Bitten again

This is another “note to self”. I’ve been bitten again by a vCloud Director problem that I first encountered last November. Laughably, when I was Googling for a solution I turned up the Vmware communities page where I posted the problem before solving it myself.

I’m not totally sure what triggers this but various “odd” symptoms eventually boil down to the error message: “The operation failed because VirtualCenter server is not connected. vCD, as noted on the communities post, is not good at spotting this error and will happily carry on until it needs to call the vsphere API to do something at which point it generates an error like this one:

One odd vCD error

A similar error might appear as follows:

To fix this, go to the “Manage & Monitor” pane of the System tab. Click on “”vCenters” under “vSphere Resources” and you will see the not connected error under the Status column. Simply right-click on the virtual center and choose “Reconnect vCenter”. That should fix all the odd problems.

Removing old vCD agent from ESXi

Just a note to myself. I picked up how to do this from http://vmwire.com/tag/esxi-vcd-agent-uninstall/ (thank you Hugo).

I was in the situation where a vCD install had been trashed by an I/P re-address. When re-installing vCD, it couldn’t put its agent back on the hosts because the old one was still there.

I’ve now removed the old agent as described above, rebooted the host and “prepared” it from vCD.

 

Danger – Cloud at Work

No blogs for a while, I’m afraid, not due to lack of topics but lack of (priority of) time. I have recently started working on a major cloud project at a large investment bank in the City (of London). This is using vCloud Director and some other nascent products from VMware. All very interesting and challenging and I certainly hope to blog about it when I have the time!