VMware

The dashboard access based on group membership is a feature often requested by a lot of customers. Usually, a division or department in an organization wants to have some insight in workloads they are running on the vSphere infrastructure. On the other hand, the IT department wants to provide access for those users to see the resource consumption for their particular department. Create custom role Before you import a custom group from AD to vROps, […]

The vCenter Server Appliance Primary Network Identifier (vCSA PNID) is an identifier that is used during the initial configuration of vCenter Server Appliance. You might seen it as the guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid string if you ever deployed a vCenter Server Appliance on VMware Workstation of Fusion. You might also seen reference to PNID in KB 2130599 – Cannot change the vCenter Server or Platform Service Controller 6.x hostname. In my case, I had a customer that was trying to […]

During some vCenter HA testing for a customer, I ended up in a situation where all nodes in the vCenter HA cluster could not communicate with each other. This means that all three nodes: Active, Passive, and Witness could not communicate with each other. This is more than a single point of failure and when this happens, the vCenter HA cluster is assumed non-functional and availability is impacted because vCenter HA is not designed for multiple […]

When configuring the vCenter Server HA in my previous post, I encountered the following error when trying to deploy vCenter HA cluster. Failed to get management network information. Verify if management interface (NIC0) is configured correctly and is reachable. After some digging on the VMware knowledge base and checking the VMTN community forum, I’ve found a fix. The issue occurs when there is a misconfiguration of the vCenter Server Appliance name in the systemname_info.json file. […]

This procedure describes in detail how to patch vCenter Server in HA cluster. You can download individual patches form (https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch). Login with your My VMware account, select patches for VC (vCenter) and download the required patch. The patch comes as an ISO file which you can mount on the vCenter Server Appliance nodes in HA cluster. In this case, I will download and apply patch 5318154 which contains the vSAN 6.6 release. Patch vCenter Server […]

One of the coolest features in vSphere 6.5 is the vCenter High Availability. This solution provides automated failover from active to passive vCenter node with expected RTO < 5 mins. The mechanism uses synchronous replication so there is no data loss and it operates in an Active/Passive configuration with a Witness node. vCenter High Availability feature is only available on the vCenter Server Appliance. Requirements for vCenter High Availability At least 3 ESXi version 5.5 […]