Everyone has ideas of where virtualization is heading, what it will look like, and how everything’s moving to cloud computing. I’ve pretty much built our internal cloud, and it’s somewhat limited to PaaS, with a move to include SaaS. I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and virtualization overall over the next two years.
In This Post, I created certificates for my SRM & vCenter servers where I used a separate signing authority. What if you don’t have one, but still want to use your own certs? You create your own Root Certificate Authority (root CA) via OpenSSL. Here’s how…
Some of the documentation around creating certificates for vCenter or SRM seems to be lacking, so I documented a few steps for each and outlined the differences, also created a video :)
This can be done from any machine, as long as openssl is installed. If you’re creating/requesting multiple certs, create folders for each request and work from within there so you don’t mix them up. I use d:\cert\vcenter and d:\cert\srm. I added “D:\OpenSSL-Win32\bin\” to may path variable so it’ll work in any folder I’m in.
Most people want to go from thick to thin to save space. I, on the other hand, want to convert my VMs from thin to thick. Thin provisioning buys you time, basically, but what do you do when you’re vastly over provisioned and your VMs are filling up available physical storage? Sure, you can manually go to each VM and use the GUI to migrate them and convert each one to thick. I had a couple hundred that were thin provisioned and needed them converted to thick.
I’ve been moving from 500GB LUNs to 1TB LUNs, so I scripted it out to migrate VMs over, as well as convert to thick using the New-Object cmdlet.
I did an in-place upgrade of vCenter to 5.0 from 4.1 and everything seemed to go fine. When I checked heartbeat, it was barking about some services, so I checked and sure enough, VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices wouldn’t start.
I checked the commons-daemon log file (located here Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\logs) and found this:
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Commons Daemon procrun (1.0.5.0 64-bit) started
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Running ‘vctomcat’ Service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Starting service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] Failed creating java
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] ServiceStart returned 1
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Run service finished.
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Commons Daemon procrun finished
I did some googling, which had suggestions such as lowering the VM heap size from 1024MB to 512MB, checking for port conflicts, etc. What fixed it for me was specifying the location of jvm.dll in the jre that came with the vCenter installation. It’s highlighted in the attached pic, which I installed on D, yours may be different. After that, vctomcat started fine.
A few months ago, a reader by the name of Tolga ŞENTEKİN came across This Post looking for something to do a little more. Tolga was looking to script out DR for some VMs he has that use NetApp with & without RDMs. He & I spent about three weeks putting a script together to do the following:
Tolga wrote the vast majority of the script, with me only contributing some of the datastore, LUN, & iSCSI stuff.
I uploaded it and have provided a link, since I didn’t want it to get sauteed up from a C&P.
Click HERE to download a copy of the script (right-click, save-as). Obviously, you will need to edit & fine tune for your environment, but he & I wanted to share with the community.
I loath the Nexus 1000v. That is all…