I had a big day at the office a couple of days ago. \u00a0I moved my vCenter application from one dedicated server to another. \u00a0That doesn’t sound like a huge ordeal, but it was a pain in the rear. \u00a0I stumbled along with a lot of help from Google and I wanted to outline some lessons learned for everyone else.<\/p>\n
I actually had a few objectives I wanted to achieve:<\/p>\n
I attempted this upgrade a little over a week ago and near the end of my change control I realized that something was wrong with the Windows 2008 server which prevented the event log from opening and the service from starting. \u00a0Since I didn’t want to leave this in production I backed out my change and rescheduled.<\/p>\n
The second attempt at this install went much better. \u00a0I had my 2008 x64 server rebuilt by my server team and the event log was working fine (I verified before attempting my install). \u00a0The vCenter install went well and I was able to achieve the first three of my objectives. \u00a0The final one was a bit more work — since I changed my vCenter IP I had to manually reconnect each of my hosts. \u00a0It was expected and only took fifteen minutes or so.<\/p>\n
After I had visibility into each of my hosts and basic vCenter functionality I started digging a bit deeper to verify my change was successful. \u00a0When I clicked on the “vCenter Service Status” button I found a problem. \u00a0All of the metrics had errors that they couldn’t connect to the old name of my vCenter server. \u00a0I poked around the console and changed my VirtualCenter.VimApiUrl and VirtualCenter.VimWebServicesUrl in the advanced vCenter settings but was unsuccessful. \u00a0Luckily I was able to find this VMware Communities article<\/a> that suggested using ADSIEdit to delete an entire container from the vCenter ADAM instance (CN=<GUID_of_vCenter>, OU=ComponentSpecs, OU=Health, DC=virtualcenter, DC=vmware, DC=int). \u00a0Thanks, bgarner!<\/p>\n Once I was able to see the service status I realized that my SQL agent stat rollup tasks (weekly\/monthly) were not running properly. \u00a0Part of my install included changing the way I access my remote database from using MS-SQL authentication to Windows Integrated. \u00a0During the first attempt of the install I received an error that one of the rollup tasks in the SQL agent was owned by the SQL user and had to be owned by my Windows user to continue. \u00a0I decided the smartest thing to do would be to delete all three rollup tasks and simply let the install re-create them. \u00a0Turns out this wasn’t the best idea — for some reason the install only recreated the daily rollup task and not the weekly or monthly. \u00a0I didn’t save the link (shame on me) but I found a blog entry suggesting that I re-run job_schedule2_mssql.sql and job_schedule3_mssql.sql from my Program Files\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\VirtualCenter Server directory. \u00a0I ran the scripts and verified that the jobs existed in my SQL Agent. \u00a0They were scheduled to run several hours in the future — so my vCenter Service Status still showed a warning. \u00a0(For the record, I checked back the next morning and everything was fine.)<\/p>\n Finally, another annoyance I’ve been dealing with for awhile was a plugin from a CapacityIQ proof-of-concept that showed up in Plugins > Manage Plungins. \u00a0I was no longer using the product but I couldn’t seem to get rid of that plugin. \u00a0I have removed plugins from the client machine several times but this one seemed to follow me around. \u00a0Fortunately another VMware Communities article<\/a> came to the rescue. \u00a0The article specifically references vCenter Chargeback but the process worked for CapIQ. \u00a0The key was finding the correct methods in the https:\/\/vcenterserver.mydomain.local\/mob web service — that I didn’t really understand or know about.<\/p>\n I hope these links help if you ever encounter a similar problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a big day at the office a couple of days ago. \u00a0I moved my vCenter application from one dedicated server to another. \u00a0That doesn’t sound like a huge ordeal, but it was a pain in the rear. \u00a0I … Continue reading