Configuration of VRM Server (vSphere Replication Management Server) is one of the steps that one has to perform while installing SRM (Site Recovery Manager) 5.0. A prerequisite for it is to have a compatible database available and the VRMS appliance deployed in advance. However, when going through the configuration, one could sometimes see an error message while [...]
When upgrading a vCenter server from version 4.x to 5.0, you may encounter an error: "The Windows installer service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running windows in safe mode, or if windows installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance." You may genuinely have a broken Windows [...]
I know - you must be thinking why would anyone want to upgrade a vSphere 4.0 environment to 4.1 when version 5.0 is out now. Well, I can think of a couple of reasons why one might think of doing that. One is the fact that many organisations are still not ready to move to version [...]
For those of you who follow VMware products closely, the past couple of weeks have been quite interesting. VMware has announced vSphere 5.0 which has a lot of new exciting features and as always, bigger limits for resources that people are unlikely to hit... ever! However, it is unfortunate that this version of vSphere is making headlines [...]
A few days back, we were hit by a problem on one of our vCenter servers (vCenter 4.0 Update 1) in that the "VMware VirtualCenter Server" service starting failing. The message in "System" event log was "The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this n time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 300000 milliseconds: Restart [...]
The first thing one wants to do after upgrading the environment to a newer ESX version, is to upgrade VMware tools on all VMs. If the environment has a large number of machines, this could be a tedious and time-consuming process. This is where the ability to upgrade a bunch of machines automatically comes in very [...]
These days, I am playing with VMware View 4.0.1. This is because a customer wants it "gradually" deployed within the company - so we have some time to do it. However, it's always nice to have a bash in your development environment before going full-blown into testing. I did that and the first thing I discovered was that [...]
In Part II of this article, we went through the process of upgrading a VirtualCenter 2.5 server to vCenter 4. In this third and final part, we'll talk about upgrading the hosts to ESX 4 and wrap up the upgrade process. Let's get to it then: ESX Host upgrades: First of all, make sure IP and networking configuration [...]
In Part I of this article, we started with some points one should think about while preparing for the upgrade of a Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 environment to vSphere 4. In this part, we'll go through the process of upgrading the VirtualCenter server to vCenter 4 Update 1. vCenter Install: Create a VM for the new vCenter server. Suggested spec (varies according to requirements): 2048 MB [...]
These days, I am upgrading our VI 3.5 environment to vSphere 4. Good thing is that there is a lot of information available in form of books and articles on the web for the different scenarios in which you can upgrade. Two of my favourite books on the subject are: Mastering VMware VSphere 4 by Scott Lowe VMware vSphere [...]