VMware vCenter 6.7 U1: Windows to VCSA Upgrade and Convergence

Today we will be talking about the VMware vCenter 6.7-U1 (Update 1) upgrade process. I recently had an opportunity to work with a enterprise customer to upgrade their VMware environment. In this post we will be going through the upgrade process and my thoughts. VMware 6.7 U1 is a major upgrade that includes the fully featured HTML5 client. For full details on what’s new please see: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/10/whats-new-in-vcenter-server-6-7-update-1.html

I will start by saying bravo to the VMware team for this release. For the first time I actually felt comfortable abandoning the good ol’ “fat client” (the legacy C# client). Many of VMware’s customers, in my experience, were intentionally lagging behind on older versions of vCenter to keep a cold death-grip on the fat client because they refused to be force-fed the flash client that we all know and despise. The HTML5 client is a worthy successor. It’s fast, it looks good, its organized better, and it even has a dark mode. It’s obvious they took feedback from the community, hired the right developers who understood their target audience, and put out a great product. The upgrade and migration process is also done very well.

After a few weeks of the VCSA and HTML5 client baked into the client environment it’s obvious that some things are still missing, like exporting events, from the HTML5 client but I would expect these to be eventually added. There also appears to be some lag to the recent tasks list in larger linked environments. I’ve also seen a few UI bugs with adding permissions and modifying sDRS configuration.

One issue I’ve seen on multiple VCSA’s so far is that the database “archive” (disk 13) will constantly fill up causing the VCSA to show up as degraded within the dashboard. You will be greeted with the error message “File system /storage/archive is low on storage space. Increase the size of disk /storage/archive.” There is very little documentation on this but apparently this is expected behavior despite the warnings and rational I don’t quite understand yet. This didn’t stop me from increasing the disk size (KB2126276) slightly. [2019-04-12: This issue is now fixed by VMware.]

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vSphere 6.7 U1 now released

On October 17, 2018 VMware announced that vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is now available. The new HTML5 client is now ‘Fully Featured’ which means that you can use the HTML5 client for all administration and configuration of vSphere; including Auto Deploy, Host Profiles, VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM), vCenter High Availability (VCHA), network topology diagrams, overview performance charts, and more.

I am personally excited to see the HTML5 client become the primary client as I much prefer using it over the flash client. One of the more interesting features included in this release is the vCenter External to Embedded Convergence tool. Since embedded PSC is the recommended deployment model for vCenter Server this tool allows you to migrate to an embedded PSC without having to nuke-and-pave your entire vCenter installation.

The Content Library also got some much needed love from the VMware development team as it now supports two more new file formats; allowing templates and OVA files. This makes the Content Library much more functional. The lack of VM templates was a major caveat of the Content Library to the point of making it practically useless for some VMware customers. So this change is a welcome one to say the least.

New Features

  • vCenter High Availability (VCHA)
    • We redesigned VCHA workflows to combine the Basic and Advanced configuration workflows. This streamlines the user experience and eliminates the need for manual intervention of some deployments.
  • Search Experience
    • We revamped the search experience. In this version of the vSphere Client, you can now search for objects with a string and filter the search results based on Tags/Custom attributes. You can also filter the object lists in the search even further. For instance, you can filter on the power state of the VMs etc., You can save your searches and revisit them later.
  • Performance Charts
    • You can pop the performance charts into a separate tab and zoom in on a specific time in the chart. We also added overview performance charts for datacenters and clusters.
  • Dark Theme
    • Dark theme has been one of the most requested features for the vSphere Client so we’re introducing a Dark mode setting. Support for the Dark theme is available for all core vSphere Client functionality and implementation for vSphere Client plugins is in progress.
  • Alarm Definitions
    • We greatly simplified the way you define new alarms, particularly in how you create rules for trigger conditions.

Disaster strikes as NAS3 crashes

This past weekend we had a power brownout for about 4 hours. This caused my servers to fail-over to battery power. The batteries don’t last long with servers running. I guess something went sour with the automatic shutdown of my NAS3 which is used only for my VMware virtual machines and it did an improper shutdown. The RAID has crashed.

I don’t have anyone to blame other than myself and I knew eventually this day would come. NAS3 was in RAID-0. That means striping with no redundancy. A failed array on RAID-0 typically means total data loss. I take daily backups of this entire NAS nightly so I am aware and prepared for the risk of using striping. That does not mean that it’s a fun time recovering from it.

Adding additional redundancy for blackouts

Currently, one of the hardest things to recover from in my current home-lab environment is a total power blackout. Everything right now is planned & designed around losing certain components like 1 disk, 1 switch/network cable, etc. However when everything is off and I need to bring things back online it’s a painstaking and very manual process. Over time my environment has also become more and more complex. This latest outage has me scratching my head at how to recover faster & simpler from a power blackout.

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