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Detecting duplicate VM MAC Address using vCenter Server Alarm

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Having a duplicate VM MAC Address in your environment can lead to an extremely painful day of troubleshooting and it can also be tough to prevent depending on how and where you provision your VMs.

There are two cases that I can think of where a duplicate MAC Address can potentially occur:

  1. You manually assign a static MAC Address versus using dynamic assignment (includes VM import) and it conflicts with an already assigned MAC Address
  2. You migrate a VM from one vCenter Server to another and the destination vCenter Server has already assigned the MAC Address of the migrated VM

In both of these scenarios, when a duplicate MAC Address occurs, time is of the essence to quickly pin-point the source of the duplicated entry and quickly resolving the conflict. What would be nice is to be able to automatically detect that a MAC Address conflict has occurred and provide the necessary information of the offending VMs.

UPDATE (4/22) - Thanks to Petr, it turns out there is another MAC Address conflict event which I did not know about specifically for detecting duplicate entries for manually assigned MAC Addresses called "VM static MAC conflict". I definitely recommend creating an alarm for both Events for the vCenter Alarm.

While performing some research in my lab environment the other day, I accidentally stumbled onto this little tidbit in vCenter Server. It turns out there is an out of the box event called "VM Mac conflict" which can be triggered using a vCenter Server alarm when a duplicated MAC Address is detected for a VM. I was actually surprised that this was not one of the pre-created default alarms in vCenter Server as I can see this being extremely useful to have out of the box. In any case, it is simple enough to create a new vCenter Server Alarm and in the example below I called it "Dupe VM Mac Address".

duplicate-mac-address-alarm-0
To test our new alarm, I created a new VM called "VM1" which has been configured with static MAC Address that matches "VM2". Once the VM has been created, we can see that the alarm is immediately triggered and by clicking into the alarm details, it provides the details of the MAC Address and the offending VMs.

duplicate-mac-address-alarm-1
In my opinion this is an alarm that everyone should create in their environment to ensure that if this problem ever occurs, you can quickly get notified and resolve the problem. I have also reported this internally and asked if we can have this alarm created by default, so hopefully this will not be necessary in the near future 🙂

Completely automating vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 Configurations

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As promised, here is a new script called configureVCSA55.sh that I have put together after learning about a couple new VCSA automation tips here and here. This script will fully automate the configuration of a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 and once the script has completed, you will have a fully functional vCenter Server Appliance. There are several variables at the top of the script that you will want to edit prior to running the script.

Here is a summary of the high level operations the script is performing and not all operations will be performed, it will depend on the variables that you have configured.

  • Accept EULA
  • vSphere Inventory Size Configuration
  • Active Directory Configuration (optional)
  • DNS Search Domain Configuration
  • NTP Configuration
  • vCenter Server Database Configuration
  • vSphere SSO Configuration
  • vSphere SSO Identity Source Configuration for Active Directory (optional)
  • Active Directory default Identity Source Configuration (optional)
  • VMware Telemtry Configuration (optional)

To run the script, you can either SCP the script to a newly deployed VCSA and run it locally in the shell or remotely via SSH using the following command:

ssh root@[VC-IP] < configureVCSA55.sh

completely-automate-configuration-vcsa55.0
I almost never go through a manual configuration of the VCSA anymore (since 5.0) as it just takes way too long! Hopefully you will find this script handy when needing to quickly test something or automating the deployment of a few dozen VCSA which I know of a few customers that are doing on a regular basis 🙂

A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN

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*** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***

The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab.

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. I cover two products; VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature; the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I’m an End-User application kind of guy. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @thepeb. When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs.

In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. I need a Home Lab that I can trust and that supports all my work tasks. I started building my lab many years ago. It all started with a single mid tower white box, but pretty soon I ran into resource constraints. I started to investigate what my next upgrade would look like.

I had a few requirements:

  • Keep the noise down
  • Shouldn’t occupy that much space
  • Should be affordable
  • Modular, I do not have money to buy everything upfront so it should be something I could build on top of.
  • Should be able to run VMware ESXi/vSphere
  • Should be cool

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