vSphere 6.0 – Page 3

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool officially GAs w/vSphere 6.0 Update 2m

09.15.2016 by William Lam // 45 Comments

Today, I am very happy to announce that we have released the official Windows vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool which is part of the new VCSA vSphere 6.0 Update 2m release! I know many of you have been asking for an update since we released the VCS to VCSA Convert Appliance Fling a little over a year ago. The Fling was pretty limited in functionality and this was by design so that we could quickly get something out to our customers and get some early feedback. Although I could not say anything, the VMware Engineering team have been very hard at work incorporating all of the feedback in how they designed and built the official VCSA Migration Tool that you see today.

With that, I would like to extend a huge thanks to all of our customers who took part in the Fling and provided feedback both in the comments section as well as reaching out to me through the various channels. It was great to engage with literally hundreds of customers of all sizes and segments, all looking to move away from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA. Lastly, I want to thank our VMware Engineering team, both to the folks who lead the initial effort on the Fling prototype to those who then productized it! I was very fortunate to have been part of this amazing milestone at VMware.

The VCSA Migration Tool workflow is quite different from how the Fling had worked which hopefully customers will appreciate. The team worked really hard on trying to simplify the overall user experience as well as trying to minimize the overall amount of downtime for the migration. In addition, we have also added full support for additional configurations and deployment topologies which you can find more details in the resource link below which includes an FAQ which I *highly* recommend folks have a look at before starting or asking further questions.

Collection of all #migrate2vcsa Links / Resources: vmwa.re/migrate2vcsalinks

Here is a quick video that I had recorded earlier which demonstrates a migration from a Windows vSphere 5.5 environment to VCSA 6.0 Update 2m, hopefully this will give you a nice overview of the migration process.

[UI Demo] - Migration of Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2m from lamw on Vimeo.

One last thing I want to quickly mention is that this release is specifically targeted at customers looking to migrate from a Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to the VCSA 6.0 Update 2, hence the letter "m" denotation. If you are NOT looking to migrate your Windows vCenter Server to the VCSA, this release is NOT applicable to you as you will NOT be able to perform a new install and/or upgrade using this release. Instead, you should be looking at the vSphere 6.0 Update 2 release which is the exact same code base that vSphere 6.0 Update 2m is based off of. This will be even more apparent when you launch the VCSA Installer, as the "Migrate" button is the only option as shown in the screenshot below.

For those planning to attend VMworld this year, we do plan to have several sessions covering the new VCSA Migration Tool as well as some other surprises 🙂 I hope to see you there and if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to leave it here or use the #migrate2vcsa hashtag if you are on Twitter, especially if you are interested in some of the surprises at VMworld.

Quick Tip - How to disable the landing page for vCenter Server 5.x & 6.x?

07.25.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The question of wanting to disable the default landing page for the vCenter Server is one that comes up infrequently. In fact, I probably see this maybe once or twice a year. However, when it does come up, it usually revolves around two topics: some sort of security risk and limiting users from obtaining software provided through these landing pages. In both case, simply disabling these landing pages will not solve either of these perceived issues.

I generally find these landing pages quite useful as they provide links to software downloads such as our legacy vSphere C# Client, SDK documentation as well as links to other interfaces to vCenter Server like the vSphere Web Client login, the datastore browser or the vSphere MOB. All of this information can be obtained through other official channels, so simply disabling this page does not really prevent users from downloading this content or accessing these interfaces.

On the second topic around security (which by no means am I an expert in), some customers feel that simply removing these default landing pages would some how prevent a security risk because a version of the software is no longer listed on that page? This is what some folks would call security through obscurity which just does not work. There are many different ways of identifying a version of vCenter Server and some of its components as well checking if the service is running. Simply removing these pages does little to nothing from stopping someone from retrieving this information using other methods. Instead, users should really be focusing how they are implementing security both in the software as well as the policies and processes they have in place which hopefully are inline with modern security practices.

In fact, by disabling some of these pages, you might even be hurting your overall customer experience depending on their familiarity with vCenter Server.

In any case, for those that are still inclined to disable these pages, below are the instructions on how to disable the various landing pages as I have not really seen this documented anywhere. The solution is actually quite simple which is to just rename the index files to something else which will prevent them from being loaded by the webserver.

Landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Tomcat landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/tomcat/webapps/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp

Landing page for vCenter Server 6.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Landing page for Platform Services Controll (vSphere 6.x)

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/index.jsp

Remotely query an ESXi host without adding it to vCenter Server

07.19.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I was browsing through the vSphere API Reference the other day and I came across an interesting vSphere API called QueryConnectionInfoViaSpec() which was introduced in vSphere 6.0. This new API is similiar to the existing QueryConnectionInfo() method which also allows you to remotely query an ESXi host without requiring you to add it to your vCenter Server Inventory, which I did not know about before. Some of the information that you can retrieve is whether it is currently being managed by an existing vCenter Server and if so, what is its IP Address, any registered Virtual Machines, networks and datastores that may be configured along with underlying host capabilities.

The main difference between this new API is that instead of accepting a list of arguments to the method, it accepts a HostConnectSpec. It is a minor difference, but what this allows you to do is to be able to re-use that exact same spec in the AddHost_Task() API if you determine that you would like to add the ESXi host to your vCenter Server Inventory after inspecting the remote ESXi host. I think this is a useful API if you want to validate that you are not stealing an ESXi host from another managed vCenter Server and if you are, at least you know which vCenter Server it was being managed by. To demonstrate this vSphere API, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called Get-RemoteESXi.ps1 which requires a vCenter Server login as well as the Hostname/IP Address and credentials of the remote ESXi host you wish to query.

Here is an example output of running the script which stores the returned output to the $results variable.

If you want to check whether the ESXi host is being managed by an existing vCenter Server, you can check the following property which will hold the IP Address of the vCenter Server if it is currently being managed:

$result.Host.ManagementServerIp

If you want to check if there are running VMs already on the ESXi host, you can check the following property:

$result.vm

As mentioned earlier, there is a ton of other information returned from the remote ESXi host and I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore further.