Sunday, August 25, 2013

vCSA 5.1u1b saves the day

Windows shop install of a "simple install" vCenter. Piece of cake and the local IT staff should be able to manage it in the long term. Except they don't put the new vCenter server into DNS and I don't realize it. >_< "Error 29155.Identity source discovery error" but install of SSO continues so I think it's something we can work with. Turns out, not so much but it was a pair of bad decisions by me that turned into a 5 hour headache and wanting to do bodily harm to the manager who decided that SSO should be required for all vCenter deployments. Hindsight #1: It's a VM. Use snapshots before mucking with things or installing. "Nah, it'll be fine, simple install...right?" Hindsight #2 and a bit: Do not uninstall SSO. Do not try to re-install everything from the "simple vCenter install" and expect it to work. Clean system or nothing. vCSA 5.1u1b (which the local IT staff won't know what to do with) was downloaded, installed, configured in about an hour. Setting the appliance for AD auth automatically set the AD domain in SSO (although with insecure settings) but it worked and I didn't have to muck with it. Saved the day. So thank you VMware for investing time into the vCSA and screw you for bad SSO error messages (or just SSO in general) and uninstall procedures that don't clean the system correctly. You cost me an entire Saturday afternoon and into the evening. Should I manually check DNS for the new vC server that I was handed? Yes. Should the SSO installer have continued upon error? NO.

Friday, August 16, 2013

New Cluster Name

While I've seen a whole host of boring cluster names in my travels, I like to open it up to voting. The ESXi cluster name is just a fairly arbitrary text value in the database that can be changed anytime so why not have some fun with it. :)

Please vote once, you can choose as many names as you like. Obvious ballot stuffing will disqualify the entry.