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Quick Tip - vCenter Server advanced settings for vSphere 5.5 & 6.0

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This was a question that was recently asked in an internal thread regarding the list of available advanced settings in vCenter Server. You can find these settings under the "Advanced Settings" section of all places 😉 and this is available both in the vSphere Web/C# Client.

Screen Shot 2015-04-01 at 8.45.05 AM
I wrote a script awhile back that allows you to modify these advanced settings and with a slight modification to the existing script, I was able to produce the complete list of available settings (available via the vSphere API) that are user configurable, as not all settings are configurable. Below, is a table of all vCenter Server 5.5 advanced settings and I also have a table for newly added advanced settings for vCenter Server 6.0.

Disclaimer: Most of these settings should be left at their default and if you do need to make a change, make it is through a recommendation by either VMware's documentation or from GSS Support as modifying some of these changes can negatively impact your environment.

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Long awaited Fling, Windows vCenter Server to VCSA Converter Appliance is finally here!

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vcs-migration-appliance-smallBack in VMworld 2013, the Office of CTO held its annual Fling Contest where customers can submit their ideas for cool new Flings that they would like to see. If selected, not only would the individual get a free pass to VMworld but VMware Engineers would also build and release the Fling, how cool is that!? There were over 200+ submissions that year and I was very fortunate to have been on the panel to help select the winner. The winning Fling for that year was the Windows vCenter Server (VCS) to VCSA Converter Appliance by Stephen Athanas.

UPDATE 09/15/16 - The officially supported VCSA Migration Tool has has GA'ed with the release of vSphere 6.0 Update 2m. Please see this blog post here for more details.

The idea of a VCS to VCSA Converter really resonated with me as well as with many of our customers. In fact, everyone that I had spoken with who has used the VCSA just love the simplicity, ease of deployment and management it provides compared to its Windows counterpart. However, one of the biggest adoption barrier that I have seen from talking to customers is that is no simple way of migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA. You literally have to start fresh and this is pretty a show stopper for the majority of our customers and I do not disagree with them.

Customers want a migration path to be able to preserve all their vCenter Server configurations such as Folder structures, Permissions, Alarms, Tags, VM Storage Policies, etc. This is the idea behind the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance which helps migrate a Windows vCenter Server running on an external Microsoft SQL Server Database to an embedded VCSA running a vPostgres Database. Today, I am very proud to announce the release of the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance Fling.

The Converter Appliance migrates the vCenter database, Roles, Permissions, Privileges, Certificates, Alarms and Inventory Service which contains Tags and VM Storage Policies. At the end of the migration, you will end up with a fully functional VCSA with the original hostname/IP Address fully intact and ready to use. As you can imagine, this was no easy task and we had some of the smartest VMware Engineers working on this project. Todd Valentine from the OCTO managed the overall program with Ravi Soundararajan as the Chief Architect working closely with Mike Stunes, Jignesh Shah, Raju Angani. Being a huge advocate and supporter of the VCSA, I also had the unique opportunity to be involved in this project and working closely with some amazing engineers to help design, test and validate the migration appliance.

We hope you give the VCS to VCSA Converter Appliance a try in your lab (Please carefully read through the documentation along with the requirements and caveats before getting started). Let us know what you think by either leaving a comment here on my blog or on the Flings webpage. This is our first release and we already have some ideas of features and capabilities we would love to add to future releases but if there are things that you feel that are currently missing or enhancements you wold like to see, please let us know!

If you wish to provide private feedback about your environment or engage with us further, feel free to send an email to Todd Valentine at: tvalentine [at] vmware [dot] com

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 🙂