What’s new in vSphere 5.5

Another VMworld is upon us, and once again I’m not attending. The big irony in 2013: I LIVE in the host city!

Anyway, for all the people slaving away at work (no doubt on a VMware product) like me… this one’s for you:

• What’s new in vSphere 5.5
ESX and ESXi, vCenter, VMware

• Making VMware Update Manager 5.1.1 (and 5.5) work with SQL 2012

  Posted on May 24th, 2013 ashinn No comments

  06/07/2013 – UPDATE: A reader commented, and this is still an issue with 5.1.1a.

  11/25/2013 – UPDATE: Thanks to user comments, VMware has finally published a KB to this issue: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2050256 also users report (as does the KB) this is an issues on 5.5.

  My lab was getting pretty dirty, so I thought why not start from scratch with vSphere 5.1.1. I figured it was also a great time to refresh my old lab SQL Failover Cluster with Server 2012 and SQL 2012 too. I had been wanting to play with AOAG and the other new(er) toys 2012 had to offer anyway.

  From what I can tell, technically vSphere is officially supported on SQL 2012??? Being the rebel I am, I pressed on undeterred by a support matrix anyway.

  Everything went as planned during the vSphere Install, and I was pretty happy. Then it came time to get Update Manager working. I installed it as usual, creating the required 32-bit DSN using the SQL 11.0 native client (what comes with SQL 2012). It installed normally and worked for about 3 minutes. Then the Update Manager service started to die repeatedly. I checked out the logs in C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Update Manager\Logs, and I saw this:

  mem> 2013-05-24T14:18:25.299-07:00 [02472 info ‘VcIntegrity’] Logged in!
  mem> 2013-05-24T14:18:25.611-07:00 [03288 error ‘Default’] Unable to allocate memory: 4294967294 bytes
  mem> 2013-05-24T14:18:25.720-07:00 [03288 panic ‘Default’] (Log recursion level 2) Unable to allocate memory

  I was like oh, some sort of Java nonsense. I tinkered around a bit, looked in the VMware KB and Google. Nothing really seemed to help.

  I started to wonder if SQL was the issue, so I bumped the Update Manager DB down to 10.0/SQL 2008 compatibility mode…. no joy. Then I installed the 10.0 native client from SQL 2008 R2 media, and recreated the 32-bit DSN. I started Update Manager back up and BAM …it seems to be stable for a couple days now.

  If this wasn’t a lab I’d call VMware to complain, but alas it is lab. looked through the 5.1.1 release notes, and I don’t see anything about this? For the record, all other portions of vSphere worked fine with 11.0 native client, including SSO.

  Till next time…

  ESX and ESXi, vCenter, VMware Update Manager panic, SQL 2012, SQL native client, Update Manager, update manager service stops, vmware, vSphere, VUM

• What’s new in vSphere 5.1 – for those who missed VMworld 2012

  Posted on September 1st, 2012 ashinn No comments

  Well, if you’re a loser like me… you didn’t attend VMworld 2012. I figured I’d at least read all of the “What’s New” PDF’s though, and here is a collection of them! So much is either improved OR great new features, it’s hard to know where to start!

  So far I think I’m most excited about the usable web client (goodbye VIC and terminal servers!) and replication. The new cached auto deploy options look nice too, but on diskless / usbless / sdless UCS blades it won’t do much for someone like me. Another thing that really interested me was the support for LACP on distributed virtual switches too.

  This is widely reported, but the licensing model changed more/less back to the way it was too.

  Anyway, here they are:

  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1
  • What’s new in VMware vCenter 5.1
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Storage
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance
  • Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication
  • Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection
  • What’s new in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
  • What’s new in vCloud Director 5.1
  • Pricing Document

  Till next time…

  ESX and ESXi, vCenter

• VMware vSphere ADAM/LDS issues after an in-place OS upgrade.

  Posted on July 26th, 2012 ashinn No comments

  I’m not a huge fan of doing in-place OS upgrades, but sometimes its just a necessary evil. Today I upgraded one of our vCenter servers from Server 2003 R2 64-bit to Server 2008 R2, which is a supported upgrade path from Microsoft.

  The OS upgrade itself went smoothly, but about 10 minutes after the final reboot vSphere Service Status alerted on these two issues:

  • LDAP replication health monitor – Failed to initialize LDAP instance manager
  • LDAP backup task monitor – JoinTool initialization error

  If you didn’t already know, vCenter relies upon Microsoft ADAM which was renamed Lightweight Directory Service. vCenter uses this as a repository for things like roles, license keys and many other metadata-ish stuff.

  I searched around the VMware KB & Google and really didn’t find anything useful. Then I dug through the vCenter Webservices Logs (vws.log), and ran into this:

  Action: Local ldap environment verification
  Problem: LDAP tools not found in “C:WindowsADAM”

  I zeroed in on: Problem: LDAP tools not found in “C:WindowsADAM and compared that directory between a known working vCenter on Server 2008 R2 and this problem child server.

  Sure enough 3 files were missing:

  • DSACLS.EXE
  • LDIFDE.EXE
  • REPADMIN.EXE

  After synchronizing that directory with the working server, I restarted vCenter Web Services and the errors went away! My assumption would be that during the upgrade those files were nuked as the LDS role was re-applied.

  For folks who might not know, here’s a VMware KB article for log file locations: KB1021804

  Till next time…

  ESX and ESXi, vCenter, Windows ADAM, esx, JoinTool, vcenter, vmware