Currently, the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) requires a Windows helper VM. This helper VM can be loaded with a number of different items, most notably vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and VMware Horizon View Composer. The services this VM can contain are listed later in this article. Suffice it to say, the helper VM (or VMs) become critical to …
Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: vCSA Helper VM, Part 2”
In my previous vSphere Upgrade Saga post, VSAN Upgrade Woes, I discussed upgrade problems in a relatively unsupported configuration. I finally figured out why I had such a problem. It was not the unsupported nature of the configuration, but the disk space used within VSAN. In effect, my VSAN was heavily overcommitted, and as such, there was no …
The upgrade to VSAN 6.2 did not go as smoothly as I wished. It was possible to do but required me to rebuild not only VSAN but my cluster as a whole as a rolling upgrade did not work as expected. Perhaps this is just the way I have my VSAN configured.
In my environment I use VCSA as it is generally far easier to manage. However, to do so, you still need either a single or multiple Microsft Windows helper VMs. The VMs run packages like SRM, vSphere Update Manager, HPE OneView, and other tools that integrate with VMware vCenter. I recently wanted to do some …
My last 6.0 patch upgrade had an interesting phenomenon. Staging of three of the patches worked without a hitch. Before I could install the next patch, however, I had to cold-reboot the nodes. A soft reboot caused a red message to the console complaining about a module that would not load: a module I did …
My infrastructure recently underwent a catastrophic failure from which recovery was more tedious than difficult. An iSCSI server running from a KVM server using Open vSwitch decided to go south. Why? I am still trying to figure that out. The long and short of it is that Open vSwitch running within a CentOS 7 KVM …
