Keith Smith - My Blog
vCenter 6.0 interface sucksThursday, September 10, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in VMware, Journal of thoughts
As mentioned here http://bit.ly/1UrCpqN, I finally made the move back to vSphere and decided to go with version 6. There has been chatter over the past few years that, the release of a great new web client was coming. Well, it finally came and honestly, they would have been better off sticking with the fat client. Why..? You may ask. Because the interface is Flash! Yes, the same Flash that should have been deprecated by now, the same Flash that has more Zero-day vulnerabilities than a tennis net has holes. I don't understand why any company would develop an interface in Flash or Java at this point. I can here some people at VMware saying if we were to develop the vSphere 6 web client in HTML5 it would take more time. I think most if not all customers would say ok take the time, because HTML5 is the best way to go point blank!
I will say this, the vCenter doesn't totally suck
Positive: 1) New platform architecture 2) Upgrade process is supposed to be a lot easier
Negatives: 1) Uses Flash — vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities, usability is terrible. 2) Uses Java — A catastrophe, Issues with every Java upgrade that are compatibility related,"security enhancements", vulnerabilities 3) Uses browsers & plugins — impacted by browser releases or changes, versions, vulnerabilities
I think that VMware needs to be more transparent about what they are doing with the replacement of this terrible Flash interface. I also think that they need to keep the TAM's informed so they can keep customers apprised of the progress.
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How To Restore Multiple SQL Databases At One TimeWednesday, September 9, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in MicrosoftOne of the things I had on my to-do list was to take backups of a few SQL databases used by production systems, this way testing could be done in a separate environment. During the last Maintenance window, I got a chance to do this. The steps were: 1. Spin up a new server (perform normal S.O.P for provisioning) 2. Install SQL Server 3. On the new test SQL server, Add/create security logins (they need to match the source, which would the SQL server where the database came from) 4. On prod servers, that had multiple databases I setup a Maintenance plan that would take a full backup of the databases I selected.  I did this because it was a quick and easy way to backup multiple databases in one fell swoop. I stop the services on the application servers to halt data being written then execute the Maintenance plan. At this point, I move all the backups to the new test SQL server. I now have backups of all the databases I wanted in. bak files. I now am tasked with having to restore quite a few databases to this new SQL server. It would be great if I could do the reverse of #4 and restore multiple SQL databases at the same time, unfortunately that is not an option from within the SQL Management studio. I could have created SSIS Packages to copy the data between data sources but chose not to on this opportunity. I had an idea! If you go in the SQL Management Studio, then go through all the steps to do the SQL database restore, choose a source and destination database. Then go to the script drop down to copy the T-SQL script  which looked like this RESTORE DATABASE [DBNAME] FILE = N'DBNAME' FROM DISK = N'v:\DBNAME_backup_2015_09_09_RANDOM.bak' WITH FILE = 1, NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10 GO Where the DBNAME is that would be the database name as it would show in the SQL Management studio. Now with the T-SQL script there I wanted to get the names of all the SQL backups, for this I ran the following from a command line driveletter:\folder\dir /b>list.txt This will create the text file inside that folder. If you want the file output elsewhere, use a fully qualified name. Remember that Windows uses \ as the directory delimiter, not / Now using the list.txt file I created, I take the names of the databases and insert them in the T-SQL script where it says DBNAME. I do this for each database using some other methods to speed this part up. Once this is completed I execute the query; it took a few minutes, but results show no errors when completed. I refresh the Object Explorer, and now all the databases are attached. I was able to change a string on a test application server, and point it at the new test SQL to confirm that the application was going to work. A Restart of a few services and success! Data is present and current at least at the time of the backup.
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system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys BSODFriday, September 4, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in VMware, Xen, Microsoft, LinuxThe system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys BSOD issue was interesting to me;  I wanted to see if I could reproduce this. I exported a VM from Amazon's EC2 because Amazon EC2 uses the Xen hypervisor as well. I upload the VM into a datastore on vSphere and convert the virutal disk as I noted here http://bit.ly/1UrCpqN I power on the VM and I get the same system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys BSOD. I boot into safe mode I run a msconfig from the search, Under the boot tab I chose base video because I still had the xentools installed on the VM's. So that had to be the culprit right? I reboot the VM, and it boots fine, at this point I uninstall all the XenServer/Citrix related items. I then restart the VM and I was glad to see it make it to the login screen. Solution: I think...  The way to avoid this issue if you are going from Xen to VMware or any other hypervisor is to uninstall all the XenServer/Citrix items before performing the export of the VM.
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XenServer to VMware MigrationFriday, September 4, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Network, VMware, Xen, MicrosoftWell, it's time to put XenServer out to pasture in favor of vSphere 6.0, the coolest thing I will miss is XenCenter which can be installed on any modern Windows OS. In the Citrix world, you do not need a dedicated XenCenter server. In the VMware world you do need a dedicated vCenter server. Not that big of a deal, but something to note if any of you start comparing the products. Start with interoperability testing In the past, I have used some version of the vCenter Converter to convert VM's from some other product. I figured I would test the theory of simply exporting a VM's from xencenter in an ovf format and importing it into vcenter. That attempt failed with the following error "Could not parse the document: 'encoding specified in XML declaration is incorrect". Upon testing the same ovf export on VMware workstation and virtualbox I received the same error. Back to the old Method It would have been great to power off VM's then export them from xencenter, then import them into vCenter. With this not being possible at the time I proceed to fire up the vCenter Converter. Using the vCenter Converter I was able to convert a few of the VM's, in some of the other attempts I received errors like converter error "Host hosts.allow: ALL:LOCAL,x.x.x.x hosts.deny: ALL:ALL Another workaround for the *nix VM's is to upload the virtual disks to the datastore, and then proceed to convert them. At this point, you could create a new virtual machine and use the new created virtual for that machine. For me, this worked great, and the *nix VM's would boot successfully. In some of the other cases, I changed from hostname to IP in the vCenter Converter, and that allowed me to convert the nix VM. I also had some instants where Windows VM's wouldn't convert; they would fail and say 3% network is unreachable host key can't be retrieved or a certificate in the host's chain is based on an untrusted root converter. For the VM's that gave those errors, I installed the vCenter Converter on the VM itself and chose This local Machine at the target. As you can see, I did quite a few workarounds to keep making progress on exporting the VM's. Into to vSphere as the final destination At this point, I have all VM's exported, I proceed to upload them into a datastore in vSphere environment. After the uploads were complete, I had to convert the disks to proper vmdk's that could be used by the VM on vSphere. On the hypervisor I enable SSH, I then proceed to SSH into the hypervisor and make my way into the datastore that housed the VM's. There were quite a few sub directory's so I had to travel into each one cd /vmfs/volumes/whatever/foldername/VMName then run vmkfstools -i currentvirtualdiskname.vmdk newvirtualdiskname.vmdk I had to do that for all the virtual disks that were uploaded. Once all that was done I added the vmx files to the vCenter Inventory, from there I had to remove the original virtual disk's and attach the new virtual disk I created. In the process, I was prompted to remove and delete the old virtual disks which is nice because that way I won't have to go back and clean up the old virtual disks. I now power on one 2012R2 VM and one 2008R2 VM for testing to ensure that they boot up and function as they should. The 2008R2 boots fine however, the 2012R2 VM blows up with the BSOD. I power up another 2012R2 VM so see if this is a one-off or not, of course, the same result of a BSOD with the error of system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys.
At this point I know there is something wrong with 2012R2 and Xen, I had to boot up the VM in safe mode by choosing Troubleshoot.  Click Advanced options 
Click Startup Settings. 
Click Restart Once in safe mode I run a msconfig from the search, Under the boot tab I chose base video 
I still had the Citrix/Xen related items installed on the VM's, so that had to be the culprit. 
I reboot the VM and it boots fine, at this point I uninstall all the XenServer/Citrix related items. I then restart the VM, and I was glad to see it make it to the login screen. I did have some cases where the VM did BSOD after the msconfig modification and XenServer/Citrix items were remove but upon a restart the VM does proceed to the login screen. I had to do the aforementioned procedure for every 2012R2 VM that had a BSOD system_thread_exception_not_handled xen.sys. I should note that this project took me about 3 1/2 days to complete due to the above technical complications and many other variables.
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Enable SSH login with RootFriday, September 4, 2015 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Linux
I recently had a need to ssh into a *nix box using the root credentials for a particular situation. It took me a few minutes to figure out the following
Once I was done I did the above steps again but changing the "PermitRootLogin" to "without-password"
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