vProgression

Learn by doing.......

  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact

Connect

  • LinkedIn
COPYRIGHT © 2017

UnityVSA Deployment to ESXi Host (Part 1)

09/07/2017 By ALPHONSE COLEMAN Leave a Comment

I am new to the EMC Unity Storage family, so I figured I would walk through the setup of the VSA on ESXi 6.5. This post is not intended for production setup, but geared more to the individual that wants to spin up an instance and learn the ins and outs of the product.

The first part will walk through deploying the VSA directly to an ESXi host. Let’s get started!

Download Link:

https://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/unity-vsa.htm

ESXi Requirements:

Hardware Processor:  Xeon E5 Series Dual Core CPU 64-bit x86 Intel 2 GHz + (or equivalent)

Hardware Memory:  20GB minimum for ESXi 6.5

Hardware Network:  4×1 GbE or 4×10 GbE (recommended)

Hardware RAID:  RAID card 512 MB NV cache, battery backed (recommended)

Procedure

Step 1: Launch VMware HTML5 Host Client and connect to your host directly. Click on “Create / Register VM”

Step 2: Select “Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file”. Click Next.

Step 3: Enter a name for the VSA, then browse or drag/drop the OVA file you downloaded to your computer.

Step 4: Verify the file was uploaded, then click Next.

Step 5: Select a datastore from the list of datastores accessible, then click Next.

Step 6: Select the networks the deployed VSA will use. Since this is a lab, I will leave all the networks at default and select Thin Provisioning. Click Next.

Step 7: Under Additional settings, leave all settings in there default state. Click Next.

Step 8: Review all settings you selected, then click Finish.

Step 9: Wait for the task to complete and you are done!

In the next post, we will focus on the configuration of the UnityVSA appliance. Thank you for viewing!

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Storage

Update ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.5 via CLI

03/17/2016 By ALPHONSE COLEMAN Leave a Comment

Looking for a way to quickly update your ESXi host? Currently, you can do this via; Update Manager, Scripted Upgrade, Auto Deploy, ESXi Installer ISO or ESXCLI. Using the CLI is awesome when only updating a few host, but I prefer Update Manager when working with a larger number of host and possibly a unattended upgrade.

Go ahead an obtain the ESXi 5.5 Update 3a Offline Bundle from VMware’s website. You may notice that I am using 3a instead of 3b. This is due to vCenter being at U3a in this customers environment. vCenter will not be able to manage ESXi 5.5 Update 3b, if you update ESXi before updating vCenter Server to version 5.5 Update 3b.

Note: Support for SSLv3 protocol is disabled by default. Refer to KB 2057795. Also note that VMware DOES NOT recommend re-enabling SSLv3 due to POODLE vulnerability. If you need to enable this for some reason, please refer to KB 2139396.

So let’s get into the steps.

Step 1: Copy the contents of the offline bundle (ESXi550-201510001.zip) to a datastore accessible by all host. I will be using WinSCP for this step. Also, I will assume that we don’t need to cover this step 😉

Step 2: SSH into the host via Putty.

Step 3: Run vmware -vl which will display the current version.

ESXi_HostVer

 

 

 

 

Step 4: Place host into maintenance mode | vim-cmd hostsvc/ maintenance_mode_enter

maint_mode_cli

 

 

 

 

Step 5: List the updates that will be applied | esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi550-201510001.zip

List_Updates

 

 

 

Step 6: Execute the Update to 5.5 Update A | esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi-5.5.0-20151004001-standard

Update_Applied

Step 7: Reboot host and you are done!

 

 

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: VMware

Reconfiguring VM for vSphere Replication Fails

02/07/2016 By ALPHONSE COLEMAN Leave a Comment

IMPORTANT: Please engage VMware Support on this if you don’t feel confident about performing these steps. So please use these commands with caution!

So, last week I had to increase a HDD on a virtual machine at one of our remote sites which requires stopping vSphere Replication before this action can take place. After noticing the virtual machines folder/files were still present on the DR target side after stopping replication, I then removed the files manually. Once I tried to reconfigure replication the following error was displayed: “There is another virtual machine ‘vm-name’ that has the same instance UUID ‘UUID of Virtual Machine’ as the one that you are attempting to configure.”

Apparently, the record of the virtual machine still existed in the VRMS database. Below are the steps that were preformed to remove the virtual machine from the database so replication could be reconfigured.

Step 1: Log into the vSphere Replication Appliance via Putty or any other SSH tool.

Step 2: Use the following command to move into the bin directory: cd /opt/vmware/vpostgres/1.0/bin/

Step 3: Type: ./psql -U vrmsdb

Step 4: Paste this command into your SSH session: SELECT a.group_movalue AS “SECONDARY GID”, b.name AS “VM Name”, ‘https://’ || c.address || ‘:8043/mob/?moid=’ || a.group_movalue || ‘&vodl=1’ AS “Link to Paste” FROM secondaryvirtualmachineentity a serverentity c WHERE a.movalue = b.movalue ORDER BY name;

See screenshot below for what information this command will return. Also, I’ve removed the server names and IP’s to protect the innocent 😉

HBR_VM_Hung

You will notice that in the first list there are 17 rows, while the one below has 16 rows of data. This is because the first output contained the virtual machine that still existed in the VRMS database. Because I am unable to reveal the server names, this will have to do for the example.

Once you find the virtual machine paste the full link into a web browser ex: https://virtualmachine:8043/mob/?moid=GID-d6de6d8a-1ed3-411c-9121-85kdf99444kkddd&vodl=1

You will be prompted for credentials, in which you need to login with your root creds. Then, scroll down to “Destroy” !!!!Before clicking destroy, please ensure this is the virtual machine you would like to remove from the database!!!!

Click Detroy, then Invoke Method. Go ahead and refresh your browser to ensure the entry is removed.  Go back to your putty session and run: SELECT a.group_movalue AS “SECONDARY GID”, b.name AS “VM Name”, ‘https://’ || c.address || ‘:8043/mob/?moid=’ || a.group_movalue || ‘&vodl=1’ AS “Link to Paste” FROM secondaryvirtualmachineentity a serverentity c WHERE a.movalue = b.movalue ORDER BY name;

You should see that virtual machine is no longer present in the list and now you can move forward with reconfiguring vSphere Replication on that machine.

HBR_Database_Removal

HBR_Invoke_Method

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: VMware

Search

Recent Posts

  • UnityVSA Deployment to ESXi Host (Part 1) 09/07/2017
  • Update ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.5 via CLI 03/17/2016

Archives