Lab Manager 4 runs out of ports on your vDS

If you see an Error such as:

Unable to deploy virtual machines in resource pool "LBM4".

• Error deploying configuration networks.
  • dvs.VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch.addPortgroups task on AddDVPortgroup_Task failed: fault.LimitExceeded.summary
    • The numPorts value : 8215 in spec exceeded maxPorts 8192.

Even though the vDS (VMware Distributed Switch) maximum went up from 4,096 to 20,000 in vSphere 4.1, the vDS won’t be able to go over 8192 unless you manually modify the vDS.  You would have already upgraded the vDS from a 4.0 to a 4.1 to have a number this high.

Here is the VMware KB that tells you how to manually increase the size of your vDS

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1038193

Lab Manager ESX 4.1 Host can’t join back into Lab Manager, reporting error “Host is entering maintenance mode”

Recently upon pushing patches to our ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 hosts, I was unable to re-enable 2 of our 23 blades.  We had one of each flavor, ESX and ESXi.  After much frustration I found our KB 1026364, which says:

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To resolve this issue, restart the Lab Manager VSLA backend service.

To restart the VSLA backend service on Lab Manager:

1. Log in to the Lab Manager server.
2. Go to Start > Run and type service.msc.
3. Right click the VMware vCenter Lab Manager Monitor service.
4. Click Restart.

When you restart the Lab Manager VSLA service , the DVS becomes unavailable. When the service starts again, Lab Manager gets the latest status from the vCenter Server.

After the Lab Manager VSLA service starts again, you can start repairing the ESX hosts or try re-enable host-spanning within Lab Manager.

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After restarting this service, I was able to repair our Hosts without issue.

Lab Manager API deployment issue

Spent the last few days troubleshooting an issue, initially, we thought it might be a fenced vs. unfenced configuration conflict, but when users try to deploy Lab Manager environments from the API tool we wrote in house, the following error was generated:

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Unable to deploy virtual machines in resource pool "LBM4".

• DRS failed to find hosts to deploy the virtual machines on the resource pool "resgroup-32975".
• DRS failed to find host for virtual machine "049104-DC". vCenter reported: This operation would violate a virtual machine affinity/anti-affinity rule.
• Unable to find host for virtual machine "RuleViolation".
• DRS failed to find host for virtual machine "049105-VCM". vCenter reported: This operation would violate a virtual machine affinity/anti-affinity rule.
• Unable to find host for virtual machine "RuleViolation".
• etc…..

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Since verything worked great from the Lab Manager UI, we knew it must be an API issue, it turns out the answer was that the old script from the Lab Manager 3 days was using the “Do Not Span Hosts” option.

Of course you want to span hosts in Lab Manager 4 !!