Allow Virtual machines with duplicate MAC address on vSphere 5.5
In a migration project to VMware vSphere 5.5 I bumped into duplicate MAC address issue (I found out after some investigation).
Some info on the setup.
There are ESXi hosts that we are migrating from 5.0 to 5.5. Some VM’s where 2 VM’s (VM1 and VM2) share the same MAC address (production and test machine).
On ESXi 5.0 these 2 VM’s can run together on the same ESXi host.
I want to move the VM’s to an already upgraded ESXi 5.5 host, the first VM (VM1 moves without any problems. ) For the second VM (VM2) I get following error during vMotion. Same error happens when I cold migrate the VM2 to the same host (ESXi 5.5) as VM1 and try to power VM2 on.
After some Google research I came across following blog
http://jasonnash.com/2008/08/30/disabling-mac-address-checking-in-vmware/
And adding the advanced setting to VM2 fixed the problem.
Where to find VMware version information
Here some links to find version information about VMware vSphere products
http://vsphere-land.com/vinfo/release-build-info
and about VMware Tools versions
How long can an ESXi host run?
Before starting an upgrade at a customer site I was surprised how long an ESXi host can run. Here the proof.
Upgrade VMware vCenter Appliance 5.1 to 5.5
A lot of my customers are running the vCenter Appliance version 5.1. Now they start to ask to upgrade this appliance to the newest version.
Here I will show you step by step the upgrade process. This is based on the VMware KB article 2058441
Prerequisites
- Verify the time set on the old (VMware vCenter 5.1) appliance and the new (VMware vCenter 5.5) appliances are in sync. Be aware that from version 5.5 the clock on the appliance is always set to the UTC time zone. In the older version you could select your own tome zone. (see VMware KB)
- Be sure SSO (if installed on separate machine) is on the same version of the vCenter you want to upgrade to.
- If the vCenter database is external, make backup on the Database server. For backing up the embedded database look at this KB
- Create a snapshot of the OLD vCenter appliance before you start the upgrade procedure.
Upgrade Procedure
- First step of the upgrade procedure is deploying a fresh VM of the latest vCenter Appliance.
- Next is to configure the VM so that network connectivity is possible. The only thing that needs to be configured is IP address, subnet and gateway. The Original vCenter hostname and IP settings will be configured (copied) in the NEW vCenter Appliance based on the setting of the old vCenter.
- Connect to the old and new vCenter appliance via a supported web browser. (personal experience is that IE works and Chrome not! For the upgrade process.
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On the NEW vCenter, Accept the EULA
- Next step in the upgrade process is to specify that you want to upgrade from a previous version
- Still in the NEW appliance, copy the local appliance code to the clipboard
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On the OLD vCenter appliance, go to the Upgrade tab and paste the clipboard content in the text box and press the import button.
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If the import was successful you get a notice and then copy the upgrade key back to the clipboard
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On the NEW server paste the upgrade key in the bottom text box and proceed by clicking the next button.
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There is an option to replace the SSL certificates on the NEW with those ones from the OLD vCenter Appliance
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Now the new SSO password must be entered for the SSO administrator account administrator@vsphere.local. (this was admin@system-domain in pre 5.5 versions)
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Select now all the servers that need to check for compatibility with the new vCenter
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After pressing next we see that we are ready to start the migration.
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Pressing next will get following screen where you have to confirm that the upgrade process can proceed.
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When you hit the start, the migration process start.
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When you start the migration you will notice that the OLD vCenter server will be shut downed and the NEW vCenter server will have the IP configuration (hostname, IP settings) of the OLD ESX host.
After a successful upgrade you can start upgrading the ESXi hosts to the latest ESXi version.
- Can you login in the new vCenter Appliance via the Web Client and everything works fine you can remove the old vCenter Appliance from the inventory and from disk.
Remove leftovers of a vCenter plugin
During an upgrade at a customer site we removed a Dell Appliance that was connected to vCenter. We dit remove the aplliance just by powering it off and then remove it from the entry. Normally you should do an unregister from in the Dell Appliance.
Now we saw that there was a plugin that could not be loaded.
After some research on the internet I passed by on the website of William Lam (virtuallyGhetto).
He has written a nice article that describes step by step how to fix the problem we had. Look here.
Problem solved, thanks William for the good work.
Unable to expand VMFS partition
Today I was asked to expand a local datastore of a ESXi 4.1. Expanding a disk is normally no problem when you are able to increate the size of the disk. After increasing the disk size you should be able to increate the partition size.
The ESXi was managed by a vCenter 5.0. On the storage adapter I did a RESCAN data stores after the disk size was increased. Then I went into the DATASTORE properties and I saw following
This above view was via a vCenter connection. Then I found following VMware KB which told me to make a direct connection to the ESXi host. After going to into the datastore properties I found out that I could increase.
When I selected this local datastore and finished the expansion I saw following result in the vSphere Client direct to the ESXi and via vCenter.
Lucky for the customer this expansion went OK.
Hopefully if you have this problem this KB article fixes also your problem.
Success
Gert Van Gorp
VSS issues when doing backups using VMware VDR
Hi,
During some consultancy projects @ SMB customers where we needed to install and configure VMware VDR to do some backups, we had some issues with Windows Machines and VSS. The result of the these errors with VSS was that the VDR backup jobs all failed.
Here some possible solutions (gonna try to keep the list up to date.)
- VSS could not be started on a Windows 2003 server
We had to reregister all VSS DLL’s, restart the server and everything was working again. (check this)
VMware KB Articles about possible VDR / VSS issues.
Cannot create quieced snapshots if backup or system recovery applications are installed KB 1009558
Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) quiesce related issues KB 1007696
Because VDR is taking snapshots of your virtual machines this can also be a interesing KB
Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX KB 1015180