vSphere 5.1.x vSphere Web Client cannot connect to vSphere Server

Symptom:

 

Well, essentially, this issue exists in both vSphere 5.1 and vSphere 5.1a. No matter what I did to install either vsphere 5.1 or 5.1a, I always not able to use web client to connect to vCenter.

All what you got is this error.

Could not connect to one or more vCenter Server Systems:

https://domain.com.au:443/sdk

 

This is really driving me crazy. The vSphere Web Client should connect to vcenterServer.domain.com.au rather than just domain.com.au.

I have tried many things via vSphere Web Client and none of them actually fixed issue.

Now, Let’s see the root of this issue:

 

Cause:

The root cause is when you install your vCenter Server, the wizard gives you misguide and you input wrong value.

When you install vCenter server, you are required to input a service account in terms of running vCenter Service. Here is what I went wrong.

If you see the account name, it only indicates a simple user name. Clearly, I wanted to use a domain service account to run this service. With this picture, I thought the system is providing a local user on the vCenter server which I don’t want.

so I modified that FQDN by using domain.com.au so I thought I could use domain account rather than local account.

But I was wrong since that FQDN is actually vCenter server and has nothing to do with account name and account password.

 

Solution:

You should reinstall vCenter Server if you do have this issue. You can’t change FQDN of vCenter in look up service easily (at least, I didn’t see any public docs). A reinstall vCenter should fix the issue, but if that doesn’t work, you have to reinstall SSO, inventory service and vCenter server.

 

The interesting thing about that error is once you leave that account, and type password and FQDN, then you click Next and Click Previous to go back and check settings, the simple username becomes domain\username!!

 

 

Other information:

Do not login Web client with admin@system-domain because that SSO admin and it has no rights on vCenter server to see the content.

 

Please let me know if you have more questions.

vSphere 5 license. A very sad day to begin

As you all know, vSphere 5 is released day. I was so happy and excited to see my favourite software made a milestone of it’s journey.

However, when I checked out vSphere 5 license, I found myself experiencing betray and sad feeling.

The reason for that is very simple. vSphere 5 license lift the CPU limit but put limit on the memory instead.

As you can see, the Enterprise can only allow Enterprise user to use Maximum 32GB per core for your VM.

Let’s take an example.

If you have 5 DL380G7 hosts. Each host has 2 processors and 384GB memory.

With your current Enterprise license, the maximum RAM you can use is:

5(hosts) x 32(GB) x 2 (proc) = 320GB (10 licenses)

If you want to use all your memory you have already bought which is 1920GB, you need to buy additional  50 Enterprise license!!

so with same company and same equipment, you have 5 times cost than vSphere 4.

What makes it even worse is:

vRAM Entitlement
We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based
entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere
configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory
configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created,
it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM)
available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each
vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity
entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM
configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM
entitled to the user. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity
can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can
configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine.
The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet
customer workload requirements.

Wow. It means no matter what kind of Vmware memory technology you applied to your vCenter, it’s calculated by virtual memory!!! Not even physical memory!!

It means if you use 4 GB on 4 VMs, in fact, only 1GB your physical memory is used by VMs, but it’s still counted as 16GB vRAM!!

WTF is Vmware thinking? guess what I feel when I read it? It’s a deal break for my career changing!! I guess I need to focus on Hyper-v and Citrix now. If their price is reasonable.

Is 13th July an excited day for Vmware? No, it’s a very very SAD day.

P.S: Too bad I just past VCAP-DCA. If I knew that, I would switch to Citrix Xen…..