Having installed vRealize Operations Manager a couple of times recently in my home lab I came across an error that initially caused me to rip out the lab and build it again changing the way my networking was being done. Why? Well the following error was being presented to me when I logged in to the Operations Manager console.
In a home lab environment this confused me because, well it’s a home lab environment and there wasn’t a lot going on (I had 5 VMs running across three hosts at the time).
In previous posts I have demonstrated the installation and initial configuration for the vRealize Operations Manager 6 installation. At the end of the last post we were left at the log on screen to continue the configuration.
Log in with the admin user and password and let’s continue after the break to configure vRealize Operations Manager.
In the previous blog post I left you at the Getting Started vRealize Operations Manager screen.
In this blog post I will be going through both the Express and New Installations, continue reading for more information.
This is a multipart blog post detailing the installation and configuration of the new vRealize Operations Manager product.
Unlike the previous vCenter Operations Manager release this is a single VM only product and doesn’t rely on the two node UI and Analytics VM vAPP.
Now deploying the appliance is pretty straight forward, in fact if you have already deployed an OVA file before you can deploy vROPS as well but for those of you who haven’t deployed an OVA \ vApp before please continue on.
In the first three posts of my SCCM 2012 R2 posts I covered the Active Directory, SQL and Windows requirements to install Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 in a lab environment.
SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 1 Covered Active Directory and Schema Extensions
SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 2 Covered SQL 2012 Additional Feature Installs (Reporting Services)
SCCM 2012 R2 Pre-requisite installs part 3 Covered the Windows 2012R2 Requirements for SCCM 2012 R2, this includes IIS, WSUS and ADK
In part 4 I cover the installation of SCCM 2012 R2 and the recently released Cumulative Update 4 (CU4).
I recently came across an issue with my home lab that indicated I had an issue with my Cruzer Fit going to a Write Protect mode, doing a search online showed that a number of people were also exhibiting the same kinds of issues but this wasn’t being restricted to SanDisk Fit drives.
I have been a fan of the Cruzer Fit for a while now, it’s sleek size meant that prying little fingers (I have a two year old who loves to investigate) can’t pull it out and lose it and it looks great on the front of my Shuttle SH63H3 cases so I was a bit alarmed to realise that I may have to replace these with another brand of drive that may not offer me the same flush fit as the Cruzer Fit.
One thing I have to mention is that my usual method of installing ESXi in to my lab environment usually involves using VMware Workstation to create a VM, attaching a USB drive to the laptop and then attaching that to the VM, hey presto you have a readily available way of installing ESXi on to a system that doesn’t have a CD\DVD drive fitted. The reason I mention this will become clearer later on in the article.
Now I should mention that the original lab build was done on VMware ESXi 5.1 and I blogged about how to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 here, during that time I haven’t really had much need to make changes to my ESXi environment and didn’t take note as to if\when the SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives I was using in my environment went to read-only but I know it has to have been after the 5.5 upgrade.
Now how did I know that the drives had gone to a write protect mode? well carry on after the break to find out.
It’s that time of the year to upgrade my environment again, now for the main my management hosts have been great and are still just as relevant today as they were back in 2013, what I have done is add in an SSD for vFlash Read Cache and added two new hosts for a vRealize Automation Suite consume cluster.
HP ProLiant Gen8 MicroServer is a decent little server that originally comes with either the Pentium G2020T or the lower powered Celeron G1610T, however you’re not restricted to using either of them, instead you can put a Xeon class CPU in there, mileage varies because of the passive cooling that’s used in the MicroServer. There has been a lot of testing done on the different CPU’s usable in the Gen 8 MicroServer, you have to be careful of the TDP value of whatever processor you’re going to use, the closer to the 35W that the G1610T has, the less risk you have of the server failing due to over heating. Another limitation on the server is that it’s limited to 16GB of ECC ram, people have tested up to 32GB but not have any success.
Intel Xeon E3-1265Lv2 CPU which has a 45W TDP, I am not concerned about the extra 10W because I won’t be running the any disks in the server and it’s also unlikely that the server will be stressed much as it will only be used for small consumer guests used via vRealize Automation Suite rather than management infrastructure.
Kingston Technology 16GB DDR3 1333 MHz ECC DIMM – This has been coming down in price, the first purchase was £125, my second purchase a month later was under £100, you have to be careful to purchase ECC Dimms.
Low Profile INTEL PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Gigabit Adapter Card – Having two on board NICs I decided to stick to a dual port rather than a quad port NIC for the HP MicroServer, this NIC will be used for iSCSI traffic only, leaving the on-board ports for management and vMotion traffic.
Samsung Memory 16GB Evo MicroSDHC – I’ve used SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives with the Shuttle boxes, with the MicroServer however you can use the on-board MicroSDHC slot to use an SD card instead.
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Samsung 2.5-Inch 500 GB 850 EVO Solid State Drive: I am still using the Synology DS1513+ storage array for my storage, however I have moved up to an all flash based array now with an upgrade to Samsung EVO 850 500GB SSD drives.
I have been using two NetGear GS724T Switches for my environment for the last couple of years, they have worked flawlessly but the storage switch was running close to contention so I decided to purchase a Netgear GS748T V4H2 switch to replace the existing storage GS724T.
Shuttle XPC SH67H3 – I have had some really good experiences with Shuttle PC’s in the past and having read a few peoples experiences with the XPC SH67 range I decided to look at the offerings. Like all Shuttle systems its a small compact system that is capable of supporting the newer Ivy Bridge processors and up to 32GB memory **Only newer version 2.0 SH67H3’s support Ivy Bridge cpus so check to see whether your motherboard supports it. You may also be required to update to the newest BIOS to support the newer cpu (of my three shuttles, two supported the new cpu from the outset whilst the the last one didn’t and needed the firmware updating, an issue if you don’t have a Sandy Bridge cpu to put into the Shuttle to update it with).
SanDisk SDSSDP-128G-G25 SSD – I added SanDisk SSD’s to each of my management hosts for Flash Cache, apart from this new SSD the hosts remain the same.
Intel PRO 1000 VT Quad Port NIC – Having the single on-board NIC is all well and good but I wanted to expand on the capabilities of the server so an additional NIC was required. This card works in the spare 4x slot that the Shuttle has and works without any issues and is identified out of the box. I have heard that if you haven’t updated the BIOS you may find that the PCI-E slot doesn’t recognise the NIC, if that’s the case download and install the latest BIOS from the Shuttle website.
Intel Core i7 3770 Ivy Bridge CPU – I had a choice here of going for a Sandy or Ivy Bridge CPU and to be honest went with the Ivy Bridge CPU because it was the latest as well as there not being much difference in price. You can of course go for a lower spec CPU and I would suggest looking at an I5 CPU if money is tight.
One important thing to note is that I went for the straight CPU rather than a K variant because the K CPU variant doesn’t support Intel VT-d or vPro technologies, if you go for an S variant CPU you will get a lower clock speed.
32GB Corsair XMS 1600MHz (4x8GB) – Having been burnt using non branded memory before I will now only use branded ram and I have had a lot of overclocking success with Corsair memory, obviously no overclocking in my lab servers but I am comfortable using Corsair so decided to stick with it for this lab kit. You aren’t forced to stick 32GB in from the start but I would stress that put as much ram in as you can afford.
SanDisk Cruzer Fit 8GB USB Key – I’ve used SanDisk Cruzer Fit for a while and they have been really good devices so am sticking with them still.
When I originally published this page back in 2013 I had said that I fully expected the Shuttle based hosts to last me a couple of years and I am pleased to say that is exactly what’s happened, I did consider upgrading the Shuttles to use an Intel D1540 based motherboard but truth be told the £1000 per server cost to increase my ram above 32GB per server just wasn’t worth it. Instead I will add a 4th Shuttle to the estate at some point in the future if needed.
Whilst I have linked to Amazon for the most part it was actually eBay that I went to and purchased about 80% of my new hardware, why eBay you ask? Well for the most part I could save up to £50 per CPU purchased on eBay over the same CPU on Amazon, things like the Shuttle cases were pretty much equally priced on a number of sites so obviously choose your preferred supplier.