IVOBEERENS.NL

Posts Tagged ‘vCenter’

When looking for performance data in vCenter 4.1 from the past week, month or year, I got the message “Performance data is currently not available for this entry”. Only real time data is visible in vSphere client.

In the vCenter Service Status the warning “Performance statistics rollup from Past Day to Past Week is not occurring in the database” appeared.

The vCenter server is installed on MS Windows 2008 R2 and uses vCenter server version 4.1 Update 2 Build 491557 with Microsoft SQL Server 2008  Express R2 64-bit.

When looking in the VMware Product Interoperability matrixes, it says is a supported configuration.

Searching on the VMTN I found more people who are experiencing this problem. The following KB article says:

To resolve this issue, migrate the SQL database to a full edition (32bit or 64bit) or a 32bit SQL Express edition. For more information on how to move the vCenter Server SQL database, see Moving the vCenter Server SQL database (7960893).

For small environments this is not an option! When installing vCenter 4.1 Update 2, the MS SQL Express 2005 database is default installed. MS SQL Express 2005 is 32-bit and you can have a maximum database size of 4GB. With MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit you can have maximum database size of 10GB. 

vCenter 5 installs by default MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit and doesn’t have this bug.

The MS SQL Express database is only supported for test and small VMware environments (5 hosts and 50 VMs maximum).

So watch out when considering MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit and vCenter 4!

 

When installing VMware vCenter 5 with the default database engine (Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008 R2) the SQL Management Studio is not installed by default. It can be confusing to add SQL Management studio at a later time. Here are the steps explained:

1. Download Microsoft SQL Express 2008 R2 (can be found here) or browse the vCenter installation ZIP or ISO. The installation package can be found in the “\redist\SQLEXPR” folder.

2. Select “New Installation or add features to an existing installation”.

3. Select “New installation or add shared features”.

- Only select “Management Tools – Basic”.

When the installation is completed you see the “SQL Server Management Studio” listed under the start menu.

Important to know is that you need exactly to follow these steps. If you choose the wrong option and  use the back button the “Management Tools – Basic” isn’t listed anymore. Strange….

 

The new vSphere 4.1 release offers a lot of new cool features and enhancements. Here’s a list What’s New in vSphere 4.1.  When upgrading to vSphere 4.1 there are a couple of things to think about before starting:

• Make sure your systems and components are supported, check the Hardware Compatibility Guide.
• Verify that other products are compatible with vSphere 4.1. For example VMware View 4 is not supported on vSphere 4.1. VMware View composer does not support 64-bit operating systems.  
• vCenter 4.1 server requires a 64-bit OS. 32-bit Operating Systems are not supported anymore for vCenter 4.1 server.
• vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture. For this reason, VMware recommends that deployments of vSphere 4.x utilize the ESXi hypervisor architecture. When migrate to ESXi all the script and programs (such as hardware monitoring agents and backup agents), that uses the Service Console needs to replaced. More information can be the following links ESX4.1 is the last ESX what do i do now and in the  ESXi41 Migration Guide.
• vSphere 4.1 support scripted installation for ESXi. You cannot use scripted installation to install ESXi to a USB device!  Here are some good links for scripted ESXi 4.1 installations:  Kenneth van Ditmarsch, Setting up vSphere ESXi 4.1 scripted installation, Kendrick Coleman, ESX 4.1 Kickstart install, Billhill,  Setting up vSphere ESX 4.1 scripted installation from Ubuntu and Deploy ESXi 4.1 using Scripted install feature.
• ESXi comes in two editions, the vSphere Hypervisor (free version) with limited features and the enterprise ESXI.
• The VMware Knowledgebase has best practices for installing and upgrading vSphere 4.1. Installing ESX 4..1 and vCenter 4.1 best practices and Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 best practices.
• Get yourself familiar with tools as PowerCLI, vCLI and the VMware Management Assistant (vMA).These tools helps you to automate, configure  and troubleshoot vSphere 4.1 environments. More information can be found on the following links vCLI, PowerCLI and vMA.
• Before upgrading check the Knowlegde Base from VMware for issues with  vSphere 4.1. For example Upgrading vCenter Server 4.0 to 4.1 fails with the error: Exception Thrown while executing SQL script.