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VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 – First Impressions

When VMware created the vRealize brand, they grouped together some of their most complex products under one banner. vRealize Automation (vRA) required the deployment and configuration of two components – a virtual appliance and a Windows server. The Windows server had a long list of prerequisites. In terms of operational management, using products like vRA meant ongoing work on scripts, workflows and other artifacts. The logical response to this is to create a non-production instance to protect your production instance. Moving updates to production could be achieved manually or via VMware’s Codestream product, but both approaches left a lot to be desired. vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager (vRSLCM or just LCM) is a new approach to this set of problems.

Getting LCM Running

LCM comes supplied as a “Virtual Application” where a few configuration options are required to provision it. One of the LCM-specific settings is whether you want to enable the vaguely named “Content Management”. Enabling this will cause the appliance to use 4 processors instead of 2. Once the appliance is deployed and started, the rest of the configuration happens via the web interface. Image

  • in IT
  • 3 min read

Project Honolulu – First impressions

Project Honolulu is Microsoft’s attempt at revamping the server administration experience. Historically the Windows server toolkit has been built around using numerous MMC (Microsoft Management Console) plugins – things like Event Viewer, AD Users and Computers and DNS Management are all built on MMC. We’ve seen a couple of attempts at revamping this in the past, there was Server Manager in 2008 and a refreshed form in 2012.

I suspect one of the driving forces behind Honolulu is the shift from RPC-based connectivity to WinRM for remote administration of servers. Honolulu seems to represent an alignment with this since it supports only Server 2012 onwards as nodes to manage, and its gateway component installs on Windows 10 or 2016. The documentation claims the management functions are performed using remote powershell or WMI over WinRM.

  • in vCenter
  • 2 min read

VCSA 6.5 Root Account Password – Reset and Cause Investigation

One of the more frustrating experiences one can experience with VMware’s vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is having the root account locked out or forgetting the password for it. I recently experienced this after I rebuilt the VCSA in my home lab from scratch.

How to Reset the VCSA Root Password VMware have a short process on how to reset the password for the root account, detailed in KB2147144. THe process is:

  1. Backup the VCSA (via snapshot or other means)
  2. Reboot the VCSA
  3. During the boot process, when the photon splash screen appears press the e key to get into the boot menu
  4. In the text box that appears, go to the line starting with “linux”. Go to the end of the line (which is right after the text “consoleblank=0”) and enter the text rw init=/bin/bash This will cause the boot process to jump right into the bash shell without needing credentials
  5. Press F10 to continue booting
  6. At the command prompt, run the passwd command to reset the password
  7. Unmount the file system by running umount /
  8. Reboot the VCSA using reboot -f
  9. Following reboot, confirm the new password works
  10. If you took a snapshot in step 1 remove it
  • in Nexpose
  • 2 min read

Adding extra service mappings to Nexpose

Nexpose does have good coverage of services in the “well known” range of ports (0-1024). An environment with a lot of propriety systems will cause Nexpose to some services as unknown or even misidentifying them. The screenshot below is a good example of this.

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The example is from a Domain Controller. Nexpose identifies the port 3389 service correctly as RDP. Ports 3269/32769 are used by the Global Catalog service, so labelling them as LDAP/LDAPS isn’t strictly accurate. For port 3260 and 5666 it gives up. Depending on your needs, you may want to get these labels a bit more accurate. This can be achieved by using a custom service names file (you can alter the default one, but it’s probably best to leave that in its default state).

The default file, default-services.properties, is located in the <install location>/plugins/java/1/NetworkScanners/1 folder. The format is basic, with each line as <port #>/<tcp or udp>=<Service Name>. Some of the custom ports I added are shown below:

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Once the properties file is in a state you’re happy with, place it in the same folder as the default one and either create a new or edit an existing scan template and put the file name into the field on the Service Discovery section. Load up the page of an asset to test and queue a scan on it with the scan template. The reported services should update with the new values.

  • in NSX
  • 5 min read

VMware NSX – First Impressions

One of the first “killer applications” on the PC platform was Lotus 1-2-3, a spread sheeting program that greatly improved the productivity of the people using it and making a clear case for buying PCs. More recently, we’ve seen this sort of thing happening in IT infrastructure, with virtualisation, automation, cloud and “as a service”. VMware’s NSX product is the latest in a line of products from VMware in this sort of area.

If we go back to the “good old days” of getting a server up and running, it could take weeks. The diagram below shows the amount of effort involved.

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While some of these numbers may have been more or less depending on circumstances, in many cases it could’ve taken over 150 business hours to get a server ready for use. Or almost a full month.

With the introduction of virtualisation, a number of these tasks were removed or diminished due to the hardware provisioning process being decoupled from the server provisioning process. With this, plus better automation tools that have appeared in recent years, the common timeline today may look like this:

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  • in Horizon
  • 4 min read

VMware Horizon 7 – First Impressions

VMware Horizon is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product which initially allowed provisioning of Virtual Desktops off a base image in an easily to manage fashion. Over time, VMware have added extra functionally, such as the ability to add Remote Desktop Services (RDS) servers.

Version 7 has added a number of interesting features and improvements. The one mentioned first in the release notes is Instant Clones. This is a technology I’ve been following for a while, ever since I read about it. Originally known as VMFork, it’s a technology to allow very rapid, almost instant, provisioning of Virtual Machines. Duncan Epping wrote a good overview of VMFork/Instant Clone back in 2014. Support for Virtual Volumes and Linux desktops are some of the other features that have been added.

  • in Telstra
  • 2 min read

Results from Telstra’s Free Data Day

Telstra had another free data day on Sunday 3rd April and this time I decided to take advantage of it since my phone has been capable of giving back speed test results of 90Mbits/sec compared to 12 on my ADSL.

Prep & Setup

Unfortunately I made the assumption that my wifi adapter would work again since the Windows 10 upgrade I performed on my PC. I went to bed early and set the alarm so I would wake up around 3am. Due to issues with getting the adapter working, I lost about an hour and started around 4:30am. The primary aim was to download a number of games on Steam that I hadn’t downloaded yet.

SQL As A Service Proof of Concept with SQL 2012 and vRealize Automation

Standing up a redundant/highly available database infrastructure can be one of the more complicated pieces of work. Doing it by hand is a long process with any points where errors could happen. It was with this in mind that I decided to use this as my first “project” with vRealize Automation.

A Brief History of SQL Server High Availability

When discussing redundancy or high availability (HA) for databases, there’s two distinct outcomes – firstly to ensure the continued delivery of the service in the event of infrastructure failure (the actual HA part) and secondly to ensure the data is kept in an orderly fashion (data integrity, no loss of data, etc). Where these two activities happen depend on the technology used.

In older versions of SQL Server, these outcomes were achieved using SQL Clustering. In SQL Clustering, the HA function was achieved at the server level by having 2 or more servers, while data integrity was maintained by the database residing on shared storage.

Want hands on with Virtual Volumes? EMC has a Virtual Appliance for that

Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a new method of managing storage introduced in VMware vSphere 6.0. Unlike many of the new features in vSphere 6.0, VVols requires not just vSphere 6.0 to work, but a storage device that supports the technology. Fortunately, EMC have produced a virtual appliance that emulates a storage device with VVol support, so you can get some practical exposure to Virtual Volumes without needing a shiny new storage array. Download and documetation can be found at http://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/vvols.htm The process for getting Virtual Volumes completely working is rather long, as the flow chart from EMC’s documentation below shows:

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I’ll run through the steps in getting the Appliance and Virtual Volumes working on a vSphere installation.

vRealize Automation 7.0 – First Impressions

vRealize Automation is, as VMware puts it, cloud automation software. It’s the black box where the magic that happens between a customer or consumer of your cloud services and the infrastructure the cloud sits on, providing the services we would normally associate with a cloud service such as self-service, elasticity and multi-tenant support.

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In the past, this product was known as vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It was rebranded along with a number of other VMware products under the vRealize banner. However, the newly branded vRealize Automation product still retains some references to vCAC.