Enable root access on debain Appliance VMs deployed

 

Login to the VM console from webclient

Login to the appliance with maintance username and password

sudo su

chattr -i /etc/passwd /etc/shadow

enable password with "password root" command

Enable root ssh with making "PermitRootLogin Yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config file

restart ssh service by "service ssh restart"

Failed to deploy OVF package. ThrowableProxy.cause A general system error occurred: Transfer failed: Error transferring file to

Error:

Failed to deploy OVF package. ThrowableProxy.cause A general system error occurred: Transfer failed: Error transferring file to

Solution:

This happens due to 2 issues.

1.your OVA file is so big and the size of the OVA file that can be uploaded depends on how much memory is available on your system.

First extract the OVA on your system by running the command tar -xvf <file.ova>. Then you can provide the deployment wizard with the OVF and VMDKs as separate files.

2.Try connecting the vCenter FQDN name to connect in browser and deploy the OVA.

SSH or WinSCP to ESXi host or vCenter Server fails with Couldn't agree a key exchange algorithm

Error: 

SSH or WinSCP connection to ESXi host or vCenter Server Appliance fails a message similar to:

Couldn't agree a key exchange algorithm (available: ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521, diffie-hellman-group16-sha512,diffie-hellman-group18-sha512,)

Solution:

To resolve this issue, upgrade PuTTy to a version to 0.65 or later from http://www.putty.org/.

VSC "maint" account locked for long time after 3 unsuccessful attempts | ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere

 

Netapp VSC /OTV will lock maint user after 3 unsuccessful login attempts.

Solution:

The maint account is locked after 3 failed attempts, to prevent brute force attacks.

It will get unlocked after 15 minutes, since the last login attempt

Boot Option to switch from UEFI to legacy Bios is disabled

 If you see the boot options under the VMware VM that already enabled and want to switch legacy follow the below steps.

Note:The process to make the VM bootable again after changing the firmware is quite a pain.You need to create a new boot partition on an MBR-partitioned disk.Then you need to boot from a Windows-installer ISO and run a bunch of commands to create a new BCDstore, add a new boot-option and stuff like that.

From vCenter Webclient:

    Power Off the VM

    Edit VM settings ->VM Option->Boot Options

Firmware Boot option is EFI and disabled.

    Disable Virtualization based security and now you can change Firmware to Legacy BIOS.

    Now Power ON VM

 

   

VMware vCLS -vSphere Cluster Services

 The vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) is a new feature from vCenter 7.0u1 onwards.

  vCLS uses agent virtual machines to maintain cluster services health.

 vCLS ensures that if vCenter Server becomes unavailable, cluster services remain available      to maintain the resources and health of the workloads

 The vCLS agent virtual machines (vCLS VMs) are created when you add hosts to clusters.

 Up to three vCLS VMs are required to run in each vSphere cluster, distributed within a cluster. vCLS is also enabled on clusters which contain only one or two hosts. In these clusters the number of vCLS VMs is one and two, respectively.

Number of vCLS Agent VMs in Clusters

Number of Hosts in a Cluster	Number of vCLS Agent VMs
1	1
2	2
3 or more	3

The lifecycle operations of vCLS VMs are managed  ESX Agent Manager .

The datastore for vCLS VMs is automatically selected based on ranking all the datastores connected to the hosts.

The algorithm tries to place vCLS VMs in a shared datastore if possible.

We can perform a storage vMotion to migrate vCLS VMs to a different datastore.

How to Extract OVA file config parameters | Deploy OVA file using powercli

For Extracting the OVA config parameters follow below steps:

1) From vSphere PowerCLI connect to vCenter

        Connect-VIServer <Vcenter IP>  

2) Define $ovfPath as the .OVA file PATH

      $ovfPath = "c:\ranjith.ova"

3) Get Get-OvfConfiguration :$ovfConfig = Get-OvfConfiguration -Ovf $ovfPath

4) Now from $ovfConfig we can extract by converting to hash table as below.

$ovfconfigHashTable = $ovfconfig.ToHashTable()

$ovfconfigHashTable.Keys | Sort-Object

 

>> will list all the parameters.