vRA and SCCM Timeout Issue

Hi,

OK here I am again. Been away for few months working on various projects including vRA, vROPS, SRM, VIN, vRB etc.etc. And one of them is MSB. Yes its a new term I've learned and worked on with one of the Federal client along with VMware NSBU. 

But here today I'm going to discuss about the timeout issue with vRA and SCCM deployment.

Now before we begin let me give you the overview of what we are dealing with.

In my recent project Im working with VMware on a vRA Distributed architecture with a little bit of vRB and also integrating the SCCM on which the client is heaving depending on for VM/s deployment. 

Mainly these are windows 2008 R2 Std and Windows 2012 R2 Std VMs. They are leveraging SCCM to do all major tasks such as putting patches, updates, updating AV signatures, putting legacy apps, some monitoring apps such as WhatsupGold and Logrhythm etc. etc.



So once the VM is built in vRA its been handed over to SCCM for further provisioning and there is a default time out setting in vRA which is only 15 minutes.

So as you can see the default setting for SCCM machine registration timeout is 5 minutes. So now

lets assume you are doing few tasks using SCCM e.g. Installing OS, putting patches, doing AV updates, putting legacy or custom applications or softwares etc. etc. then you need time to finish all those tasks in the background on SCCM side. With having 5 minutes timeout vRA wont know what is the status of the SCCM VM as the whole process may not be finished and the gugent might not be updating vRA with any status at all so you may see the process/task in vRA as its still running and not completed and eventually the task will fail as no signal received by vRA in time (which is 5 minutes). So to avoid that you need to increase that time out setting by enough time that you can finish the required tasks on SCCM side before hitting the timeout window of vRA. We had to keep it at 45 minutes (screen shot below) on a safer side which accounts few reboots of the OS along with other tasks listed above.

After doing the above change we were started receiving finished tasks in vRA successfully which were handled by SCCM then gugent updates vRA server with appropriate status.

I will cover the SCCM and vRA in one of my upcoming blogs very soon.

Hope this will help integrating SCCM and vRA.

Please share and care.

Thanks for your time.

Virtual Disk Service entered into stopped State and Sophos AV

Hi,

Recently I was part of the discussion where the following infrastructure was involved.

ESXi 5.1.0

VM - Windows 2008 R2

User was  getting the error under Event Viewer inside the Guest Operating System

"Virtual disk service entered into a Stopped State"'

Now operation impact was none for the VM and multiple VMs are in the same situation.

No errors logged under the vmware.log of the virtual machine either. VMkernel log has no entries for such events so this led the focus more inside the Guest OS of the VM.

Upon investigating the issue further, found that user was running Sophos AV inside the virtual machine at the Guest Operating System Level. Unsure about the exact version of AV,  but once we stopped the service/application within the Guest Operating System then we stopped getting the error any more under the Event viewer.

Found a thread which was discussing about the version 7.6.18 (Updated 4/15/2010) which led towards the investigation at the Guest OS Level.

Hope this helps other users who are encountering the same issue.

Please share and care !!