1.SRM Server

Short form for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ Server. SRM Server extends vCenter Server to provide disaster recovery capabilities for VMware customers. It enables integration with array-based replication, discovery and management of replicated datastores, and automated migration of VMware inventory from one vCenter server to another.

2. Array based Replication (ABR)
Replication of Virtual Machine that is managed and executed by the storage subsystem itself rather than from inside the virtual machine the VMkernel OR the service console..

3.vSphere Replication
Native software-based replication engine built-in to ESXi 5.0 that can be used to provide replication of virtual machines via SRM.

4.Logical unit number (LUN)
A single SCSI storage device on the SAN that can be mapped to one or more vSphere hosts.

5.Datastore Group
Replicated datastores containing the complete set of Virtual Machines you want to protect via SRM

6.Failover and Fail back
Failover is the event that occurs when the recovery site takes over operation in place of the protected site after the declaration of a disaster. Fail back is the process of restoring system to its original site.

7.Inventory mapping
Mapping between resource pools, networks and VM folders on the protection sit and their destination counterparts on the recover site.

8.Protected Site and recovery site
The protected site is the primary data center. The recovery site is the backup that is used when the primary site is incapacitated by a disaster.

9.Protection Group
A collection of all virtual machines and templates that are failed together during test and recovery.

10.Recovery Plan
The necessary steps to recover protected Virtual Machines in their assigned protection groups according to an order of priority defined in the plan.

11.Storage Replication Adapters (SRA)
Software provided by storage vendors that ensures integration of storage devices with SRM

12.Reprotect
Reversal of direction of replication, and automatic reprotection of protection groups.

13. Datastore
Storage unit of a managed vSphere host

14.Protected VM
A VM that is protected by SRM.

15.Unprotected VM
A VM that is not protected by SRM.

16.Protected site
The site that initially contains the protected VMs.

17.Recovery site
The site to which virtual machines will fail over.

18.Datastore group
Replicated datastores containing complete sets of protected VMs.

19.Placeholder VM
An object found with other VMs in the recovery site vCenter inventory representing a protected site VM that is being replicated to the recovery site. It is represented with an icon showing a lightning bolt.

20.Recovery point objective
The maximum acceptable amount of data that can be lost during a failure, expressed as a time value. For example, an RPO of four hours indicates that up to four hours worth of data loss are acceptable before a return to an operational state.

21.Recovery time objective
The maximum acceptable amount of time that a service or services of a datacenter may be nonfunctional during a failure, expressed as a time value. For example, an RTO of 12 hours indicates it is acceptable that up to 12 hours might pass before a service might be restored.

23.Recovery plan
The complete set of steps needed to recover (or test recovery of) the protected VMs in one or more protection groups.

Most of the above information is taken from VMware SRM 5.0 Evaluators guide & VMware SRM Admin guide

Internet Explorer running slow/crashes

We have a corporate standard and we have to use Internet Explorer. But few of the widgets in dashboard were running very slow OR it used to crash the IE itself. Earlier, we thought it might be an issue with my computer, so we tried it on my laptop then my  colleagues desktop, they all faced the similar issue.

On the same box, Firefox version 10.0 was working fine. So, we knew, it is a IE issue or something with the plugins. To fix the problem we did the following but that did not help

1. Uninstalled/Disabled the anti-virus

2. Disabled Add-on in IE

3. Compared IE security settings

4. Added vCOPS in trusted zones

3. Tried IE on a Windows 2008 server VM and it worked fine. So we ran RSoP trying to figure out if group policy is causing the issue but that did not help either.

VMware says, they have never seen something like this and it is a problem with our environment – Who is going to say that to upper Management . Finally, we came up with an idea and created ThinApp version of IE 8 to check, if it is a problem with IE or a problem with our environment.

When, we ran ThinApp version of IE and connected to dashboards it worked fine. So, now we know the problem is with our environment. I have a feeling this has to do with security settings/certificates, will let you know about my findings.

Finally, we were able to figure out the problem, the problem is related with McAfee and when we disabled the McAfee from the desktop it worked fine. We had to disable Framework Service and McAfee McShield.

To resolve the issue we configured the McAfee to avoid the scan of the UI URL.

Problem – VMware changes their Licensing model from CPU based to VM based.

Solution:- Spoke to VMware Licensing support about this issue. They were ready to cover 5 VMs per CPU License what we had purchased. I am not sure, from where they got this number. I think there are so many factors which determines the number of VMs per CPU. Factors like – Hardware, CPU, memory etc…I spoke with VMware about this issue and after showing the numbers of VMs in our environment, they readily agreed to cover more than VMs for per processor purchased.

So, earlier we were going to get almost – 100*5=500 VMs protection

Now, we are going to get 100*12=1200 VMs.

Thanks VMware Support for quick resolution !!!

They have a very good support. I had some issues configuring it and they helped me out.

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.PowerState -eq PoweredOn} | Where-Object {$_.version -lt "v7"}

1. Network issue
2. Switch issue
3. May be the VMware tools had a problem this VM is using VMXNet3 adapter.
4. Logged a call with VMware support and they wanted config logs for Networking switches – Network Manager was not at all happy when he heard that.

I just realized may be there might be a Duplicate MAC somewhere on the network that might be causing this problem. Here comes powershell to rescue. Did a google and found this nice script , from vNugglets which can tell us if there are any duplicate address on the network.

After running the script, we did find that there was indeed duplicate MAC address on the network which was causing this issue.
Thanks for the script it saved us lot of time.

On a side note :- I was wondering if there are duplicate MAC address across multiple VCenter Server, how are we going to troubleshoot that. Need to do some research to get answer to that question.

Description

The Enter-PSSession cmdlet starts an interactive session with a single remote computer. During the session, the commands that you type run on the remote computer, just as though you were typing directly on the remote computer. You can have only one interactive session at a time.
Typically, you use the ComputerName parameter to specify the name of the remote computer. However, you can also use a session that you create by using New-PSSession for the interactive session.
To end the interactive session and disconnect from the remote computer, use the Exit-PSSession cmdlet, or type "exit".

I was having trouble making this cmd work. Every time, I used to get the following error message

PS K:\> Enter-PSSession -computername 10.0.0.1 -credential USA\administrator
Enter-PSSession : Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request. Default authentication may be used w
ith an IP address under the following conditions: the transport is HTTPS or the destination is in the TrustedHosts list, and explicit credentials are provided. Use winrm
.cmd to configure TrustedHosts. Note that computers in the TrustedHosts list might not be authenticated. For more information on how to set TrustedHosts run the followin
g command: winrm help config. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
At line:1 char:16
+ Enter-PSSession <<<<  -computername 10.0.0.1 -credential USA\administrator
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (10.0.0.1:String) [Enter-PSSession], PSRemotingTransportException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CreateRemoteRunspaceFailed

After looking at help manuals and Google I found, using the following cmd "winrm quickconfig" at Powershell prompt on the destination computer will do the trick. It will enable firewall exceptions and will accept WS-Man requests to any IP on this machine.
I would like to have firewall exceptions just for few Ip Address and not "ANY IP address". Will have to do more research on this topic. Perhaps it warrents for another blogpost.

PS K:\> Enter-PSSession corp
[corp]: PS C:\Users\TOM\Documents>

All though I have not tested it throughtly, but I think there is lot of potential to use this cmd-let for day to day troubleshooting specially if you need to quickly connect to vcenter server OR some other server and want to have the link to the log files Or services that are running on the computer for example:-

To get a quick look at the services that are running for vmware

[corp]: PS C:\> Get-Service | Where-Object {$_.Displayname -like '*vm*'}

Status   Name               DisplayName
——        —-                     ———–
Running  ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS  VMwareVCMSDS
Stopped  vCOConfiguration   VMware vCenter Orchestrator Configu…
Running  vctomcat           VMware VirtualCenter Management Web…
Running  vimPBSM            VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Stora…
Running  VMTools            VMware Tools Service
Stopped  vmvss              VMware Snapshot Provider
Running  vpxd               VMware VirtualCenter Server

[corp]: PS C:\>

PowerCLI 5.0 Reference Poster

vSphere CLI ESXi5.0 Reference Poster

As as alternative to installing vCenter Server on a windows machine, you can download the VMware vCenter Server appliance. It is a preconfigured Linux based VM optimized for running vCenter Server.

Prerequisites

1. vSphere Client is already installed
2. You can deploy vCenter Appliance only on hosts that are running ESX version 4.x or ESXi version 4.x and later
3. Appliance required at least 7GB of disk space and is limited to a maximum size of 80 GB
4. Only Support Oracle as external database (Read this somewhere on the net)

I had a hard time in finding the download location. It seems you have to register first, (which makes sense) go to download page, and select the 3 individual files i.e the ovf file, the System disk and the data disk for vCenter Server 5.0 appliance

vCenter Appliance does not support following feature

1. MS SQL Server is not supported for vCenter Server Appliance
2. It does not support IPv6 configuration

The embedded database will note support more than 5 hots and 50 VMs.

Steps to Deploy vCenter Server Appliance

1. Download the appliance
2. Launch Vi Client -> Select Deploy OVf template
3. Select the ovf file from the Source
4. Click next or verify ovf template details
5. Give the VM name to your Appliance and click Next
6. Select the Storage Type and click Next
7. I prefer Thin Provision, click Next
8. Select Network and Click Next
9. Click on finish to start the provision process

Steps to Configure the Appliance

1. Initially when  the appliance boots it is configured to use DHCP. If your network is configured to use DHCP then it is good, otherwise you will have to manually enter the IP Address by selecting the Configure network option using the arrow keys.

1. Connect with your browner to the above IP Address <https://ipaddress:5480>
2. Accept the Certificate error message
3. Login as root and default password is vmware
4. Accept EULA
5. 
6. Wait for couple of seconds, it will show "requesting information
7. 
8. After this your Appliance is up and running but you will need to configure the database for vCenter Service to start. If you try to start the vCenter Server without configuring the database, you will get  a error message
9. 
10. To Configure database, click on the Database tab, from the Database Type drop down select embedded option. i don't have a oracle database to test this setup and click on save option under actions
11. 
12. Go back to the Status tab and start vCenter Server service after few secs vCenter Service will be up and running
13. 

That's it your vCenter Server is up and running.

I am sure, lots of people would like to reduce that RAM requirement, just reduced the RAM to 4GB and still works, this might help people who are working on VMware workstations. I am sure, there must be some reason why VMware recommended 8 GB of RAM. May be for production use its needs that much RAM. In my lab environment, I will further test this.

It also provides some good links to VMware compatibility guide. In my humble opinion everybody should go through this KB and guides before planning any production changes.

KB article 2005099