Troubleshooting

One of my work colleagues brought to my attention today an issue in VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.8.0 to my attention today. While attempting to complete some regular account password changes, he realized that the Password Locker was only returning 10 passwords and stating there were only 10 passwords in the system.

While browsing the VMware Flings website, I recently ran across a Fling previously released in November of 2021 titled vSphere Diagnostic Tool that I found to be quite interesting. The tool is a set of python scripts that execute various diagnostic commands against a vCenter Server appliance. The scripts aim to rapidly isolate common known issues with vCenter Server appliances to aid and provide the end-user with information on how to remediate the problems.

While attempting to upgrade my ESXi hosts to the latest vSphere 7.0 release, I ran into the following error on all of the hosts in my home lab: The upgrade has VIBs that are missing dependencies. Remove the VIBs or use Image Builder to create a custom upgrade ISO image that contains the missing dependencies, and try to upgrade again. While the error message gives you a pretty good idea of what might be causing the issue, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what VIBs it could be referring to.

Over the past several years of operating multiple vRealize Automation 7.x deployments, I’ve come across a situation where the data collection status for the Inventory or State data stays stuck at “In Progress” for a particular vSphere cluster. Usually, this occurs because a vSphere Agent executing the job was stopped mid-process. I initially searched online for a solution and could not find anything that helped. This left me to digging through the vRealize Automation 7.

Over the past several years of using vRealize Automation 6.x and 7.x, I have generated numerous dashboards and search queries within Splunk to explore the log data generated by these products. Knowing that vRealize Automation 8.0 is an entirely new product compared to previous versions, I decided that it was time to begin reviewing the log data being generated by the appliance to determine what information could be obtained from the logs.