vSphere - Rob Steele

Please change appliance (OS) root password before attempting an update

I’ve been working today to get my home lab updated and came across a vcenter update message while running the Pre-Update.

It appears that I need to change the root password for the OS as it expired.

A quick google search and I found a VMware KB article on how to update the password.

Connect to the vCenter Server Appliance with an SSH session and the root user credentials.
Use the following commands to get to the command prompt:

shell shell.set --enable true
shell

3.Change the root password using passwd command.
4.Verify the root account password has been changed using:chage -l root
5.Re-attempt the upgrade again.

Thats it! Run the pre-check again and update!

***referenced KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67414 ***

VMware Photon on vCloud Air

Tonight I wanted to provision one of VMware’s newest open source projects on VMware vCloud Info. Photon is a minimal Linux container host OS. It is designed to have a small footprint and boot extremely fast on VMware platforms. Photon is optimized for vSphere and validated on VMware product and provider platforms. Photon supports the following container specifications: Docker, rkt (rocket), and Pivotal Garden.

I would encourage you to sign up for a vCloud Air On Demand subscription if you haven’t already. If you are familiar with VMware products and would like to deploy VMs in the cloud for testing or for production this is the way to do it. vCloud Air Signup

If you sign up using my link you will get $300 in free credits. Which is plenty to play around on or even build a nice lab in the cloud.

My mic was messing up in this so I apologize, but let me know if you would like to see more videos like this in the comments below.

Official page of: VMware Photon

VMware VDP Advanced 5.5 “Unable to find this VDP in the vCenter inventory”

A quick troubleshooting blog… I recently came across this error when deploying the VMware VDP appliance: “Unable to find this VDP in the vCenter inventory”

I took a look a look at the following log file on the VDP appliance:
/opt/vmware/var/log/vami/vami-ovf.log

The following entries were present:

[info] [process id: 4062] Hostname property is not present, querying and setting hostname.
[info] [process id: 4062] Output:Host name has been set to localhost.localdom

From these entries I realized that I did not setup DNS for the new appliance. After creating the entries I rebooted the appliance and retried the configuration wizard only to see the same thing. I’m assuming at this point (and confirmed via the admin guide; page 17) that the appliance deployment relies on the DNS entries. I removed the previous deployment and also provisioned the appliance from the web client on the second pass and was able to configure without issue.