Since the announcement of the free Log Insight for vCenter Server edition I have received a lot of questions about what you can and can not do. In this post, I would like to state the facts. Read on to learn more!
Cloud Architecture and Management
Tag: vCenter Server
A major announcement with Log Insight 3.3 is that everyone with a supported vCenter Server Standard, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus license gets an edition of…
As you know, Log Insight supports integration with vSphere. One part of the integration is the collection of vCenter Server events, tasks and alarms. If you are using a non-English vCenter Server locale and you wish to leverage the Log Insight vSphere content pack, read on!
In case you missed it, William Lam recently put up a couple of excellent posts on how to configure some important vCenter Server alarms. As it turns out, the underlying VOB (VMkernel Observation) messages appear in vSphere logs and if your are running Log Insight you can easily check for environmental issues such as the ones he outlined.
One of the great features of Log Insight is its tight integration with other VMware products. One of these integrations is with vSphere. I have talked about vSphere integration in the past, however I would like to do so in more details to clear up some questions I have received lately.
Now that you have vCenter Log Insight deployed and configured, you need to configure sources to send their log messages to Log Insight. If you enabled vCenter Server integration then you should start to receive log messages, but this is only the beginning of configuring remote syslog sources.
IMPORTANT: Configuring vCenter Server integration does not configure vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi hosts connected to vCenter Server to send remote syslog to Log Insight. For more information continue reading!
Let’s start by going over what Log Insight supports today and what mechanisms it has to configure vSphere devices for you.
If you have deployed the VCSA a couple of dozen times like me then you quickly realize that it is necessary to script the initial configuration of the device. I would highly recommend taking a look at William Lam’s blog for some great setup scripts including:
- http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/automating-vcsa-51-vcenter-server.html
- http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/10/vghetto-lab-notsupported-slides-posted.html
- http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/02/automating-vcsa-network-configurations.html
Something that I noticed was missing from William’s scripts was the ability to configure application layer services such as NTP and Syslog. As such, I put together a couple quick scripts shared below.
I was recently deploying a Cloud Foundry instance and was experiencing errors during the deployment. From the several failed deployments, I received the following BOSH error messages:
Error 100: Unable to communicate with the remote host, since it is disconnected.
mysql_node/54: Unable to communicate with the remote host, since it is disconnected.
Error 100: A general system error occurred: Server closed connection after 0 response bytes read; SSL(TCPClientSocket(this=000000000de625e0, state=CONNECTED, _connectSocket=TCP(fd=-1), error=(null)) TCPStreamWin32(socket=TCP(fd=23280) local=10.23.6.17:59642, peer=10.17.0.156:443))
Looking at the events on the ESXi host I saw the following:
What was causing the issue and how can it be fixed?
During a recent change ticket in a non-production environment I was called into an All Paths Down (APD) situation on some ESXi hosts. For those who do not know what an APD is, it is when an ESXi host loses all paths to its shared storage. The ESXi hosts impacted in my particular case were hosting several virtual vCenter Server (vCS) instances. The virtual vCS VMs were being used by a group of developers for SOAP calls in order to provision, modify, and delete VMs. Once all the vCS instances had been recovered and vSphere client sessions verified that the instances were operational, the instances were turned back over to development. The developers immediately began complaining about SOAP commands failing to the vCS instances.
What was going on?
I am in the process of building my home lab. I recently purchased two servers and installed ESXi 4.1 on them. In addition, I deployed a test vCenter Server instance so I could run VUM. With vCenter Server up, I attempted to add the two ESXi servers. The first one added without issue, but the second one failed with the error messages:
Cannot complete the configuration of the HA agent on the host. See the task details for additional information.
Misconfiguration in the host network setup
I verified that the hosts were in fact configured identically and then tried to add the host again, but the same error messages were displayed. Based on the error messages, I found the following KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1019200. Unfortunately, the link did not help.
Next, I removed the ESXi host from vCenter Server and tried to re-add it. This time I got a different error message:
A general system error occurred internal error vmodl.fault.HostCommunication
From this error message I found KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1012154. This article pointed to name resolution (i.e. DNS) being my issue. I know of the importance of DNS with VMware products and was sure I had verified its configuration, but decided to double check. As suspected, DNS was configured and working as expected.
At this point, I decided to restart the management services as that fixes a majority of ESX(i) issues. Upon doing so and trying to add the ESXi server to vCenter Server, I received another new error message:
Unable to access the specified host, either it doesn’t exist, the server software is not responding, or there is a network problem
This error message pointed me to KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003409.
Again I tried everything suggested and was still receiving the same error message. At this point, I was frustrated. I decided to reboot the server just in case that fixed the issue. Upon restarting, the error message want back to the vmodl.fault.HostCommuncation one.
What was going on and how could this be fixed?