vCenter Experts .. Question Regarding vCenter Evidence files

[bruce_giles]

Hello Everyone, I have been busy upgrading all of my Beacons to a new Operating System which has consumed all of my attention of late, which means I haven't spent too much time on the Forum here.

I am investigating some vCenter challenges where by the vCenter scans are possibly missing some relationships when running the scans. I am just starting to look into where the various logs are kept to investigate further. I am connecting to the vCenters just fine and most of the related vm's are being associated but there are a few which are missing. The Vm's which are missing the Host details are indeed being inventoried properly when the agent runs its process each week so I know the servers are working etc. The vCenter scans run everyday to keep things as up to date as possible.

I am under the impression that some sort of ndi file is generated and uploaded from the respective Beacon\s but I am curious if a copy of those vCenter ndi files are kept somewhere for analysis afterwords. I suspect there are some log files but not sure if they actual identify what is being captured. I run things in the Cloud which makes things a little more challenging since I don't have any access to the Application server etc.

Any suggestions would be welcomed .....

Thanks in Advance

Bruce

[bruce_giles]

Hi Everyone, just a quick update .. I was able to run the esxquery app from my laptop and connect to the vcenter ... as expected it created an ndi file for each Vmhost on that vCenter. When I open the ndi file I can see the related vm's. This is pretty good .. now I will need to query the vCenter where I am supposedly missing some vm's and see if the query is identifying those ones.

Perhaps this is the only way unless you get lucky to select the ndi file when its actually running the rule which would be next to impossible I'm thinking.

Would still be interesting to hear from those who have some expertise in this area.

So far so good ... Lol

[tjohnson1]

If you stop the upload tasks in the Windows Task Scheduler and then run the rule, the NDIs will be available in the Incoming\Inventory folder on your beacon. You can also enable replication on the beacon (https://docs.flexera.com/fnms/EN/WebHelp/index.html#tasks/IB-ReplicationTab.html) to keep a copy of the files that are uploaded.

[bruce_giles · Accepted solution]

Hi Everyone, thanks for the suggestions ... another quick update .. it appears like my issue with the odd vm not showing its Host details is because in one of my examples I had 3 vm's .. different names but with the same serial number. From what I read in another forum thread, the uuid's must match before devices are updated and there must only be one unique uuid per vm. I know what happens in our environment, they reuse the vm's changing their names but keep the same serial number which messses us up in the Flexera world.

In this example I have simply deleted the other 2 devices with the same serial number / uuid and will check things tomorrow after the vcenter rule runs again tonight. Will update things after I see what happens tomorrow after the rule runs. Here is a quick copy and paste from that other forum topic ....

For vmguests, duplicate serial numbers are a strong indication that the uuids are identical as well (this is what the serial number based on).

Because this uuid is not unique FNMS cannot do the guest-host join, as it doesn't know which host to choose.

[FarrukhNaz]

Since you need only vCenter NDIs so I believe ESXQURY is a better option as compare to Replication as Replication will dump the NDI for whole environment.

[bruce_giles]

Hi Everyone, good news to report .... as mentioned earlier I found multiple devices with the same serial number which was suspected to be causing my issue for a few vm's not having host information. After deleting the other 2 devices with the same serial number, the vm to host relationship was updated accordingly for the missing device after the vcenter rule ran again last night.

In summary then, its very important to verify if multiple devices have the same serial number as a lot of things are based upon the fact that only one device should have a unique serial number / uuid for things to update appropriately. For myself this was a learning exercise which resulted in knowing a lot more about the vcenter rules and how things operate.

Again , thanks to all who offered suggestions .. it helps all of us at at some point

Bruce

[FarrukhNaz]

Hi, thanks for the update, as per my experience vmware ESXi host duplicate SN caused by a vmware bug in the vmware OS v6.5 and that is a known issue and can be resolved by upgrading the ESX OS v6.5 to any higher version or just by installing the v6.5 path 3.

I suggest you verify the ESX OS version for few sample servers in order to find the permanent fix, for more details you can refer following url: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/ESXi-Discussions/esxi-host-serial-number/m-p/2760612

[bruce_giles]

Thanks for the additional information .. really appreciate it !!

[jasonlu]

Extra info on vm guests in this post:

https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Forum/Duplicate-serial-number-VM-s-with-no-host-alert/td-p/246983

Older versions of Vcenter (haven't played with it in a while) had an option when bringing in vmguests from other systems, asking you the question "was it copied or moved?" If you selected 'moved',  the uuid (and hence the serial number) remained the same, if you selected 'copied' a new uuid for the vmguest was generated.

This was important if the task was making a new vmguest from a gold image.

j