vCenter 6.0 Installation Video

Hope you are doing good,

Today I was installing vCenter 6.0 for my lab purpose so I though of creating video for the same.

Please have just 8 minutes to see how to install VMware vCenter 6.0.

Read More

The VMRC Console has Disconnected.. Trying to reconnect

If you came accross the error The VMRC Console has Disconnected.. Trying to reconnect on your virtual machine console here is a sollution you can use.

1. Log off from vSphere client from your laptop
   
2. open the task manager & kill vmware-vmrc.exe*32 process.
   
3. Logoff form your system & login back.
   
4. Open the VM console & you should be able to see the VM screen.
   
5. If its still shows you same error wait for 5 minutes precisely & you will be able to see the screen.

Read More

Reset ESXi VMware Evaluation license to 60 days.

Today my lab evalaution license was end with 0 days remaining; I found good way to reset your VMware licence evaluation mode back to 60 days so you can use it for more 60 days & reset again after 60 days.

now there is no need to format / reinstall your ESXi & vCenter to reset your licence.

Note: I will not suggest this to use in your production environment but you can use it for your lab.

here are the steps below:

Reset licence on ESXi host:

A) For ESX 4  & ESXi 4 , 5

1. Login to the TSM through SSH or Shell
2. Remove the following two files:
3. /etc/vmware/vmware.lic
4. /etc/vmware/license.cfg
5. Reboot server

use below command to do the task

# m -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

#reboot

B) For ESXi 5.1, 5.5 & 6

For ESXi 5.1 and ESXi 5.5, you may need to continually remove the license files as the server reboots for this to work.  The following should do this quite nicely:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

reboot ; while true ; do

    rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

done

An alternative shows that restarting the services should works just as well as rebooting the server: 

# For ESXi 5.0

rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

services.sh restart

# For ESXi 5.1

rm -r /etc/vmware/license.cfg

cp /etc/vmware/.#license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

The alternative also shows a method for resetting the trial license while connected to vCenter server.  I still think removing and re-adding the ESXi server is cleaner.

Update: 25/08/2015

use below command for 5.1

rm -r /etc/vmware/license.cfg
cp /etc/vmware/.#license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Reset ESXi Licence

Rated 4.9/5 based on 892 reviews

Read More

What is Perennial Reservation?

I had a problem with MSCS cluster when I rebooted one of the ESXi host & found that ESXi host was stopped responding at the time of boot / discovery.

Then I got to know that there were 32 RDM were mapped to VM which were causing the issue

What are perennial reservations and why are they needed? Whenever a LUN is participating in a MSCS cluster, the active node has ownership of that device(s) using permanent SCSI reservations. Now, whenever you rescan for devices on an ESXi host, or are booting an ESXi host, the host tries to query all devices that it can see, including the devices used for MSCS. Now, I'm not exactly sure what takes place during the query process, but because the MSCS device(s) are already have a permanent SCSI reservation, the ESXi query to the device fails, and will continue to fail until the host decides to move on

To solve the problem of of ESXi trying to query MSCS owned devices, a flag has been introduced on a device called Is Perennially Reserved. By default this flag is set to false. By setting this flag to true it lets the ESXi host know to essentially, NOT query this device during rescans/boot time.  Here's VMware KB 1016106 that describes that problem/resolution

Read the KB from VMware which talks about more

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016106

Read More

ESXi/ESX hosts and compatible virtual machine hardware versions

ESXi/ESX version	Hardware version					Compatible with vCenter Server version
	Version 10	Version 9	Version 8	Version 7	Version 4
ESXi 5.5	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	vCenter Server 5.5
ESXi 5.1	Not Supported	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	vCenter Server 5.1
ESXi 5.0	Not Supported	Not Supported	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	Edit, Run	vCenter Server 5.0
ESXi/ESX 4.x	Not Supported	Not Supported	Not Supported	Create, Edit, Run	Create, Edit, Run	vCenter Server 4.x
ESX 3.x	Not Supported	Not Supported	Not Supported	Not Supported	Create, Edit, Run	vCenter Server 2.x and later

Read More