Zsoldier's Tech Blog

vCenter Log Insight is a new log aggregator from VMware. As a new tool that is integrated with vCenter Operations Manager, Log Insight has great potential. The ability to tie in directly with VMware's knowledge base, vCenter and vCenter Operations gives Log Insight a true strength in combining analytics with logging. We started using Log Insight (project Strata) at Tech Preview 2. We had a need for log aggregation solution and thought we'd give it a try on our lower environments. We have used it for different purposes. 1st time was with analytics. when we deployed it, I had setup a dashboard to see "warning" level alerts. 3 of our 120 hosts were far surpassing the others in errors.  After clicking down into the bar graphs we saw a high number of Active Directory related errors.  After rejoining 2 of those hosts to the domain the errors had cleared. The third box we needed to reinstall to clear the errors. Since we've done this all the servers have ...

I was working to get certs for the vsphere web client.  Needless to say, I had worked w/ JKS (Java Keystore) before so I figured the process was the same for PFX (PKCS12 keystore) files, but I was dead wrong.  I'd highly recommend looking into the VMware SSL Certificate Automation Tool .  What follows is mainly a learning exercise for me. For starters, if you have a mac, good for you, cause openssl is likely already installed and accessible via terminal which makes things much easier from the get go.  If you run Windows, download the windows binaries and install.  If you go to the openssl.org site like listed in VMware's docs as a Windows admin, lord help you.  When you install the openssl windows binaries w/ all defaults selected, openssl installs on C:\OpenSSL-Win32\bin. Open a command prompt to that directory, then you can pretty much follow the instructions from VMware . To read more about my trials and tribulations, click the link to continue ...

Refer to this post for openssl info , then follow the steps here: Generate a certificate signing request openssl req -out vcops.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout vcops.key Answer the wizard questions appropriately for your environment. This creates your Certificate request and generates the associated private key. When you receive your signed cert from the CA if not already in pem format (with private key): Assuming CER or CRT we need to convert it to PKCS12 first. openssl pkcs12 -export -in vcops.cer -inkey vcops.key -name vcops -passout pass:password -out vcops.pfx Convert to PEM w/ private key openssl pkcs12 -in vcops.pfx -out vcops.pem -nodes It will prompt for password, if you used my example under step 2, then that would be password. Log into vcop's admin console (https://vcopsServername/admin), select the SSL tab, and upload your newly created pem file. Additional Steps: These steps were helpful in updating vCOPs registration info in vCe...

I needed something that I could look back upon to determine who created what VM in vCenter and from what template.  This works when dealing w/ just vCenter and not vCloud Director.  It's painfully slow, but it works as a stopgap until I figure out how to query the same information from SQL instead. Here is an screenshot example of what the PowerCLI script outputs: Although, I can probably gather a longer historical view through CSV's than vCenter's SQL if those events/tasks are cleaned up after a period of time.  It's meant to be run on a daily basis. Script found after the break:

Those interested in some VMware-sponsored sessions @ this HP Discover 2013 can look forward to the following: BB4361 Optimizing HP Storage for VMware: Current Integrations and Software-Defined Storage DT4364 Top Strategies to Simplify Datacenter Management with vCenter Operations Manager and vSphere Web Clients Integration TB4362 VMware End User Computing - Transforming your Workspace TB4363 Managing the Software-Defined Datacenter The two that I will probably be attending are DT4364 and TB4363.  They seem to be the most interesting to me. Details of sessions past the break:

I'm proud to say that I made the list again this year.  Look forward to continue providing helpful content to the community.  I think I'm going to expand more into the Japanese community this year. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2013/05/vexpert-2013-awardees-announced.html

Summary: I have a shared NFS datastore mapped to all my hosts.  So I found it strange that two hosts in a cluster of 5 were not seeing it.  When I would try to map it, I would get the following error: Unable to create datastore: The specified key, name, or identifier already exists. This worked for me: It seems I had an old mapping in place that wasn't showing up in vCenter until I refreshed the storage view to show the 'inactive' mount: Once the inactive mount appeared, I was able to unmount it, then remount the correct path. [If the refresh doesn't work, you may need to SSH to the host and run the ESXCLI commands listed toward the bottom of the post] I found it interesting in that running "vicfg-nas <a bunch of connection options here> --vihost myesxserver -l" did not list this inactive path either.  It might have shown up if I connected directly to the ESXi host w/ the vSphere client, but I did not check. ESXi 5, you'll need to use t...