VMware Metro Cluster - DRS Automation with TAGS

 

Hello guys, in this post I will show you a how to use TAGs in VMware to distinguish the Site where the virtual machines are running. In this way,  and using PowerCLI Scripts we are able to allocate the VM to the Host of the respective site with the help of DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler).
It is possible to make these configurations without using TAGs, but I think that this way it is more flexible, simple and elegant. The only requirement is to have Metro Cluster working properly (it's not in this scope how to configure a vSphere Metro Cluster) and the vSphere Enterprise Plus license on every Host.

This is very useful if you have a Metro Cluster, and you want that VMs that are on Site 1 Storage to run on the Hosts in Site 1 and vice-versa for Site 2. If you don't use this feature, you may end up having VMs on Site 1 Storage running on Site 2 Hosts and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to make these settings automatically in the vCenter. (I hope that VMware in future releases will place the option of TAGs directly in the DRS, instead of the name of the VMs). So let's deep dive to the PowerCLI Scripts.

VMware Horizon with HAProxy Cluster LoadBalancer

It's been a while and since I had this post in draft for a long time I finally decided to finish it and publish it. What I'm going to show you is how to make a HAProxy Cluster for VMware Horizon connections with Load Balancing (LB) for two or more active VMware Horizon Connection Servers.

This LB Cluster solution is free (Linux environments) and can be used for other solutions that do not use the same ports (in this case 80, 443 and 8443). In turn, Connection Servers communicate with vCenter to redirect users to the correct VDI Pools after Active Directory authentication.
Let's see how to configure HAProxy redundantly using two CentOS 7 servers.

Errors with Custom vCenter Appliance 6.7 Certificates and SRM 8.1 (Error 25239)

In this post I decided to talk about two topics regarding vCenter certificates. VMware has improved a lot, but there are still a few bugs and some strange errors. I will show you how to import new custom certificates into vCenter 6.7 and how to resolve an error 25239 installing SRM 8.1. I had this error in a customer and the troubleshoot was quite difficult and the problem was certificate related. So here are my notes about the two topics:

• Installing custom certificates into vCenter 6.7 and troubleshooting
• Installing SRM 8.1 with custom certificates in vCenter 6.7 and troubleshooting

VMware Troubleshoot Commands, Logs and Performance - ESXTOP

Today in this post I will show you some commands and logs to try to solve some errors in a VMware environment. I'll give special attention to a very useful command called esxtop

 

What I'm going to show is the following: 

• Important Log Files

• Useful ESXi Commands

• Some ESXi Configuration Files

• ESXTOP Command

Let's Begin!

Create Multiple Mount Points in Multiple Disks in one Datastore VMware

I was in a costumer where I had to create many disks to present to several virtual machines in VMware. The Datastores were few, but I had to create 60 disks in each VM (maximum supported with four SCSI controllers). To increase complexity, all of these Volumes in Windows meant to be Mount Points. To optimize this process I had to create some Scripts to help me.

I splited in different points:

• Script to add multiple disks from one datastore to a VM;
• Script to change all the Disks paths to Round Robin (The Storage was a HPE 3PAR);
• Script to Create all the Windows Mount Points;
• Script to view the Mount Points created.

Let's see how to do it!

Upgrade HPE Storage 3PAR to v3.3.1 - Upgrade Service Processor to v5.0

SP5 Release Notes:
https://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00002915fr_fr

3PAR 3.3.1 Relase Notes:
https://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00017203en_us


Service Processor 5.0 is completely new and there is only one way to upgrade. Lets find out how.

VMware Package Tools

Sometimes when we install a virtual machine with applications and drivers that are not standard, we have difficulty installing VMware Tools. So, in this post I will provide you a link where you can find all the drivers from all VMware versions. With this you can install a single driver or you can troubleshoot a spcific issue.

The page looks like this: