I have tried to span a port on my virtual switch to enable me to see all traffic crossing my physical network for security monitoring. I'm tearing my hair out in frustration!

I am using vSphere ESXi on v6.5.

Firstly, I confirmed the traffic is visible on the physical cable by sniffing the traffic using wireshark from my laptop. Then I put that cable back into vmnic1 on my ESXi box.

I created a vSwitch, allowed promiscuous mode and connected vmnic1.

I created a new port group called SPAN and also allowed promiscuous made.

Now I connect my VM to the SPAN group via it's only network adapter and start wireshark. I can see all the broadcasts, ARP traffic, IMCP etc but none of the interesting traffic between other hosts that see when I connect my laptop to same physical network port.

Ideas as to where I going wrong would be most welcome!

I've been tasked with updating a host server to resolve an issue of a VM dropping off the network constantly.  As the title suggests, this is a single host environment with 3 VM's and the vCenter appliance running on it.

Host: ESXi 6.0

vCenter Applicance: 6.5

I'm not clear on the patching process for the reason that the documentation says to shut down all VM's and appliances, put the host into Maintenance mode, then run the updates.  However, it seems that if the vCenter appliance isn't running I wouldn't be able to run updates from the web client.

Would it, for this reason, make sense to install vCenter server on a different server onsite?

Thanks!

vCenter  Server Appliance  were getting failed to update from  v6.0 update 1 to v6.0 update 3B. The error occurred after trying to stage files with the message: 'running test transaction, installation process failed'.

Hello,

I've been tasked with the upgrade of a datacenter infrastructure. Currently there are running 8 hosts (on ESX 5.1 U3) and ~140 VMs (with a Windows vCenter 5.5) that have been setup by my predecessor (of course the documentation is lacking some details...). Recently the datacenter received 8 brand new Hosts and now it's time for designing an upgrade strategy. Cause a lot of things do not fit properly and may have been misconfigured, I have decided not to do an inplace upgrade of the infrastructure. Instead, I want to start from scratch and raise an entire new environment, moving from a windows based VCS to a VCSA, new SSO and so on. Right now i require some help with strategy or an advice, how to get the VMs from old environment to the new one.

From what I remember of the vmware training course, my current roadmap looks like this

- update the existing hosts to 5.5

- deploy a VCSA 6.5 on the old hosts

- discard the VCS 5.5 cluster and datacenter

- unregister hosts from VCS 5.5

- Register 5.5 hosts to VCSA 6.5

- Register 6.5 hosts to VCSA 6.5

- vMotion VMs to new hosts

- remove the 5.5 hosts from VCSA

Is this approach a realistic stategy. If not, how would a better approach will look like?

Thanks in advance

Edit: all hosts using shared datastores on NetApp NFS

We upgraded our vSphere from 5.0 to 5.1 seems like somewhere in the mid not sure for what reason it took a wrong URL while resgitering.

Now when I'm opening the webclient it's giving me the error as

Could not connect to one or more vCenter Server Systems:

"https://domain1.com.au:443/sdk"

I know the reason, it's coz my vCenter host name is actually "domain2.com.au" & not "domain1.com.au".

Now where do I need to make changes to get my webclient working & connect to my vCenter server i.e. domain2.com.au

Screenshot:-

I've already updated the below attributes with correct server named URL's but it still isn't working. Any help?

1. Navigate to Administration> vCenter Server Settings... > Advanced Settings.
2. Update these attributes with the correct FQDN for vCenter Server:
   
   VirtualCenter.VimApiUrl : https://<vCenter Server FQDN>:443/sdk
   VirtualCenter.VimWebServiceUrl : https://<vCenter ServerFQDN>:8443/vws

I have no experience with VMware and I am having difficulty finding the answer to this problem,

I need to install a OVF file format in VMware and nothing else, I would want to install the VMware on a windows 10 or Windows 2008 server without having to have a dedicated machine for this project.

What would be the best product in the range to do this with minimum costs.

Thanks in advance

bare with me here as i'm new at this.We are fixing to upgrade from 4.1 to 5.5 (yea I know we aren't doing to 6 yet) anyways once we do the upgrade it will preserve all the vswitch settings in the exsi host after the upgrade?

I'm wondering how best to configure our vCenter environment.  We only need 2 vCenters (external PSC model) for the entire US.  Originally, I've been thinking that I'll install a first PSC, then point vCenter in that physical site to that PSC in that newly created 'SSO site'.  Then, install a PSC in the other city/physical site, joining to the existing SSO domain by pointing to the first installed PSC and configuring as a new SSOsite.  Finally, install the 2nd vCenter and point it to the 2nd installed PSC in the same SSO domain but in its own SSO site.

Then I started thinking---why configure a 2nd SSO site in the 2nd physical location at all?  The WAN links are plenty fast if I ever needed to repoint a vCenter to the other physical site's PSC (documented KB's for both inter and intra repointing available with 6.0 U1 I know).  Couldn't I simplify my deployment further by not creating a 2nd SSO site in the SSO domain?  Why not just have the 2nd PSC join the existing SSO site that was created when the 1st PSC was deployed?  Each vCenter would use the PSC specified in its PHYSICAL location at deployment time, sure/absolutely.  Having just a single SSO site with 2 PSC's in it doesn't appear to be one of the many deployment topologies that VMware has made available in various KB's etc UNLESS it's behind a hardware load balancer----and I just plain don't want to use a LB for this deployment because I don't think the complexity is worth it.  Thoughts?

I have three Dell Poweredge Servers, two in a cluster and a third one for Veeam and other stuff.  Each one upgraded fine from 6.0 to 6.5. All is up and running great except of course in vCenter all of the vm's show vmware tools is out of date. The auto-upgrade and the manual upgrades all fail (Windows and linux).  I then downloaded the .exe file from the vmware website and it fails the same way. When I tried the auto-upgrade route first it errored out with a bunch of files not found. I used the Dell custom .ISO image from Dell's website to do the 6 to 6.5 upgrade.

- Gary

I am trying to upgrade VCSA 6.o to 6.5.It fails with the following errors:

Error: Failed to get an SSL thumbprint of the appliance server certificate for vcsaserver.

Here is the error from the installer log file:

016-11-22T15:22:17.723Z - error: Could not get certificate fingerprint from host, 10.0.0.25: Error: connect ETIMEDOUT 10.0.0.25:443

Thanks,

Message was edited by: Chat Bomjan Never mind. It is resolved now.

Hi guys,

I'm fairly experienced doing scripted installs of esxi dating back to esxi 4.1. With the latest release (6.5.x) however I'm getting some issues.

The issue is: my ipv4 address for the management is not being set and therefore the host is not usable after the installation.

Here is what I do to install:

vmaccepteula 
rootpw --iscrypted here_is_my_password

# Install parameters 
#Local Storage, HP Raid Controller Driver 
install --firstdisk=hpsa,local --overwritevmfs  

network --bootproto=static --device=vmnic0 --ip=192.168.10.100 --netmask=255.255.255.0 --gateway=192.168.10.1 --nameserver=192.168.10.1 --hostname=ESXi6.virtualfrog.lab --vlanid=00 --addvmportgroup=0 

reboot --noeject

This however results in my ipv4 configuration to be set to "disabled". It does not matter if I try this on a nested esxi on my VMware Fusion or if I use a HPE Bladeserver.

I have a workaround by setting the ip again during the %firstboot part of my kickstart script, but I wonder if you guys are having trouble with the 6.5 kickstart install as well or if I missed some change in 6.5 regarding kickstart installation.

thank you.

Edit: Here is the link to the documentation center regarding this approach for 6.5. As far as I can see I follow the procedure accordingly: VMware vSphere 6.5 Documentation Library

installing VCSA 6.5, I Cant to connect for stage 2 this is the message "the installer is unable to connect the vcenter server appliance management interface vcsa 6.5" I don´t have to access for IP but DNS is ok.

The 6.5d target VCSA instance fails to start vAPI service at 66% of stage 2, step 2 in installer.exe wizard from the VCSA .ISO at firstboot and my upgrade fails.  Our topology is 2x 6.0u2 external PSCs at different sites in enhanced link mode that are working fine in the environment and appear service healthy and no less than 20% free space on any internal partition.  The exact error from the wizard is:

--------------------

An error occurred while starting service 'vapi-endpoint'

Failed to start the vAPI Endpoint Service

Failed to configure vAPI Endpoint Service at the firstboot time

Resolution

Please file a bug against VAPI

--------------------

It doesn't look like a network problem since the wizard gets through the network verification settings and I've verified that the machine running installer.exe has functional DNS to everything involved, but just to confirm, I've tried:

- using an ephemeral port group instance of our management VLAN on the distributed switch, as installer.exe requests (but not a standard switch yet)

- using straight IP addresses instead of FQDN because I've had other VMware products cause this grief before during setup

- entirely disabling the Windows firewall

- running the installer as a domain admin of the domain our PSC is configured to talk to over LDAP as an identity source (it is not joined to the domain, however)

I opened a support case with VMware a week ago / last Wednesday, but they have been very slow to give in and ask for logs to escalate up to engineering.  PLEASE, has anyone else had this issue and what helped get you through the PSC upgrade?

Support told me to look at this, but we don't have any GPO under software restrictions at all so it does not seem relevant:

Windows vCenter Server 6.5 installation fails while configuring the vAPI EndPoint Service

Does anyone know if the installer.exe invokes Java from an internal bundle or if Java must be installed in Windows as a prerequisite?

Thanks for any ideas... at all.

The VCSA upgrade fails...

I receive the following error message in the session logs:

2017-06-17 18:10:14.835389 CIP Service: [VCSA INFO] fetch File form VM - result:{"type":"result","statusCode":"OK","sessionId":"nwDX-cxUM-Lvpf-sCWH","requestId":"715","requestComponentId":"fileTransfer","requestObjectId":"8088-jT99-8gEX-Xsia","result":"{\n    \"status\": \"error\", \n    \"info\": [], \n    \"question\": null, \n    \"progress_message\": {\n        \"args\": [\n            \"VMware License Service\"\n        ], \n        \"id\": \"ur.upgrade.script.export.progress.text\", \n        \"localized\": \"Exporting VMware License Service data...\", \n        \"translatable\": \"Exporting %(0)s data...\"\n    }, \n    \"warning\": [], \n    \"error\": {\n        \"resolution\": {\n            \"id\": \"ur.upgrade.script.internal.resolution\", \n            \"localized\": \"Send upgrade logs files to GSS for further assistance.\", \n            \"translatable\": \"Send upgrade logs files to GSS for further assistance.\"\n        }, \n        \"detail\": [\n            {\n                \"args\": [\n                    \"Export\", \n                    \"VMware License Service\"\n                ], \n                \"id\": \"ur.upgrade.script.internal.text\", \n                \"localized\": \"Internal error occurs during Export of VMware License Service.\", \n                \"translatable\": \"Internal error occurs during %(0)s of %(1)s.\"\n            }, \n            {\n                \"args\": [\n                    \"Export\", \n                    \"VMware License Service\"\n                ], \n                \"id\": \"ur.upgrade.script.internal.text\", \n                \"localized\": \"Internal error occurs during Export of VMware License Service.\", \n                \"translatable\": \"Internal error occurs during %(0)s of %(1)s.\"\n            }\n        ], \n        \"componentKey\": \"upgrade_framework\", \n        \"problemId\": null\n    }, \n    \"progress\": 34\n}","isFinal":"true"}

I've been unsuccessful at finding any relevant KB articles and am hoping that someone here has run into this issue before

Been beating our heads against this for a day -

Upgrading an external PSC from 6.0 to 6.5.  Tried this via the CLI **and** the UI.  We manage to get past all the phase 1 export stuff - when we hit phase 2 (copying data over), the pre-upgrade checks run again and fail on a well-known issue in the README:

The upgrade of a vCenter Server Appliance might fail because a dependency shared library path is missing
The upgrade of a vCenter Server Appliance might fail before the export phase and the error log shows: /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_get_network: error while loading shared libraries: libvami-common.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. This problem occurs due to missing dependency shared library path.

but this README item covers the fix for the FIRST phase on the original PSC you're upgrading, and does not anticipate the check failing on the NEW PSC you are deploying to.

The error surfaced to the installers is "Cannot collect upgrade requirements. For more details check out the server logs."

Not sure how/why these checks are even running again on phase 2, but I see no viable workaround.

Wondered if anyone has seen this, before I file a support ticket.

Hi folks:

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this question or not, but I've been using William Lam's maclearn vib for a couple of years now because I have a VM that runs OpenVPN in bridge mode, and that needs promiscuous mode.  As with the nested ESXi situation that he wrote maclearn to address, this causes excessive CPU usage on that VM if there is lots of traffic on the virtual switch.  Because of that when I did updates I had to use "software profile update" instead of "software profile install" so that the maclearn vib didn't get removed. 

I was going through the dry-run of updating to 6.5d and it failed with a dependency check:

[root@naplesesxi:~] esxcli software profile update --dry-run --depot=/vmfs/volumes/539b4dcd-0d43b62e-2a98-e840f2d1736d/Upgrades/ESXi650-201704001

.zip --profile=ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard

[DependencyError]

File path of '/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/dvfilter-maclearn' is claimed by multiple non-overlay VIBs: {'VMware_bootbank_vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn_1.00-1.00', 'VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379'}

File path of '/usr/libexec/jumpstart/plugins/dvfilter-maclearn.json' is claimed by multiple non-overlay VIBs: {'VMware_bootbank_vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn_1.00-1.00', 'VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379'}

Please refer to the log file for more details.

I had read something about a new fling being available that added a better version of maclearn, but it required a Distributed Virtual Switch, and as I only have the essentials package, I didn't have the ability to create a Distributed Virtual Switch, so I was intending to just stay with what I had.  I had not read or heard that the original version of maclearn was going to actually become a standard part of ESXi, but if I am reading the error message correctly, I believe it's trying to tell me that it is.  If I do the command as "install" instead of update, it says that my version will be removed, along with some other ones that I'll need to research:

[root@naplesesxi:~] esxcli software profile install --dry-run --depot=/vmfs/volumes/539b4dcd-0d43b62e-2a98-e840f2d1736d/Upgrades/ESXi650-20170400

1.zip --profile=ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard

[Exception]

You attempted to install an image profile which would have resulted in the removal of VIBs ['VFrontDe_bootbank_sata-xahci_1.10-1', 'VMware_bootbank_vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn_1.00-1.00', 'VMware_bootbank_lsu-lsi-mptsas-plugin_1.0.0-1vmw.600.0.0.2494585', 'VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379']. If this is not what you intended, you may use the esxcli software profile update command to preserve the VIBs above. If this is what you intended, please use the --ok-to-remove option to explicitly allow the removal.

Please refer to the log file for more details.

[root@naplesesxi:~]

The release notes didn't mention anything about maclearn, but it looks like it's here.  I guess my best bet would be to remove Lam's original vib first, assuming that this new vib is really the old maclearn version that works on systems without a Distributed Virtual Switch, and then apply the update in "update" mode so that I don't remove the others. 

I guess what I'm looking for feedback on is whether or not that VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379 really is a plug replacement for the original maclearn vib.

Comments welcome.

We were in the process of upgrading our ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 U3 and before we were upgrading the firmware on our IBM System x3650 M4 servers using the IBM BOMC. Doing so, it upgraded the RAID controller firmware to version 23.31.0-0023.

After the upgrade, the host booted but the local datastore didn't mount and gave an error when trying to mount it. We were also unable to delete it. The RAID configuration showed no errors. It was a RAID1 composed of 2 HDD and 1 Hot Spare. Easy enough right.

We contacted VMware and they suspected something was wrong with the storage on this server. Everything was working fine before we upgraded the firmwares.

VMware recommended we rebuilt the RAID configuration and try to do a clean install of ESXi 5.5 U3 using the Lenovo custom image.. It fails.

I even tried to install 6.0 U2 using the Lenovo custom image.

The DSA, IMM2 and UEFI versions running are shown below.

This is the first time this has ever happened to us and we are at lost and praying for ideas.

Anyone's help would be welcomed.

Anyone who know`s an easy way to setup remote syslog collector, so that the folders isn`t named with the ip address of the host, but with the FQDN or just hostname of the ESX server..???

Needing to upgrade a Vcenter 5.5 (installed on Windows Server) to 6.5.  I would like to just upgrade the Vcenter in place.  That part seems easy.  This also has VMware View tied to it.  Will this break?  I have several 5.5 hosts that we are also migrating away from.  I 3 new hosts with 6.5 installed, but as you know my current Vcenter will not manage them until the upgrade.  Can I upgrade to 6.5 manage current 5.5 and 6.5 hosts, do the migration and then down the old hosts?

I'm having some issues that I'm hoping the community can solve.  I have a vCSA 5.5 in my environment that I want to upgrade to 6.5.  I downloaded the 6.5e ISO and mounted it, ran the installer.  The problem is I am stuck at step 3.  I input the info for the source appliance (the current vCSA 5.5) with the appropriate info which seems to take.  However the info I input for the second section, the ESXi Host or vCenter Server info seems to be the issue.  I have used both the direct IP for the host as well as the IP for the vCSA 5.5.  Using port 5480 as I can't get further on any other port.

When inputting the info using host IP, I get the error "Failed to get an SSL thumbprint of the source server certificate for [host IP]."

When inputting the info using vCSA IP, I get the certificate warning window, which I press Yes to, but then the error is "Invalid credentials for ESXi host or vCenter Server."  I have switched the username to be any of these:  root / administrator@vsphere.local / vmadmin (this is our vCenter admin account) / vmadmin@vsphere.local - all come up with the same error.  I know that all of these work to log in to the host directly, and that the xxx@vsphere.local accounts work when logging into the vCSA through both the web ui and using the vSphere client. 

So what am I doing incorrectly, and why won't it let me upgrade?  Should I just cut my losses and make a new vCSA and then remove my hosts from the old one and add them to the new one?  Is there something else I should try to do?