Increase efficiency with vRealize Log Insight

Syslog Server – a time saving tool

Today I’m writing about a use case, which is not very popular amongst IT professionals. Troubleshooting by parsing system logs. Sounds attractive as a dental surgery.

Almost any system and any component logs events, warnings and errors into some kind of internal log. Emphasis is on any and internal, because that’s part of the problem. Log information isn’t usually easy accessible. And once you’ve copied all logs to a common location, you need to scroll through it by a text editor. This is cumbersome and tricky. If you – for example – have to align events from a server with events from a switch, you’ll need multiple steps to achieve it. A very time-consuming procedure. If you have bad luck (Murphy says, you will..), one of the components is unavailable, because an error occurred. No log – no analysis. Continue reading “Increase efficiency with vRealize Log Insight”

4. April 20189. October 2018

Increase root partition on VCSA

First aid if VCSA root partition turns out to be too small

I recent times I frequently see vCenter server appliances (VCSA), whose root partitions ran out of free space. As a result services are unable to start after reboot. There are some tricks to free some space on root but on the long run you should increase the partition size.

Sounds simple – but it’s quite tricky and a bit dangerous. Don’t try this at home! 😉

Continue reading “Increase root partition on VCSA”

2. April 20182. April 2018

Update vSphere H5 Fling

New Version 3.36.0

Since vSphere 6.5 the HTML5 client (vSphere-Client) is an integral part of the environment and is geting updated with more and more features with every release of vCenter. It is to get rid of the infamous flash client (web-client) sooner or later.

In distributions below 6.5 there’s no HTML5 client included. But it is possible to get the functionality with a fling.

Continue reading “Update vSphere H5 Fling”

20. November 20179. October 2018

Backup vCenter Server High Availability nodes

Using Veeam Backup to protect VCHA

The vCenterServer Appliance (VCSA) is becoming more and more important. Many vSphere-related services rely deeply on the availability of vCenter. So it was a logic move to make vCenter more available by having an active, a passive and a witness node of vCenter in your cluster. In case the active appliance breaks, the passive appliance will take over.

I’ve been experimenting with VCHA for a while. Although I’m not yet satisfied with the failover time (5-10 minutes), I think it is a move into the right direction. I wouldn’t call it “high” availability right now – maybe “elevated” availability. But nevertheless the failover time might be alright for many environments today and it is used for production. That raises an important question:

How to backup a vCenter High Availability node?

If you have a standalone VC you’ll just make a backup or replica and you’re finished. But VCHA consists of 3 components and before backing up you’ll need to find out which one is the active node, because VMware only supports VADP-based backups (VMware vStorage API for Data Protection) of the active node. There’s no point in backing up the passive node or the witness. Keep in mind that active and passive node may have switched roles since last backup! Continue reading “Backup vCenter Server High Availability nodes”