in VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5, 3.7 & 3.8 that reports your SDDC manager license key as invalid as the below screenshot shows.

This has been listed in the “known issues” section of the release notes for each version, but there is no KB article for this.

Validation fails on SDDC Manager license.During the bringup process, the validation for the SDDC Manager license fails.

Workaround: Enter a blank license and proceed. You can enter the correct license value later in the process.

 

SDDC Manager License Key Not Valid

Regards

Dean

PowerCLI

PowerCLI with a GUI – Clone a machine, add DHCP Reservations, alter CPUID

In this blog post, I am going to break down a PowerShell code I have created (with help from some colleagues). The functions of this PowerShell code are;

  • Present a GUI form to the end user
    • Connect to a vCenter
    • Select the virtual machine to be cloned
    • Select the datastore the new VM is to be stored on (display DS free space)
    • Select the host for this VM to be created against (display free memory on the host)
    • Set the new VM name
    • Create an IP reservation in both the Production and DR DHCP Scopes

Below are some functional screenshots of the code’s GUI and also a rough flowchart of what I needed to achieve.

You can skip to the end to find the full code or my github.

PowerCLI with a GUI - Clone a machine, add DHCP Reservations, alter CPUID

clone script connection window veducate

clone script full GUI options when connected vEducate

clone vm script flowchart

TAM Lab Recording

Since posting this blog, I also covered this in a VMware TAM Lab recording which you can watch below.

A little more background on the script

So my customer had a dedicated environment for hosting their custom application, however these applications were built and running inside an old unsupported OS which expected to be running on a particular era of CPU’s to run correctly, for example todays Intel Skylake would cause the OS to panic and not run. As you can also imagine with this type of older OS, there are no VM Tools support either.

Here is the architecture diagram;

clone vm architecture diagram

Providing DR around this environment was interesting, we could protect the VM using SRM and storage array LUN replication. But this also presented some issues, when the VM boots in DR. “what happens with networking?” hence we setup a DHCP reservation on both Production and DR. Meaning we know the VMs IP regardless of where its booted.

Continue reading PowerCLI with a GUI – Clone a machine, add DHCP Reservations, alter CPUID

vROPs – What is the “IsGreenForPlacement” Metric + Dashboard

A customer of mine queried the details of a metric available in vROPs “IsGreenForPlacement”

You can find this by selecting a cluster in vROPs, go to All Metrics, and just search placement.

vrops IsGreenForPlacement 1

And here is a screenshot of the Metric in a sparkline.vrops IsGreenForPlacement 2

The customer uses this metric to give a signal (Green/Red Button on a vROPs Dashboard) if a vSphere cluster can be used for on-going deployments.

Unfortunately there’s not much documented information publicly. And we ran into an  issue where the metric stayed positive (yes you can deploy), but the Storage datastore had run out of space. So I went off to dig out what this metric actually does.

IsGreenForPlacement – details

After speaking to the internal teams on vROPs I found the answer;

“Regarding IsGreenForPlacement metric, only CPU and Memory participates on calculation of this metric, by default if CPU and MEM workload is less than 80% it is green.”

So storage is not taken into account.

Creating a Dashboard

This one will be really simple. Continue reading vROPs – What is the “IsGreenForPlacement” Metric + Dashboard