VCSA – Page 29

Quick Tip - Determining the vCenter Server OS platform (Windows or VCSA) using vSphere API

06.25.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

The vSphere API is an extensively rich interface for being able to extract all sorts of useful information about your vSphere infrastructure. One useful trick that may come in handy for those requiring to perform operations directly against the vCenter Server guestOS itself is to figure out whether you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)? Lets say you wish to automate the deployment of the recently released VSAN 6.0 Health Check Plugin and the process to install the plugin will differ between Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA, so it would be ideal if you can easily distinguish between the two

A simplistic solution would be to quickly test for something that would exist in either Windows or Linux, but what if you wanted to perform these operations using the vSphere API and the Guest Operations API to execute the commands within the guests? Well, luckily the vSphere API actually provides this information when connecting to a vCenter Server API endpoint and you can tell if you are connecting to a Windows vCenter Server or the VCSA.

To determine the guestOS type for the vCenter Server you are connecting to, there is a property called osType which you can query when you first connect. Below is a quick PowerCLI snippet for accessing this property, you can also use a variety of other vSphere SDKs to extract this property.

$server = Connect-VIServer -Server reflex.primp-industries.com

$server.ExtensionData.Content.About

Disconnect-VIServer -Server $server -Confirm:$false

The osType property for the VCSA is linux-x64

The osType property for vCenter Server for Windows is win32-x64

Hope to see you at VMworld 2015

06.23.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

The VMworld 2015 Content Catalog just went live this morning and I am please to announce that I have two sessions that were accepted at both VMworld US and Europe. The first session will be a Technical Deep Dive on our new Content Library feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.0 and I will be co-presenting that with James Chang, one of the Content Library Engineers. The second session will be covering a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and I will be covering some of the best practices along with some of the tips and tricks that you may not know about the VCSA. I hope to see you in one of these sessions and I look forward to meeting and chatting with some of my readers at VMworld!

INF5106 - Content Library Technical Deep Dive

What’s the best place to store and maintain your VM templates, ISOs, and vApps? How do you share them with other administrators and users in your organization or between two sites? The solution is a content library, a content management tool within vCenter that manages and replicates content across data centers. In this talk you will learn how to organize your VM templates for the best VM provisioning speed, pick up best practices for automatically sharing your content between sites, and understand how to migrate content from your existing vCloud Director to vCenter with the least amount of effort. And all this right from the vSphere client that you are already familiar with! Next, we will dive into advanced features like external webserver support (e.g. Amazon S3), HTTP mirroring for scale, and rapid sync using array replication technologies. Lastly, we will conclude the talk with a product demonstration showcasing the advanced content management and consumption use cases within a software defined data center

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks

In this session, I will go through some of the best practices and considerations when deploying and managing the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I will walk through some of the changes between past releases and the new vSphere 6.0 release. In addition, I will also provide tips and tricks on using the VCSA as well as ways in migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 12: New methods of downloading Support Bundles for VCSA / PSC

06.18.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Many of you are probably pretty familiar with the process of generating a VMware Support bundle for vCenter Server when it comes to troubleshooting or filing an SR with VMware GSS by using either the vSphere Web/C# Client UI. With the released of vSphere 6.0 and specifically with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) there are now some additional methods in generating a VMware Support bundle which can come in handy if the vSphere Web Client is not running or if you wish to perform this simply through the command-line on a remote system.

The first option is simply by pointing your web browser to the following URL of your VCSA:

https://192.168.1.60/appliance/support-bundle

You will be prompted to login with a local account such as the "root" user which ensures that there is no dependency that SSO must be running which is the case when using the vSphere Web Client. Once authenticated, the VMware Support bundle will be generated and you will then be able to download it onto your system. The VMware Support Bundle is in the format of a compressed tar file which you can use gzip or tar to extract.

The second option is simply using cURL or wget from the command-line which you will also need to provide valid credentials to download. Here is an example of using curl and we will be saving the file as "support-bundle.tar.gz":

curl -k -u root -o support-bundle.tar.gz -O https://192.168.1.60/applmgmt/support-bundle

Once we have downloaded the VMware Support bundle to our desktop, we can then extract it using a variety of tools such as tar for example:

tar -zxvf support-bundle.tar.gz

In situations when you need to quickly resolve a problem by providing support logs to VMware, time is of the essence and being able to quickly generate the necessary support files can help lead to a quick resolution. Hopefully these additional methods of generating a VMware Support Bundle can help save you time when you may need to call upon them.