Well I had some serious issues going to vSphere 4.1 from v4.0U2. The steps for the upgrade seemed straightforward:
- Upgrade vCenter Server
- Upgrade ESX
Well, it was not all that easy. Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade: Going to 4.1 (Updated)’ »
Posts tagged ‘vCenter’
In my last post “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail” I realized that I badly configured my SAN from the start. So I bit the bullet and started a process to change the number of spindles per LUN to 11 of 12 disks, with the 12 disk being a hot spare. Performance on SAN LUN is directly proportional to the number of spindles in use by the RAID set and my old setup had 3 Disk LUNs instead of using virtual LUNs ontop of one larger physical LUN.
Now that I know how to configure this, I wanted to make use of the higher performance. To do this, I had to
- first offload all VMs from the SAN to some other storage by way of SVMotion
- backup any RDMs I have
- update the LUN layout of the IBM DS3400 to be 11 disks in a Raid 5 with virtual LUNs presented to ESX
- SVMotion the VMs to the new LUNs Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade: Rearranging LUNs for Better Performance: Updated’ »
Thanks to Cody Bunch of the twittersphere helped me to solve the latest mystery within my vSphere environment: vCenter would fail to start after a reboot of the Windows 2008 vCenter Server VM. This has been plaguing me since I started this process, but it finally needed to be fixed!
The problem is that VMware Update Manager and VMware vCenter Server collide when they are both trying to access the MSSQL 2008 database for some odd reason.
The solution is fairly easy, add a service dependency on VMware Update Manager so that it requires VMware vCenter to start first. To do this open up regedit and navigate to HKLM\System\ControlSet001\services\vmware-ufad-vci key and add a new Multi String Value named ‘DependOnService’. Give this new registry element a value of ‘vpxd’.
This will now place a dependency on VUM such that it requires vCenter to start first. Now on reboots, vCenter starts properly and I no longer have to manually start the service.
Read the ongoing saga of the next phase of the upgrade on the Network World Blue Gears site.
