Troubleshooting vCenter Appliance VCSA the Easy Way

vmware vcenter server is a critical component of your vsphere infrastructure so obviously keeping a healthy vcenter is a very important task as an administrator if you're like me in the past you have gathered various command line tools and ran different sets of commands to gather health and other diagnostic information from your vcenter server when required i'm going to introduce you guys today to a new vmware fleeing that allows you to in a holistic way gather all the critical information needed for troubleshooting and for support information and overall just keeping a healthy vcenter server all in one place [Music] this tool that we are talking about for effective vsphere and specifically vcenter server troubleshooting is called the vsphere diagnostic tool now the vsphere diagnostic tool is a vmware fling vmware flings in case you have not heard of these before are developed by in-house engineers software developers inside of vmware that produce very useful and effective tools that may not as of yet be included in fully supported production utilities or solutions that are found in current vmware products but as a case in point they often transition to that point the vmware os optimization tool that we myself included have used for years and years to create effective golden images for vmware horizon environments that is now a supported vmware tool and for years it was a vmware fleet so these are very powerful robust utilities and tools that we can take advantage of the vsphere diagnostic tool if you just simply google for vsphere diagnostic tool vmware fling you will arrive at the website on the vmware flings page just as a summary and i'm reading this straight from the website the vsphere diagnostic tool is a python script that runs diagnostic commands on the vcenter server photon appliance to return useful troubleshooting data while re while running within the confines of the local environment without upstream dependencies so essentially what this is is a simple python script that you download upload to your vcenter server appliance and it runs a wide range of tests that those are healthy notice the list that we have here it gathers basic vcenter info it gives you information about the lookup service an active directory check certificate checks disk checks dns ntp port checks root account check vcenter services check and even vcenter high availability checks so i would imagine this script is going to continue to morph and evolve into an even more powerful utility it gives you a simple pass or warning or failure for each of those included checks that the project is currently checking i found it interesting too it notes that the team are continuing to add new capabilities and checks into this tool they have a backlog of over 100 new features that they are developing and as you can see on the page itself the long-term goal is to have this tool made available in all current and future vmware products with photon os appliances as well as esxi so this is going to be no doubt a project that continues to grow so what i have done is i have downloaded the zip file of the vsphere diagnostic tool directly from the vmware flings site and i have unzipped that zip file now you can unzip it on your workstation or you can copy it over to your vcsa appliance and unzip it there if you prefer but what i've done i went ahead and unzipped it on my workstation and i've just got winscp open what i'm going to do is just simply copy the file to the root directory of the vcsa appliance so what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect to the vc vcsa appliance and log in as root and once there i can now see if i do a directory listing but it's doing ls i can see the vdt folder that i just copied up so if i change into the vdt folder and do a list out there's actually a subfolder called vdt change to vdt and if you know there is a vdt.py script so this is the python script that is the actual tool itself now if i try to execute the python script i'm going to get a permission denied so i'm just going to do a change mod plus x vdt and we're going to allow that to be executed then we can now run the utility so all you have to do is simply call the python script it's going to first ask you for the sso administrator so i'm going to log in with that and as soon as i hit enter on the password the tool is going to run so it's not going to prompt you to run it's just going to automatically start running through that battery of tests that we detailed from the product page itself and so the script is finished but if i scroll all the way back up we can see the uh information that is presented is very thorough you get a lot of information about the general vcenter information the version the uptime of the appliance how it's configured from a virtual hardware perspective the sso domain we can also start seeing things like dns check and as you can see i've got a failure there uh also see the status of the lookup check we can look at the vc certificates we can also look at the directory core files check the vcenter postgres db check a lot of times you'll get a table that just gets out of control size wise on your vcsa appliance this gives you a quick look at the sizes of those postgres db tables you can also get a quick snapshot of the disk itself disk capacity is you know are you running out of space there what about ntp so it checks ntp vcenter port check root account check what is the attribute set on the actual root account itself vc service is syslog so as you can see you get a very thorough output using this utility so guys there you have it the vsphere diagnostic tool a new vmware fleeing that i highly recommend that you check out it gives you a quick overview of the health of your vcsa appliance as well as any potential issues that you might be running into or seeing in your environment well i'm brandon lee please do like the video and subscribe to the channel and i'll see you guys soon you

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 13,892

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Id: mOUR0EJlcKE

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022