Book Reviews - VMware vSphere Troubleshooting

Book Reviews - VMware vSphere Troubleshooting
Gain expertise in troubleshooting most common issues to implement vSphere environments with ease

About This Book

  • Plan, analyze, and design effective solutions for your vSphere environment
  • Troubleshoot problems related to vSphere performance
  • Familiarize yourself with the advanced troubleshooting conceptsand become an xpert level administrator

Who This Book Is For

The books is intended for mid-level System Engineers and System Integrators who want to learn VMware power tools to troubleshoot and manage the vSphere infrastructure. Good knowledge level and understanding of virtualization is expected.

What You Will Learn

  • Configure vSphere management assistant and troubleshooting tools
  • Use troubleshooting tools to monitor performance and troubleshoot different issues
  • Learn how to troubleshoot High Availability and other commonly known problems with clusters such as insufficient resources, failing heartbeats
  • Use Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) to verify configuration
  • Diagnose storage issues including iSCSI, NFS and VMFS problems
  • Manage vSphere Network Virtual and Distributed Switches, Trunks, VLANS
  • Monitor and shape network traffic, configure routes and DNS
  • Quickly resolve common day-to-day problems by analysing logs of VMware vSphere hosts and VMware vCenter Server
  • Debug and resolve commonly known vSphere Cluster problems

In Detail

VMware vSphere is the leading server virtualization platform with consistent management for virtual data centers. It enhances troubleshooting skills to diagnose and resolve day to day problems in your VMware vSphere infrastructure environment.
This book will provide you practical hands-on knowledge of using different performance monitoring and troubleshooting tools to manage and troubleshoot the vSphere infrastructure.
It begins by introducing systematic approach for troubleshooting different problems and show casing the troubleshooting techniques. You will be able to use the troubleshooting tools to monitor performance, and troubleshoot issues related to Hosts and Virtual Machines. Moving on, you will troubleshoot High Availability, storage I/O control problems, virtual LANS, and iSCSI, NFS, VMFS issues.
By the end of this book, you will be able to analyze and solve advanced issues related to vShpere environment such as vcenter certificates, database problems, and different failed state errors.

Style and approach

A step-by-step guide full of real world scenarios that will enhance advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in troubleshooting the VMware vSphere environment. Basic concepts of vSphere and the most common vSphere infrastructure problems are explained with practical solutions to resolve it.
Chapter 1: The Methodology of Problem Solving 1
Troubleshooting techniques 1
Precise communication 3
Creating a knowledge base of identified problems and solutions 4
Obtaining the required knowledge of the problem space 4
Isolating the problem space 5
Documenting and keeping track of changes 5
Troubleshooting with power tools 5
Configuring the vSphere management agent 6
Installation 6
Installation steps 7
VMware vMA features 8
Powering-on vMA 10
AD integration 10
AD unattended access 11
vMA web UI 13
vi-user 13
Configuring vMA as a syslog server 14
Creating a logrotate file 17
The vMA authentication mechanism 17
Accessing systems from vMA 18
vMA scripts samples 19
PowerCLI 19
Connecting to vCenter Server or an ESX/vSphere host with PowerCLI 20
Setting up a syslog server using PowerCLI 20
Setting up a sysLog server manually 21
A comprehensive reference of log files 21
vSphere log files – vSphere host 5.1 and later 21
Logs from vCenter Server components on vSphere
host 5.1, 5.5, and 6.0 23
vCenter log files 23
vCenter inventory service log files 25
vSphere Profile-Driven Storage log files 26
Configuring logs and collecting logs 27
Using vSphere Client 27
Using vSphere Web Client 28
Using the vm-support tool 29
Running vm-support in a console session on vSphere hosts 29
Generating logs on stdout 30
Using vm-support in vMA to collect logs 30
Using PowerCLI to collect the log bundle 31
Collecting log bundles from vCenter Server 31
Collecting log bundles from a vSphere host 32
Collecting log bundles from the vSphere log browser 32
Exporting logs 33
Understanding the hardware health of vSphere hosts 33
Miscellaneous tools 34
Chapter 2: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Host and VM
Performance 35
Tools for performance monitoring 36
Using esxtop/resxtop 36
Live resource monitoring – the interactive mode 39
Offline performance monitoring – batch mode 40
Replaying performance metrics – replay mode 41
Using Windows Performance Monitor 43
Analyzing esxtop results 45
Understanding CPU statistics 46
Enabling more esxtop fields 46
Memory statistics 49
Memory management in a vSphere host 49
Memory overcommitment 49
Memory overhead 50
Transparent page sharing 50
Ballooning 51
Memory compression 51
Diagnosing memory blockage 54
Network metrics 56
Understanding network metrics 57
Diagnosing network performance 58
Storage metrics 58
Using vMA and resxtop 61
vCenter performance charts 62
Creating a chart and configuring metrics 64
Configuring logging level for performance 66
Virtual machine troubleshooting 67
USB-attached virtual machines 68
Non-responsive USB/CD drives 68
Unable VM migration with a USB device 68
Fault-tolerant virtual machines 69
Incompatible or hosts not available 69
Chapter 3: Troubleshooting Clusters 71
An overview of cluster information 72
Cluster performance monitoring 73
vSphere HA 74
Failing heartbeat datastores 75
Changing heartbeating datastores 75
Insufficient heartbeat datastores 76
Unable to unmount a datastore 77
Detaching datastores with vMA 78
Detaching a datastore using vSphere PowerCLI 80
vCenter server rejects specific datastores 81
DRS-enabled storage 82
Failed DRS recommendations 82
Datastore maintenance mode failure 83
More common errors of Storage DRS 83
Insufficient resources and vSphere HA failover 84
I/O control troubleshooting 88
SIOC logging 90
Changing vDisk shares and limits for a virtual machine 91
vSphere Fault Tolerance for virtual machines 92
Common troubleshooting of fault tolerance 93
Configuring SNMP traps for continuous monitoring 94
Configuring SNMP traps with vMA 95
Tuning the SNMP agents 96
Configuring SNMP agents from PowerCLI 97
Chapter 4: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Networking 101
Log files 102
Understanding the virtual network creation process 105
Network troubleshooting commands 106
Repairing a dvsdata.db file 108
ESXCLI network 109
Troubleshooting uplinks 112
Troubleshooting virtual switches 113
Troubleshooting VLANs 116
Verifying physical trunks and VLAN configuration 118
Verifying VLAN configuration from CLI 118
Verifying VLANs from PowerCLI 119
Verifying PVLANs and secondary PVLANs 120
Testing virtual machine connectivity 120
Troubleshooting VMkernel interfaces 120
Verifying configuration from DCUI 123
Verifying network connectivity from DCUI 124
Verifying management network from DCUI 125
Troubleshooting with port mirroring 127
Monitoring with NetFlow 133
Adding a default route 134
Deleting a route 135
Managing vSphere DNS 135
PowerCLI - changing DNS on multiple vSphere hosts 138
Chapter 5: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage 141
Storage adapters 142
Storage log files 143
The hostd.log file 143
The storageRM.log file 143
The vmkernel.log file 144
DRMDump 144
Multipathing and PSA troubleshooting 144
Native Multipathing Plugins 146
Changing the path selection policy from VMware vMA 150
Storage path masking 152
LUN and claim rules 153
Identifying storage devices and LUNs 155
Listing storage devices from vMA 159
Troubleshooting paths 162
Disabling vSphere APD 163
Planned PDL 163
VMware vMA to automate detaching of LUNs 165
Unplanned PDL 168
Multipath policy selection from the vSphere client 168
Using vMA to change a path state 169
Unmasking a path 171
LUN troubleshooting tips 172
Storage module troubleshooting 172
Troubleshooting iSCSI-related issues 173
iSCSI error correction 178
Troubleshooting NFS issues 178
Troubleshooting VMFS issues 179
VMFS snapshots and resignaturing 180
SAN display problems 181
SAN performance troubleshooting 182
Chapter 6: Advanced Troubleshooting of vCenter Server
and vSphere Hosts 183
vCenter managed hosts 184
Logging for an inventory service 184
Viewing vCenter Server logs 185
Setting up vCenter Server the statistics intervals from vSphere
Web Client 186
Relocating or removing a vSphere host 188
vSphere host disconnection and reconnection 188
vSphere SSL certificates 189
Replacing machine certificates 190
Replacing VMCA root certificate 192
Replacing user solution certificates 193
Implementing SSL certificates for ESXi 194
Regenerating certificates 195
vCenter Server database 195
vSphere HA agent troubleshooting 196
Unreachable or uninitialized state 197
The HA agent initialization error 199
Reinstalling the HA agent 200
HA agent host failed state 201
Network partitioned or network isolated errors 201
Commonly known auto deploy problems 203
Getting help 206
Appendix A: Learning PowerGUI Basics 209
Using the VMware Community PowerPack 211
Appendix B: Installing VMware vRealize Operations Manager 217
Appendix C: Power CLI - A Basic Reference 229

No comments:

Post a Comment