Should you enable Network health check for your Distributed Virtual Switches

Network health check is a very useful feature that was introduced with vSphere 5.1 vDS.

What does it do?

The purpose is to test if the VLANs, MTU and Load Balancing settings you defined are actually working. The old way of doing this would be to disconnect all port except one, by either doing a shutdown on the switch port, or pulling out the cable, and then testing, with a VM, if every VLAN still works. This can be a very lengthy process if you have many adapters, but also a necessary step if you want a stable environment.

If you want to know more about how it check the different settings, Joseph Griffiths did a good article on this you can read here: http://blog.jgriffiths.org/?p=877

So why would you ever disable this feature?

Well the health check feature generates a lot of mac table entries as explained in VMware KB 2034795.

An example given is that you have 35 Hosts with 2 Network Adapters each, and 60 VLANs. This will generate (35 * 2 * 60) 4200 mac table entries in your physical switches. And as you can see, this quickly increases. Some switches only has room for 32.000 records or less. Continue reading Should you enable Network health check for your Distributed Virtual Switches

Free IPAM solution – 3. Enabling REST

Today we will look at how to enable REST on phpIPAM. This is an essential part when integrating with vRealize Orchestrator, since REST is an excellent interface for automation.

REST might scare you at first, but don’t loose faith, you will soon enough begin to like it, when you vRealize the power it brings.

Continue reading Free IPAM solution – 3. Enabling REST

vCenter 6.5 Upgrade fails with error: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294)

I just upgraded the vCenter in my test lab, and I got an error after the first part of the process. When it was about to migrate data from the old VCSA 6.0 Server.

I restarted to process but this time is was unable to get information from my source VCSA server. In the log I had the following errors:

2016-11-16T16:42:03.649Z - info: VM Identifier for Source VC: vm-108
2016-11-16T16:42:03.784Z - debug: initiateFileTransferFromGuest error: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).
2016-11-16T16:42:03.785Z - debug: Failed to get fileTransferInfo:ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).
2016-11-16T16:42:03.785Z - debug: Failed to get url of file in guest vm:ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).
2016-11-16T16:42:03.785Z - error: Error in getting fileData for nodeType. Error: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).
2016-11-16T16:42:03.785Z - error: Failed to read the nodetype, Error: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).
2016-11-16T16:42:03.786Z - error: sourcePrecheck: error in getting source Info: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294).

I quickly discovered the reason. My root password was expired and it wanted me to create a new password for root.

Continue reading vCenter 6.5 Upgrade fails with error: vix error codes = (1, 4294967294)