VMware

vCSA PNID - 02
How To

What is my vCSA PNID?

8 August, 2017 0

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 […]

vCenter High Availablity - 01
How To

How to recover from isolated vCenter HA nodes

12 July, 2017 0

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 […]

vCenter High Availablity - 01
How To

Fix – Verify if management interface (NIC0) is configured correctly and is reachable

13 June, 2017 5

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. […]

vCenter High Availablity - 01
How To

How to patch vCenter Server HA cluster

7 June, 2017 0

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 […]

vCenter High Availablity - 01
How To

How to configure vCenter High Availability

30 May, 2017 0

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 […]

How To

Migrate Windows vCenter Server 6 with embedded PSC to vCSA 6.5 with external PSC

7 February, 2017 5

Continuing with the upgrade-migration scenarios to vCSA #migrate2vcsa FTW! 😎 , this blog post will concentrate on migrating from Windows vCenter Server 6 with embedded PSC to vCSA 6.5 with external PSC.  The procedure steps are as follow. Migrate to vCSA 6.5 with external PSC Deploy a secondary PSC version 6 and join the existing SSO domain. Repoint the vCenter Server to the new PSC. Migrate PSC to version 6.5. Migrate Windows vCenter Server to vCenter […]

Migrate to VCSA 6.0
How To

Migration Assistant Error – Replace a Process Level Token privilege to the user

16 January, 2017 0

A quick blog post on how to solve the “Replace a process level token privilege to the user” error when migrating a Windows vCenter Server 6.0 to vCenter Server 6.5 Appliance. The error is generated after running the Migration Assistant versions 6.5 on a Windows machine where the vCenter Server is installed and the vCenter Server service is running under a custom service account. To solve the issue, you need to edit the local security […]

Migrate to VCSA 6.0
How To

Migrate vCenter 5.5 with external SSO to VCSA 6.0 with external PSC

6 December, 2016 0

In the last weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of migrations to vSphere 6.0 for our customers and most of them were migration to the vCenter Server Appliance version 6.0 using the migration tool. This post is the first one in the migration series I am starting and I am kicking off with how to migrate vCenter 5.5 with external SSO to VCSA 6.0 with external PSC. Note – If you are still running on […]