How to Build vCAC 6.2 LAB on VMware Workstation 11 – Part 1

Recently VMware released VMware vRealize Automation Center 6.2 (vCAC). I guess there will be a newer version along with vSphere 6.0. Be an ITPro you have to keep learning new stuff! I built a lab environment on my laptop for learning. I’m going to share my implementation experience below, it spent me dozen hours plus lot of documents reading. Initially I felt it’s to complicate to deploy (That’s looks like a tradition of VMware products). But eventually I thought it’s not easy to provide a unified self-service end user interface in a multi-vendors infrastructure. Even OpenStack is not easy!

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ESXi 5.5 and Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC

*** English Version ***

You are using HP ProLiant BL460c G7 or Gen8, ESXi version is 5.5, NIC is Emulex chipset. You are using driver version 10.x.x.x. You may experience the host randomly lost connectivity on vCenter Server, host status show “No responding”. You cannot ping any virtual machine hosted on the blade. High pause frame is observed on HP virtual connect model down links after problem occurred. And you see similar error in vmkernel logs:

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How to Change SCSI Controller Type on Virtual Machine

Some of my virtual machines used ISL logical SCSI controller. It’s not recommended for Red Hat 6 virtual machines. We need to change it to VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller.

Basically the steps is power off virtual machine, change the SCSI controller type, and power on. Then you lost operation system. 🙂

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Incompatible device backing specified for device ‘x’

It’s easy to find a solution for this particular problem. VMware has a KB for this error. Somehow it’s not my case. I don’t know what’s the exactly root cause but you can try vMotion the virtual machine to other host and give a try. Chinese Version 这个问题的解决方案很容易找到,VMware有一个知识库。但不知道为什么,我遇到的问题没法用此知识库解决。我通过vMotion虚拟机到其他ESXi 主机解决此问题,也不知道具体原因是什么。

Linux virtual machine hang on ESXi 5.5 host

English Version

Again something wrong on ESXi 5.5! Please don’t upgrade VMware Tools to 5.5 if you have Debian or Red Hat Linux virtual machine on your ESXi 5.5 hosts. There is a unsolved bug on vmmemctl drivers (balloon driver) of VMware Tools 5.5 can lead to Linux virtual machine hangs.

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