TagVMware

vCenter plugin URLs

When installing various VMware products that link into vCenter (vShield, vCloud Connector, vChargeback, I could go on..), you often have minimal control over what URL is actually used to browse to the plugin and you usually can’t change it later on. This can screw up your SSL certificate plans.

After a little digging, I found these tables in the SQL database:

– VPX_EXT_CLIENT
– VPX_EXT_SERVER

Both have a field called ‘URL’ which has the URL (doh) to the plugin.

Two things; this is not supported by VMware and could break something. I hasn’t on my setup, but it might on … Read more

Importing .ovf’s into VMware Fusion

A love for Apple’s OSX and computing devices brings some side effects. One of them is that you’re stuck with VMware Fusion which is way behind it’s Windows counterpart, VMware Workstation. Fusion cannot import .ovf VMs, just .vmx VMs. In my case, I needed to convert the vSphere Management Appliance to a VM that could run in VMware Fusion.

It took me a while to this neat tool: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf – ovftool is a utility that can convert virtual machines between certain formats.

Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use the commandline tool to convert the .ovf to … Read more

Removing vCloud Agent from ESX(i) host

When you’re like me, you just go ahead and install stuff without taking the time to read if the software you’re installing can be upgraded later. Dive head first. 😉

Often with beta software, an upgrade path to a release build is lacking or problematic. Same goes for vCloud Director 1.5 beta to the release build of 1.5. When I upgraded to the release build, I did so without ‘Unpreparing’ the ESXi hosts that were being used by vCloud Director. That causes some problems when you want to link a new vCloud Director to these ESXi hosts, as the vCloud … Read more

VMware vCloud Director SSL certificates

vCloud Director uses a java keystore to read its SSL certificates from. This makes it a bit more complicated to use an existing certificate and private key set. Took me a while to figure out, so I’m sharing.

In this example I created /opt/vmware/keystore for the certificate files. The ssl-key.pem and ssl-cert.pem are the existing certificate files. Furthermore, I used ‘passed’ as the keystore and alias password. (needed for the vCD configuration)

Firstly, we need to convert the key and certificate to a DER format:

[[email protected] keystore]# export PATH=$PATH:/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/jre/bin
[[email protected] keystore]# openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt -in ssl-key.pem -inform PEM -out 
Read more

Snapshot hell: Recover a locked vmdk

I’ve had my share of battles with corrupt vmdk files, after the process of removing a snapshot crashed. Finally, I found a way to recover them through a VCB utility. Here’s the log that usually presents itself:

May 12 01:43:13.593: vmx| DISKLIB-DSCPTR: Failed to open extents for descriptor file in normal mode
May 12 01:43:13.593: vmx| DISKLIB-LINK : “/vmfs/volumes/49dc603e-af139aaa-7131-002219b6f201/VM1/VM1.vmdk” : failed to open (Device or resource busy).
May 12 01:43:13.593: vmx| DISKLIB-CHAIN : “/vmfs/volumes/49dc603e-af139aaa-7131-002219b6f201/VM1/VM1.vmdk” : failed to open (Device or resource busy).
May 12 01:43:13.594: vmx| DISKLIB-LIB : Failed to open ‘/vmfs/volumes/49dc603e-af139aaa-7131-002219b6f201/VM1/VM1.vmdk’ with flags 0xa (Device or resource busy).
May

Read more

© 2024 Lostdomain

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑