VMware vSphere 5 License Reporting

The new vSphere 5 licensing model is accompanied by a new licensing report that allows customers to query vRAM utilization.  Although this report is accessed through the standard vSphere Client, it is based on the next-generation Flex framework and served up via the vSphere Web Client — a server normally used by end-user web browsers.  The report looks like this:

VCVA License Reporting Bug

Conveniently, the VCVA comes with the Web Client already installed.  Unfortunately, a small workaround is needed before the license reporting feature can be used on the VCVA, which shows the following error by default:

While the actual bug is in the vSphere Client, the workaround is to re-register the Web Client from the command line on the VCVA.  Keep in mind the default username/password for the VCVA are root/vmware, shown below — please change yours.  To fix the reporting issue, log in via SSH and run the following commands, which will prompt interactively for confirmation:

# /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/scripts/admin-cmd.sh unregister https://`hostname`:9443/vsphere-client localhost root vmware
# /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/scripts/admin-cmd.sh register https://`hostname`:9443/vsphere-client localhost root vmware

Here is the process in action:

After re-registering the vSphere Web Client, the license report will work as expected.

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In addition to this warning, an alert is shown via the host icon in the inventory tree view.  I’m sure many vSphere administrators have encountered this annoyance.  Recently, I wondered why some of my hosts had it and some did not.  As it turns out, the warning goes away after rebooting.  But this is VMware ESXi — not Windows — and reboots are few and far between.

Fortunately, the warning will also go away after restarting the “management agents” (Host Agent, specifically).  This can be done through the DCUI console GUI, but since you are probably logging in with SSH anyway, the same thing can be accomplished with the following command:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

And here it is in action:

If you have been looking for a way to get rid of this warning, I hope this helps you out.

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From What’s New in VMware vSphere 4.0:

Enhanced ESX Error Reporting — vSphere 4.0 gives you the ability to report per-host network, storage and VMFS issues to the vSphere Client in the Events tab. Each error event also provides a link to a specific Knowledge Base article that explains the event and provides detailed remediation steps to resolve the error. vSphere 4.0 also has the ability to set specific alarms for such events, with the help of the Events and Alarms feature. See vSphere Basic System Administration.

I experienced the feature firsthand recently while reconfiguring some physical switches in my lab, causing the following event:

Clicking the link took me to KB 1009542 with much more specific detail about the warning.

Very nice enhancement.

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You can think of the VM console like a remote KVM for virtual machines  — similar to HP iLO on a physical machine.  Most of the time there are more efficient network-based remote access techniques like RDP or SSH.  However, there are some circumstances — like network misconfiguration — that absolutely require the use of a remote console.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were connected to a VM console while it automatically migrated with VMotion to another physical host?  If you are a long-time VMware admin, you would probably expect things to keep on working.  And that is exactly right — the console connection is seamlessly transferred to the new VMware ESX host.  This behavior is especially important when VMware DRS is dynamically moving virtual machines to optimize cluster resources.

Need to check the network settings of a VM?  No problem — you may not even notice if that VM migrates to another host while you are connected.

Here is a quick video of the situation in action:

Does Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 handle this scenario the same way?  Not exactly.

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