I've recently upgraded my vCenter Server 7.0.3 to 8.0 and during the process I've encountered the following error: Error in method invocation [Errno 1] Unknown host
The error is related to using IP address instead of FQDN as shown in the image below . It will appear in stage 2, after VCSA VM is deployed in the environment.
To avoid it, just use FQDN everywhere. This error was first mentioned on upgrades from 6.7 to 7.0, but somehow in my lab got ported to upgrade from 7.0 to 8.0.
It's been 32 months since the last summit took place and how the times have changed. Not sure if anyone would've dared in February 2020 to imagine the shifts to come a few weeks later and that will keep on coming throughout the next 2 and a half years. And it's not only socially and politically, but also technologically. The status quo of the human society was pretty much ignored and we had to learn, adapt and change.
This week in Lisbon I had the opportunity to meet again the great community of people from all the corners of the world called VMUG. And the people in it is what makes this whole idea great. In 2020 it was the social part that impressed me too. Technologies come and change, trends may shift (again this word) on the way. The people involved in the process are the most important.
Talking about people we had (as always) a number of select guests from VMware to talk to us. From Joe Baguley's (CTO EMEA) talk about skills gap and how AI and robots are slowly making it to the masses and into your house, to Duncan Epping's journey throughout VMware and the idea that everyone wants to be something, but very few want to make the effort to become that something, it all evolved around the changes that we are living and need to face. And it is scary, especially since the buzz word without any relation to the event, was AI, and more exactly ChatGPT, an OpenAI project that was trained to interact with humans in a conversation like natural language. The ease of usage and accessibility of this AI model is amazing and it will change a lot. But it is still only a tool in our hands. And the way we use it will make a difference. Only two years ago a talk around this subject would've brought a lot of smiles.
I am a techie, not really great with words so let me wrap it up. As humans we need certainty, connection, contribution. VMUG is a community that brings all of this and more. And it does it through its members, the people that change, learn and grow along with the community.
Instant clone is a technology to create a powered on VM using as source another running VM. An instant clone VM shares memory and disk state with its source VM. Once it is powered on, the instant clone is a fully manageable independent vCenter Server object. The clones can be customized and have unique MACs, UUID. This makes the technology very appealing for use cases where large number of VMs need to be created in a short time from a controlled point in time - think about VDIs.
My use case was on-demand labs generated from the same lab template(s). A lab template is made of 3 to 6 VMs of different sizes running interdependent applications. Users login to a web app and then request one or more new labs from the available templates. The web app would start in the background lab provisioning for all the requests via vCenter Server.
$labPrefix = "lab-1-*" $vms = Get-VM -Name $labPrefix foreach ($vm in $vms) { $snapTime = get-date -Format "MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm" $description = $vm.Name + " " + $snapTime New-Snapshot -VM $vm -Name "delta disk cleanup" -Description $description -Memory:$true -Confirm:$false Get-Snapshot -VM $vm -Name "delta disk cleanup" | Remove-Snapshot -RemoveChildren -Confirm:$false }
Recently I had the opportunity to take (and pass) 3 certifications and I did it using Pearson's OnVUE online proctoring. Talking to other colleagues of mine I found out there are mixed feelings about the experience. For me it was an overall good experience. So, I've decided to put together a few thoughts about how it went.
The good
You can schedule the exam anytime you want and you can do it from one day to another. You are home in your office, so it's a familiar space. There is no commute to the test center and back. For me these are the biggest advantages.
The not so good
You have to clean up your desk and disconnect everything. If you have docking station, multiple monitors and other equipment it will be a bit of work to do. If you have other things around your desk (like my old film cameras that I keep as decorations), you will need to move those too. Be prepared to use your webcam to show that cables are unplugged.
Another thing to take care: no one is allowed to enter the room be it kid, partner or pet. This may prove an inconvenient.
The app delivering the exam is not optimized for wide monitors. That makes the questions very long and places the buttons in strange positions. But you get used to it, or better use laptop screen.
The weird
The proctor experience can vary a bit. It was fine for 2 exams to use external monitor, not fine during another one. The weirdest thing: I was told during one exam not to look up because that is not allowed and doing it again will fail my exam (!?!). Small issue here: when I try to remember things I involuntarily look up. Luckily I managed to pass the exam without remembering too many things.
Connectivity issues
It happened one morning to take longer to connect and get someone to enter online with me. It took me more than half hour to start the process. But after that all went well. No biggie here, just start on time.
Once you get the exam started, the experience is the same like in any test center. I am not sure that I would like to go back to a test center unless absolutely necessary (like looking up during the exam).
The latest releases of vRealize Automation bring in a series of interesting features.
Cloud Resource
Cloud Resource view was introduced back in May 2021 for vRA Cloud and allows to manage resources directly instead of managing them by resource groups (deployments). It allows now to manage all discovered, onboarded and provisioned deployments, trigger power day 2 actions on discovered resources and bulk manage multiple resources at the same time.
ABX enabled deployment for custom resources
Provisioning a custom resource allows you to track and manage the custom resource and its properties during its whole lifecycle. No dynamic types are needed for full lifecycle management.
Cloud Templates Dynamic Input
Use vRO Actions for dynamic external values to define different types of input values directly at the Cloud Template and bind local input to the dynamic inputs as action parameters.
Kubernetes support in Code Stream Workspace
The Code Stream pipeline workspace now supports Docker and Kubernetes for continuous integration tasks. The Kubernetes platform manages the entire lifecycle of the container, similar to Docker. In the pipeline workspace, you can choose Docker (the default selection) or Kubernetes. In the workspace, you select the appropriate endpoint.
You can also choose to create a clone of the Git repository.
Multi-cloud
vRA leverages Azure provisioning capabilities, including the ability to enable/disable boot diagnostics for Azure VMs for Day 0/2, and the ability to configure the name for the Azure NIC interfaces.
This year is going to be the second one in a row when I don't get to do my favorite autumn activity: go to VMworld in Barcelona. But I do get to do part of it - attend the virtual VMworld 2021. And to make it as close as possible to the real experience, I will most probably add some red Spanish wine and jamon on the side.
As for the sessions I am looking forward to attend, I will leave here a few of my choices:
VMware vSAN – Dynamic Volumes for Traditional and Modern Applications [MCL1084]
I've been involved recently in projects with Tanzu and vSAN and this session with Duncan Epping and Cormac Hogan is the place to go to see how vSAN continues to evolve, to learn about new features, integration with with Tanzu and hear some of the best practices.
The Future of VM Provisioning – Enabling VM Lifecycle Through Kubernetes [APP1564]
A session about what I think is a one of the game changers introduced by VMware this year: include VM-based workloads in modern applications using Kubernetes APIs to deploy, configure and manage them. I've been using working with VM service since its official release in May and also wrote small blog post earlier this month.
What's New in vSphere [APP1205]
Automation Showdown: Imperative vs Declarative [CODE2786]
Achieving Happiness: The Quest for Something New [IC1484]
We've seen in the previous post how to enable and use VM Operator. We've also noticed that currently there are only 2 VM images that are supported to be deployed using VM Operator. What if we need to create our own image?
There is a way, but the way is not supported by VMware. So once going this path, you have to understand the risks.
What is so special about the VM image deployed using VM Operator? It is using cloud-init and OVF environment variables to initialize the VM.
Let's start with a new Linux VM template. We will install VMware Tools. Then we need to install cloud-init. Once cloud init is installed update the configuration as following:
<ProductSection ovf:required="false"> <Info>Cloud-Init customization</Info> <Product>Linux distribution for VMware VM Service</Product> <Property ovf:key="instance-id" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value="id-ovf"> <Label>A Unique Instance ID for this instance</Label> <Description>Specifies the instance id. This is required and used to determine if the machine should take "first boot" actions</Description> </Property> <Property ovf:key="hostname" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value="centosguest"> <Description>Specifies the hostname for the appliance</Description> </Property> <Property ovf:key="seedfrom" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true"> <Label>Url to seed instance data from</Label> <Description>This field is optional, but indicates that the instance should 'seed' user-data and meta-data from the given url. If set to 'http://tinyurl.com/sm-' is given, meta-data will be pulled from http://tinyurl.com/sm-meta-data and user-data from http://tinyurl.com/sm-user-data. Leave this empty if you do not want to seed from a url.</Description> </Property> <Property ovf:key="public-keys" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value=""> <Label>ssh public keys</Label> <Description>This field is optional, but indicates that the instance should populate the default user's 'authorized_keys' with this value</Description> </Property> <Property ovf:key="user-data" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value=""> <Label>Encoded user-data</Label> <Description>In order to fit into a xml attribute, this value is base64 encoded . It will be decoded, and then processed normally as user-data.</Description> </Property> <Property ovf:key="password" ovf:type="string" ovf:userConfigurable="true" ovf:value=""> <Label>Default User's password</Label> <Description>If set, the default user's password will be set to this value to allow password based login. The password will be good for only a single login. If set to the string 'RANDOM' then a random password will be generated, and written to the console.</Description> </Property> </ProductSection>
<vmw:ExtraConfig ovf:required="false" vmw:key="guestinfo.vmservice.defer-cloud-init" vmw:value="ready"/>
metadata:
name: my-vm-name
labels:
app: db-server
annotations:
vmoperator.vmware.com/image-supported-check: disable