vSphere 5.1 Upgrade: Home Lab

Being a vExpert has its benefits, one of which is getting a year-long evaluation license for VMware vCloud Suite 5 Enterprise.  Since this includes vSphere 5.1 (vCenter and ESXi), I was inspired to get my home lab back up and running again.

Heads-up warning:  this stuff is never as easy as it's supposed to be.  We had an old saying at my previous employer: "it takes 100 hours"!  When someone complained that they were spending too much time on a task, the joke was always, "did you put your 100 hours in?"  Anyway, I digress...

Setting Up the Environment
The first step was getting my old/used Dell 2950 server racked and connected.  Racking it up and connecting to a KVM was easy.  Connecting it to my network was not.  I recently moved my old rack out of my office to an unfinished part of my basement - with no network drops, of course.  So I bought a small 4-port GbE switch and 50ft cable with the idea of running the cable to my existing switch still located in my office.  Since my office is in the finished part of my basement, I needed to run the cable through the ceiling and down the far wall.  I had done this several times using a draw-string to pull the cable through.  Well this time the string decided to break - I heard a snap! - the cable didn't even make it half way.

Great, now I have to figure out how to fish the cable through and find it to pull it back down near the area where my switch lives.  Long story short, there went my first 50 hours, but I did finally get the cable and new pull string through.  Did I mention that I hate pulling cable?

Physical Server Installation and Configuration
Next up - updating BIOS and component firmware of the server.  This went w/o a hitch.  The Remote Access Card works great, no need to stand in front of the server in the basement.

I then installed ESXi 5.1 to a 2GB Kingston flash drive plugged into the back of the server.  Again, installation completes successfully.  I rebooted the server, connected via the vSphere client and configured the standard settings - NTP time, local datastore, etc.

Installing the First VM
I created a VM to host the Active Directory domain controller.  I decided to use Windows Server 2012 since this was a brand new install in a new home lab network.  This allows me to explore/learn the new features of AD on Sever 2012 and give me some future-proofing.

Installing vCenter 5.1
With the domain controller up and running it was time to create a VM for vCenter 5.1.  I'm using the simple installation method since this is for a home lab and I'm keeping all of the components on the same VM.  I decided to use Windows Server 2012 again to be consistent, if for no other reason.  I know this is not supported per the compatibility list, but have read other admin using this version with success.  Not my luck though.  I got an error message stating the the installation was interrupted before it could be completed, and that I should check the logs.  Hmmm... I tried again using a different service account during the installation but no luck.  I even tried logging on as the local administrator security context and still no luck - each time I got the same error.  So vCenter 5.1 simple install on Windows Server 2012 = FAIL.  There goes another 25 hours!

At this point, I've decided to try the vCenter Server appliance.  This should actually be the easist and fastest way to deploy a new instance of vCenter, right?  There are other benefits as well: this will be the only option within the next several releases, the appliance is easy to upgrade, it includes a better, built-in database (vPostgreSQL) and most of the limitations of the 5.0 vCenter appliance have been removed.  Seems like a no-brainer.  Too bad it didn't work either(!).  I'm not sure how a brand new instance deployed on a brand new install of ESXi can fail, but it did.  The OVA deployed fine, vCenter appears to start fine, but 2 plugins failed to start: "VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring and Reporting" and " vCenter Service Status".    The error is "the request failed because the remote server took too long to respond".  Manually enabling the storage monitoring plugin works, gut the service status plugin still fails.  I'd had enough of that so I deleted the VM.  There goes another 10 hours!

Since that experiment failed, I wanted to go back to using a Windows OS which is not a bad thing since I suspect that this is what most environments will be using for some time to come.  Getting back to using a compatible OS, I deployed a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM.  Again, I start a simple installation of vCenter.  This time, I get a different (SSO) error:
Error 29148.STS configuration error.

What the heck!?!?  This is a plan, vanilla install on a newly built VM!  Now I'm losing confidence of vCenter 5.1 and SSO.  I decided to try again, this time choosing to use the local network account for the service account and making sure I choose as many defaults as possible (although I was mostly doing this previously).  And finally, SUCCESS!!! (And final 15 hours!)

I logged on to the new vCenter instance via the vSphere client, added and licensed the new ESXi host and everything looked good.

Conclusion
Whew!  At the end of the day, I wished I could have used the vCenter appliance - it would have been more than enough for my little home lab.  But the Windows-based vCenter still works great and now I'm ready to move on.

Next up:  Web Client and Update Manager installations.  I don't expect any problems (famous last words).  Later this week or early next week I'll post how this went along with the upgrade in my company's dev/test environment.  Quick preview:  SSO issues galore.

vSphere 5 Upgrade: SRM - PART 1

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, time to upgrade SRM.  Well, I got to step 6.2 and things went downhill from there.  The following is the description I used to open an SR with VMware support:

Upgrading SRM from 4.1.2 to 5.0.  I get the error: "failed to create database tables".  It doesn't appear to make any changes to the database.
I've double-checked settings per KB1015436 and several communities postings.
I've tried re-installing SRM 4.1.2 (successfully), performing a repair, then another upgrade but it still fails with the same error.

The first support tech went down the 'invalid permissions' path but this was not the problem.  Turns out, the SRM 5.0 upgrade does not support upgrading from SRM 4.1.2!  Interesting because the only documentation I can find on the subject clearly states that you can upgrade from SRM 4.1(!).  Looks like VMware needs to do a better job documenting these requirements.

I was then informed that I could wait until the next minor/point release of SRM 5 which would support upgrading from 4.1.2, but I didn't have that kind of time (and who knows when they'll actually release it).  So no upgrade for me, full install from scratch instead!  Besides have to reconfigure mappings, protection groups (which I was going to have to do anyway), etc, the biggest downside is losing the previous DR test results.  Yes, I saved those off as separate Excel files, but it would have been nice to have had all of the results right there in SRM from the beginning.


But wait, there's more!  Now that I have a brand new freshly installed SRM up and running, it's time to setup vSphere Replication.  Did that go problem free you ask?  Ummm, no.  The following is the description I used to open yet another SR with VMware support:

The VRMS servers at both sites fail to connect.  I have unregistered the server, powered down/deleted the appliance VM, re-initialized the VRMS database, repaired SRM, redeployed the VRMS servers and configured them with the same vCenter FQDN per KB2007463 but still have the same problem.

Between the support tech and I it took several hours to figure this one out.  The short of it is that it's a vCenter certificate problem.  What clued me into this was the error I got when registering the VRMS instance:

That "unacceptable signature algorithm" message is not your typical self-signed cert warning!  Turns out, my vCenter self-signed certs had expired.  This hadn't caused a problem until installing vSphere Replication - it wants at least a current/non-expired cert.  I checked the vCenter cert and sure enough, it had expired in 2010.  It was created in 2008 and was valid for only 2 years!

Now I bet you're wondering, how does one fix this cert problem?  Well that's easy, reinstall vCenter!  And repair won't work either so you have to uninstall the current vCenter instance and re-install a new one.  Luckily most settings are maintained in the vCenter database so this could have been much more painful.

While I was at it I checked the new vCenter cert and VMware apparently decided to make this one valid for 10 years.  Now that's more like it!

But wait, there's more!  Look for part PART 2 of this adventure in a near future post.  A little hint - the fun ain't over yet.

vSphere 5 Upgrade: VMFS Datastores

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, time to upgrade VMFS datastores.  Like the last couple of steps this one completed w/o issue.  Note that it is better to create VMFS datastores because you'll get a 1MB block size regardless of what size datastore you're creating, optimizing disk space.  Compare this to the 2-8MB block sizes required based on datastore size in ESXi 4.1 and earlier.

All of my datastores now report to be VMFS version 5.54.

vSphere 5 Upgrade: VM Tools and Virtual Hardware

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, time to upgrade VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware.  I'm happy to report that both of these steps completed w/o issue.  After the previous 4.1 upgrade, the VMware Tools upgrade corrupted one of my Windows 2000 VMs.  VMware claimed it was a Microsoft problem, Microsoft claimed it was a VMware problem.  Love the finger-pointing guys!  Anyway, I made sure this VM was upgraded (actually replaced) with a Windows 2008 R2 server and we updated the application while we were at it - a win/win in my book.

No problems this time (phew!).

The only other thing I did differently compared to my previous upgrade was upgrade the SQL and vCenter servers first.  vUpdate Manager will skip these VMs anyway.

vSphere 5 Upgrade: ESXi Hosts

Per Its Time vSphere 5 Upgrade, the ESXi host upgrades.  Not much to report here.  The upgrades completed w/o issue per vUpdate Manager.

Note that I had to force remediation.  Then I enabled "remove incompatible packages".  I didn't seem to loose anything after the upgrade.  Maybe it removed the HP bundles that were installed for ESXi 4.1?

vSphere 5 Upgrade: vCenter and vUpdate Manager

Let me say upfront that had I tested the upgrade against clones of the productions VMs, I would have found these problems ahead of time (note to self for future upgrades!).

I followed the steps published in Its Time: vSphere 5 Upgrade so the first component to get upgraded was the vCenter instance at the recovery site.  This completed successfully - no errors - so far so good.

Next up, vCenter upgrade at the protected site.  The database upgrade step failed(!).  The installer gave a fairly generic error: "database upgrade failed. See the log at...".  The log only mentioned: "failed to execute dbuhelper.exe: an error occurred".

A quick Google search finds the log error posted in a VMware Communities post (TGfVC! - thank goodness for VMware Communities!).  The resolution: set the log file growth to unrestricted.  Sure enough, my log file was set to restricted so I changed it, re-ran the install and viola, success!

That evening, I reconfigured the vCenter Linked Mode feature but they never seemed to reconnect.  By time I came in to work the next morning, it had started working.  I must not have been patient enough(?), not sure but it has worked fine since.

Finally (for this step), vUpdate Manager upgrade.  This went smoothly just as it did in the lab.  Now that its working, I can start upgrading the ESXi hosts.

It's Time: vSphere 5 Upgrade

The technological benefits of upgrading from VMware vSphere 4.x to vSphere 5.x are not as great as upgrading VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.x to vSphere 4.x in my opinion.  I don't know what the numbers are but I'm guessing that adoption hasn't been as fast as a consequence.

The latest XtraVirt poll posed this question with the following results:
What is your company's timescale for vSphere 5 deployment?
35%   6-12 Months
27%   1-3 Months
15%   3-6 Months
15%   1-2 Years
8%     No Current Plan

Well over half of admins responding will be upgrading within a year.  That's not bad.  I am in the "1-3 months" category and could argue that I've already started (planning and testing are complete).  The driver in my case is not technology/features-based, but is cost avoidance.

HP EVA SAN replication is licensed by capacity.  I don't want to rant about how utterly wrong this is but I'm not about to pay HP additional thousands of dollars for the privilege of replicating my data, thank you.  And now that SRM 5.0 provides replication for free, I don't have to (see previous post).

I've been planning our vSphere upgrade over the last month.  I've successfully installed and upgraded to vSphere 5 in the lab, now it's time to upgrade production.  I think VMware has finally got the upgrade process right.  It took them awhile although the vSphere 4.x upgrade was fairly smooth.  If you upgraded Virtual Infrastructure 2 to 3 you know what I mean!

I've pasted my upgrade plan below (taking out company-specifics).  I also included some notes from the lab tests. On to the show!

Phase 1: Planning

VMware vSphere Upgrade Center

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/

VMware vSphere Upgrade and Install Community Forum

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/upgradecenter?view=discussions

(Note: I watched the forums and blogosphere in general to determine the stability of the release.  This is always a good practice but especially with a ".0" release - let others test it out.)

As of 9/15/2011, no real “deal-killer”/systemic errors found during or after upgrade.  Here’s the list:

1.       Port group names must be less than 19 characters (no impact to us)

2.       vCenter license must be provided during installation or it will start in expired mode (no impact to us)

3.       One admin gets an error when trying to upgrade ESXi via CLI – “downloading metadata failed” (no impact to us – we’re not using CLI to upgrade ESXi)

4.       One admin had a corrupted esx.conf file that prevented him from upgrading ESXi (no impact to us)

Check Pre-requisites:

1.       Check VMware Infrastructure Licenses

a.       vCenter 5.0  (available)

b.      ESXi 5.0  (available)

c.   Site Recovery Manager 5.0 (available November 19, 2011)

2.       Check Hardware Compatibility

a.       Server Platform

b.   SAN Platform

c.   HBA cards

d.   NIC cards

3.       Check Software Compatibility

a.       Review Guest OS Support

b.      Review 3^rd-party Product Support

                                                   i.      Backup Software

                                                 ii.      Management Software

                                                iii.      Custom Scripts

c.       Review Interoperability matrix

                                                   i.      http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php

PROJECT MILESTONE: Planning Complete

Phase 2: Testing

Setup Test Environment

Once the above steps are complete, it’s time to start testing.

(Note: The general idea here is to configure an environment that matches the current production environment as closely as possible.  I've done this in the past using cloned VMs with "mostly" successful results.  This is the way to go if you can keep the test and production networks isolated.  For this upgrade, I decided to configure new VMs - this should still give me valid tests and is faster to get up and running than using cloned VMs based on past experience.  If you have the time, you may want to go the cloned VMs route.)

Step 1: Setup ESXi Hosts

1.       Setup 3 servers as ESXi hosts in Datacenter1

2.       Setup 3 servers as ESXi hosts in Datacenter2

3.       Install vSphere 4.1 (or whatever your current version is) each host per the COMPANY Installation Guide.  (You do have this documented, right?)

Step 2: Setup SAN LUNs and Replication

1.       Create one LUN in Datacenter1 for vCenter and SQL VMs

2.       Create one LUN in Datacenter2 for vCenter and SQL VMs

3.       Create one read-only LUN in Datacenter2 to host the replicated LUN

4.       Configure the Datacenter1 LUN for replication to Datacenter2.

Step 3: Setup Test Virtual Machines

1.       Install one base Windows Server 2008 R2 image on one host as each site to be used as the VCenter/SRM server

2.       Clone images for use as SQL server to host the vCenter databases

3.       Configure images as stand-alone VMs.

Step 4: Configure SQL Server

1.       Install the same SQL Server version used in production both SQL VMs

a.       Use the production configuration as reference.

Step 5: Configure vCenter

1.       Install the SQL Native Client on both vCenter VMs

2.       Install vCenter on both vCenter VMs

a.       Use the production configuration as reference

b.      Configure vCenter with production licenses during installation or it will start in expired mode

3.       Add hosts to vCenter as appropriate

4.       Use vUM to apply the same updates to ESXi hosts as are present in production.

a.       TEST: This will test vUM to upgrade hosts

b.      TEST: This will also test vMotion capability

c.       TEST: This will also test the ESXi host configuration (networks, storage, etc.).

Step 6: Configure SRM

1.       Install SRM on each vCenter VM

2.       Configure SRM for the replicated LUN

3.       TEST: Perform a test SRM recovery to ensure system is functional.

PROJECT MILESTONE: Fully Functional Test Environment Complete

Upgrade to vCenter 5.0/SRM 5.0

Now with a fully functional test environment in place, it’s time to start upgrading.

The upgrade to 5.0 is supposed to be the least intense VI/vSphere upgrade yet.  The steps are fairly straight-forward:

1.     Upgrade vCenter/Upgrade Manager (vUM)
2.     Upgrade the ESXi hosts
3.     Upgrade VMware Tools of the VMs and the Virtual Hardware of the VMs to version 8
4.     Upgrade the VMFS datastores to version 5
5.     Upgrade the SRM to version 5
6.     Upgrade and 3^rd-party tools and scripts.

Step 1: Upgrade vCenter

1.       Backup the vCenter database using SQL Server Management Studio

2.       Backup the SSL certificates (%allusersprofile%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter)

3.      Stop all vCenter services

4.       Install JDK 1.6

5.       Using the vCenter ISO, upgrade vCenter to version 5

a.       Upgrade the recovery site first

b.      Run the vCenter host agent pre-upgrade checker

6.       Configure the new vSphere 5 licenses

7.       Upgrade the vSphere Client

8.       From the recovery site, rejoin the site via Linked Mode:
From the Start menu, select All Programs > VMware > vCenter Server Linked Mode Configuration

Step 2: Upgrade Manager (vUM)

1.       Backup the vUM database using SQL Server Management Studio

2.       Stop all vUM services

3.       Install JDK 1.6

4.       Using the vCenter ISO, upgrade vUM to version 5

a.       Upgrade the recovery site first

5.       Upgrade the vSphere Client vUM plug-in

Step 3: Upgrade the ESXi hosts

There are two options to upgrade the hosts: via vUM or doing a clean install with the OEM custom ESXi 5 image/ISO.  For testing purposes, we’ll try both methods.

1.       Using vUM, upgrade the first host of each cluster

a.       Test vMotioning VMs between 4.1 and 5.0 hosts

(Lab note: Need to force remediation.  Enable "remove incompatible packages".)

2.       Using the ISO, perform a clean install of the last host in each cluster.

(Note: I skipped step 2 - vUM worked so well I decided to go with that method.  HP provides an image that can be "imported" directly into vUM (very nice!) which worked great.)

DECISION POINT: Use vUM Upgrade or Clean Install from ISO

Step 4: Upgrade VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware

1.       Using vUM, upgrade the VMware Tools component of all VMs

2.       Using vUM, upgrade the virtual hardware of all VMs.

(Note: vUM scan skips vCenter and SQL VMs.  You'll need to go back and upgrade these manually.)

Step 5: Upgrade the VMFS Datastore

The VMFS datastores can be upgraded in place while the VMs are running.

Step 6: Upgrade SRM

1.       Snapshot VC and SQL VMs

2.       Upgrade SRM to 5.0 on recovery, then protected site vCenter VM

a.       Stop SRM

b.      Uninstall SAN SRA

c.       Uninstall the SRM plug-in

d.      Upgrade SRM

e.      Install the 5.0 SRA (if using array-based replication)

f.        Restart SRM

3.       Configure SRM

a.       Remove Array Manager

b.      Add new Array Manager

c.       Reconfigure protection group

d.      Reconfigure recovery plan.

4.       Install and Configure vSphere Replication (if not using array-based replication)

a.       At the PROTECTED SITE deploy the vSphere Replication Management Server (vRMS)

                                                   i.      Assign a static IP address

                                                 ii.      Register with the protected site’s vCenter instance

b.      At the RECOVERY SITE deploy the vSphere Replication Management Server (vRMS)

                                                   i.      Assign a static IP address

                                                 ii.      Register with the recovery site’s vCenter instance

c.       At the RECOVERY Site deploy the vSphere Replication Server (vRS)

d.      Configure VMs for replication via the vSphere client

5.       TEST: Perform a test SRM recovery to ensure system is functional

Step 7: Configure Network Monitoring Tool

Note: In our case, we configured 2 "applications" in our NetFlow-based network traffic monitoring system:

1. vSphere Initial: port 31031 (port used to do the inital "seed" copy of the VM)
2. vSphere Ongoing: port 44046 (port used to replicate changes after initial replication completes)

Step 8: Upgrade 3^rd-Party Tools

There’s little need to test tools that vendors have certified for vSphere 5.0.  However, custom scripts will need to be tested.

PROJECT MILESTONE: vCenter and Site Recovery Manager Upgrade Complete

Phase 3: Production Upgrade

Follow steps in Phase 2 to upgrade production.  

Conclusion 

That's it!  Depending on the outcome of your tests in Phase 2, this may become an iterative process.  Also note that there's always the chance that you've tested everything 100 times and still encounter an issue while upgrading production.  It's the nature of the beast.  However, having the experience of performing the upgrade in a test environment will give you a leg up in troubleshooting problems.  And, having worked with VMware support numerous times, I can recommend calling them without hesitation.

Finally, always remember to document things along the way.  Follow these steps and you will be in good shape.