VM-BLOG.INFO

During my Lab upgrade which went quiet smoothly and successfully, I came across this warning “The Number of vSphere HA Heartbeat datastore for host esx01.home.intra in cluster Prod in home is 0, which is less than required: 2” in the Tasks and events.

This must be a new feature “vSphere HA Heartbeat” of VSphere 5.0.

Let’s digin.

Prior this version, if we have a Host which is isolated from the cluster on its network management, HA will kick in and restart the VMs running on this host on a different ESX host and now with vSphere 5.0, a new feature has been added to the HA, vCenter will check the heartbeat on the Management network and also on the Vmkernal side. This Datastore Heartbeat feature should give a more accurate and determine if the given host has failed or this has just had a glitch somewhere.

Now once I’ve presented my storage to these two ESXi hosts, this warning disappeared and both ESXi have chosen the presented LUNs for storage heartbeating. How cool is this?

This is a while since I was looking for time to do my home lab upgrade to vSphere 5.0. The time came in and managed to stage an upgrade of my vCenter to version 5. Once this has been a success and with no troubles and I had to bring both ESXi Hosts to Version 4.1 at least to be manageable by vCenter 5.0. both ESXi have been upgraded to 4.1 and all well until I started getting this error Call”ClusterComputerResource.Destroy” for Object “Prod” on vCenter Server “vCenter.home.intra” when logging on to my vCenter with the viclient.

Hectic and annoying when you wanted to start working with the vSphere 5 but luckily the fix for this was by removing the vCenter VM from the hosted ESXi  inventory and re-adding it back to it.

When you think that everything was resolved I got a second error popping up

Call”Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo” for Object “home” on vCenter Server “vCenter.home.intra” when trying to add my newly upgraded ESXi host to version 4.1 “no error to report when I’ve added the second ESXi 4.1 to the vCenter”.  The error state that there is a connection error when trying to add this host so I tried to add it using the IP address and this was a success, that was a problem with the FQDN with this host. From the vCenter server I’ve pinged the Host FQDN and I’m getting no response and had a look at the DNS and cannot see the ESXi A record of this one “I must have deleted this before”, a simple add of the A Record Entry in the DNS, ipconfig /flushdns and /registerdns was sufficient to have my host pingable from my vCenter and from there adding this was a success too. Badabing badaboom we back to work.

This is a while since VMware released the vSphere version 5 and the time has come to move on to the next level. Multiple new features have been shipped with this new version and one of the cool features that I’ve read about is the storage appliance VMware VSA which can be used if you do not have any external NAS/SAN solution in your network. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance when installed can be setup as storage cluster between two, three hosts and share the datastore this between ESXi hosts (this is an excellent solution for a small business or someone who want to test VMware capacities before investing). With this you can play around with it, vMotion your virtual machines, share the datastore for all these hosts, replicate between ESXi hosts and have it as one solution for availability, failover capability between your hosts.

Anyway, my point in this article is to talk about my plan in upgrading my Home lab and also my Certification . Lot of reading gone on in the last few weeks/months preparing myself and I think time has now come to start by upgrading my Home lab. This is now sitting on the vCenter and ESXi version 4 and looking forward to do an upgrade rather than a migration.

My current setup consists of:

Physical:

-          2 x ESXi hosted on 2 x identic Xeon XW6400 with 8gig Ram, 500gig local storage each that I’ve had from my former employee (RIP Symbian).

-          1 x external NFS, iSCSI storage (QNAP SS-439 Turbo NAS) with 800gig Storage.

-          1 x NetGear Prosafe 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch.

-          1 x NetGear Router for DHCP.

-          1 x HP NC6400 Laptop with Veeam Backup and replication V.5 installed on it (Thanks to Veeam).

Virtual:

My Virtual infrastructure sit on a Windows 2008 and R2 versions (AD/DNS, MS SQL, Citrix XenApp, vCenter).

Lots of reading and planning gone and though of and now it’s my turn to give back to the community what I’m planning to achieve.

My first step is going to be the migration of the vCenter to Version 5 before moving my ESXi hosts to the same version. Some few requirements that will to be taken into consideration are:

Pre-Upgrade Tasks:

• The Software and Hardware requirement:  vCenter 5.0 Server requires a 64-Bit Software and Hardware.
• Database requirement:

1-      Do backup your Database or take a snapshot of this one from your ESX/ESXi host before moving on.
2-      Might be the time to upgrade your vCenter Database if you are still on Express 2005 as this is no longer  supported or move to an a Database Server that is now supported (vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Guide, pg  29.)
3-      Be sure that you have/Created a 64Bit DSN prior the migration and the DSN is using the SQL Native Client driver.

• Make the most of the vCenter 5.0 upgrade installation file by using the vCenter Host Agent pre-Upgrade Checker as this will report any issue and might prevent a successful upgrade.
• If the VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft (MSCS) are being used to protect the vCenter, make sure that these are disabled prior the upgrade or you will have your vCenter started somewhere else (Unintentional Failover).

Post-upgrade tasks:

Once the upgrade has been successful and tested all your vCenter to resolve any issues before moving to the next level it is the time to do a Post-upgrade for this migration. The list is not limited to the bellow but these are important as far as I’m concerned.

Some of these Post-Upgrade are:

• Re-install and re-configure the vCenter Plug-ins on your vSphere.
• Again make the most of vCenter and use the 60 days Trial licence until your VMware infrastructure has been upgraded to version 5.0 and then install your vSphere 5.0 Licence key.
• If you are still managing a vi3.x hosts, install the VirtualCenter 2.5 Licence Server.
• If you have been using your VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft Cluster Server MSCS, this is the time to re-enable these.

You can find several resources on how to migrate a vCenter server to 5.0 and one of which I do recommend is reading this blog from vmguru.nl

In the next couple of days (Starting from tonight), I will go around and play with the upgrade and also stage a migration as well for testing and also posing the result and experience on this blog.

Any comment are more than welcome.

Wow, finally got my VCP exam after a long time studying and playing with it. passed this last Friday and I got 419 which will allow me to continue if I wanted so. Now priority for sure is to Land a job on VMware and hopefully get more experience with this.

If you are plaing to pass your VCP, lots of videos and learning stuff are available at the VMware.com website and also the Simon long blog is one of the best to test your knowledge.
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