vcenter – New Age Technologies https://test.newat.com Need IT... Search IT... Find IT Thu, 09 Jun 2016 11:18:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Manually Using SYSPREP in Windows 2012 VMs and Templates https://test.newat.com/manually-using-sysprep-in-windows-2012-vms-and-templates/ Fri, 31 Oct 2014 01:50:38 +0000 http://vloreblog.com/?p=581 Recently, on a professional services engagement, we encountered a situation, where the Customization Wizard was failing to successfully apply SYSPREP to Windows 2012 Servers.  Because our main objective and my time was focused on other areas, we could not take time to resolve the underlying the root cause, so we needed a work-around.   This […]

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]]> Recently, on a professional services engagement, we encountered a situation, where the Customization Wizard was failing to successfully apply SYSPREP to Windows 2012 Servers.  Because our main objective and my time was focused on other areas, we could not take time to resolve the underlying the root cause, so we needed a work-around.   This led us to applying SYSPREP manually, which I had not done in a long time.  Here are the details that we applied toward using SYSPREP manually in a VM template

 

Our main concern is if we deploy two VMs from a template or VM that already has a SID, then an issue may occur if we try to add both new VMs to the domain.  The following error may occur when adding the second VM.

sysprep-1a

To fix this in the second VM, you can use these steps:

1 – Open RUN and enter sysprep

sysprep-2a

2 – Right-click on sysprep and choose Run as Administrator

sysprep-3a

3 – In the System Preparation Tool Window, set the System Cleanup Action dropdown = Enter System Out of Box Experience (OOBE). check the Generalize box, and set the Shutdown Options to Reboot.

sysprep-4a

4 – SYSPREP will run the necessary action and restart Windows.

5 – As Windows reboots, it will prompt for new Settings.  Apply the appropriate settings for this VM.   Windows will now have a new SID.

6. – After Windows starts, you should be able to successfully add it to the AD domain.

 

To avoid this issue in the future, deploy a Windows VMs from a template where SYSPREP has been used to strip the SID and where Windows will prompt for new settings on the next boot.  To prepare the template, perform these steps:

  • In a new VM, install Windows 2012 R2
  • Install VMware Tools
  • Install all Windows Updates
  • Use Steps 1 to 3 from above, except on step 3, set the Shutdown Options = Shutdown (not restart)
  • After Windows shutdown finishes, use the vSphere Client to right-click on the VM and choose Convert to Template

 

 

 

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]]> Custom vCenter Server Alarms and Actions https://test.newat.com/custom-vcenter-server-alarms-and-actions/ Sat, 08 Feb 2014 04:37:24 +0000 http://vloreblog.com/?p=474 As part of many of my vSphere related professional services engagements, such jumpstarts, designs, upgrades and health-checks, I typically address the alarms provided by VMware vCenter Server.  Frequently, I recommend creating some custom alarms and configuring specific actions on some alarms to meet customer needs.  Although my recommendations are unique for each customer, they tend […]

The post Custom vCenter Server Alarms and Actions appeared first on New Age Technologies.

]]> As part of many of my vSphere related professional services engagements, such jumpstarts, designs, upgrades and health-checks, I typically address the alarms provided by VMware vCenter Server.  Frequently, I recommend creating some custom alarms and configuring specific actions on some alarms to meet customer needs.  Although my recommendations are unique for each customer, they tend to have many similarities.  Here I am proving a sample of the recommendations that I provided to a customer in Los Angeles, whose major focus is to ensure high availability.  In this scenario, the customer does not use an SNMP management system, so we decided to use the option to send emails to the administration team,  instead of sending SNMP traps.  Also, in this scenario, the customer planned to configure Storage DRS in Manual mode, instead of Automatic mode.

vCenter Alarms and Email Notifications

Configure the Actions for the following pre-defined alarms to send email notifications.  I consider each of these alarms to be unexpected and worthy of immediate attention if they trigger in this specific vSphere environment.  Unless otherwise stated, configure the Action to occur only when the alarm changes to the Red state.

  • Host connection and power state (alerts if host connection state = “not responding” and host power state is NOT = Standby)
  • Host battery status
  • Host error
  • Host hardware fan status
  • Host hardware power status (HW Health tab indicates UpperCriticalThreshold = 675 Watts, UpperThresholdFatal=702 Watts)
  • Host hardware system board status
  • Host hardware temperature status
  • Host hardware voltage
  • Status of other host hardware object
  • vSphere HA host status
  • Cannot find vSphere master agent
  • vSphere HA failover in progress
  • vSphere HA virtual machine failover failed
  • Insufficient vSphere HA failover resources
  • Storage DRS Recommendation (if the decision is made to configure Storage DRS in a Manual Mode)
  • Datastore cluster is out of space
  • Datastore usage on disk (Red state is triggered at 85% usage)
  • Cannot connect to storage  (triggered if host loses connectivity to a storage device)
  • Network uplink redundancy degraded
  • Network uplink redundancy lost
  • Cannot connect to storage  (triggered if host loses connectivity to a storage device)
  • Health status monitoring (triggers if changes occur to overall vCenter Service status)
  • Virtual Machine Consolidation Needed status (triggered if a Delete Snapshot task failed for a VM)

Consider creating these custom alarms on the folders where critical VMs.  Optionally, define email actions on some of these.

  • Datastore Disk Provisioned (%)   (set yellow trigger to 100%, where the provisioned disk space meets or exceeds the capacity.)
  • VM Snapshot size (set to trigger at 2 GB)
  • VM Max Total Disk Latency  (set trigger at 20 ms for 1 minute)
  • VM CPU Ready Time – assign these to individual VMs or folders, depending on the number of vCPUs (total virtual cores) assigned to each VM

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