Tuesday, June 20, 2017

vSphere Web Client - Unmount Datastore Grayed out.

It was time to decommission one of our iSCSI datastores.  I ensured the following:
  • All VMs, snapshots and templates have been migrated off.
  • Datastore is not used for HA heartbeat
  • Not part of a datastore cluster.
  • Not configured as a coredump partition
  • Storage I/O Control disabled 
**Go through the complete unmounting a LUN checklist prior to unmounting a LUN: 


When I tried to unmount the datastore, using the vSphere Web Client, the option was grayed out...


Workaround: 
After going through the detailed checklist in VMware KB 2004605  I went OLD SCHOOL and used the VMware vSphere Client to log directly into the host using the Datastore.  Through the vSphere Client, I was able to successfully unmount the datastore.

FYI - You can still point your vSphere Client directly to an ESXi 6.5 host.


Jan 23rd 2018 Update:
It happened again, this time I used the web client pointed directly at the ESXi host to perform the unmount function:


Friday, June 16, 2017

VMWare vCenter Converter 6.1.1 works with vSphere 6.5

** Confirmed - I have successfully P2V'd a production SQL server managed by a vCenter 6.5 server. No Biggie**

I recently received a request to P2V an old Windows Server 2008 R2 server.  I'll be honest, the last time I used Converter was with version 5.X.

I go to VMware.com and the latest version of VMware Converter is 6.1.1.  This version was released back in February of 2016. This predates the release of vSphere 6.5.

Sure enough, in the VMware Converter document, it states that it only supports up to vCenter Server 6.0.  I'm running vSphere 6.5, time to test...

** Perform the VM conversion at your own risk. This is not a VMware supported configuration **

Fortunately, this version is very similar to previous versions I've used.  I installed the Converter application on the source VM and "let er run".  Nothing fancy, the default options were taken

Well, I lucked out and was able to successfully perform the migration.  Good Luck!

Thursday, June 8, 2017

vCSA 6.5: How to Find Which PSC your vCSA is pointing to, its SSO Domain Name and SSO Site Name

I was recently asked for some SSO and PSC config info for a vCSA running version 6.5.  Just SSH into your vCSA and run the following one-liners:

To find your SSO Domain Name:
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-domain-name --server-name localhost

To find your SSO Site Name:
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-site-name --server-name localhost

To find you which PSC your vCSA is pointing to:
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-ls-location --server-name localhost