Friday, May 4, 2012

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.

5 comments:

EldadCohen said...

Hi Brian,

How are u ? With your permission I have some quick questions....
Sorry for loading you with questions as your remarks are just perfect..

1. Are there any alternative solutions for migrating Lab manager to more newer product,
vDirector seems to be very painful implantation for very small organization, Do you suggest staying with
Lab manager ?

2. If I decide to stay with Lab manager are there any product on the marker that can leverage and improve
functionality or features to automate Lab manager?

3. I can not upgrade my ESXi from 4 to 5 if I want to stay with Lab manager in this environment? Am I correct ?


Many thanks
Eldad

Brian Smith said...

For Lab Manager, you are stuck with the latest version of 4.x ESX, it won't work with 5.

vCloud director is different from LBM, not necessarily alot more complex, but it's designed around multi-tenancy, not single tenancy, and I believe that's what you aren't comfortable with, at least it was for me at first. Ultimately I moved because I needed the capacity and features that the 5.x Suite offers

As for automating Lab Manager, we've used almost all home grown solutions, the vSphere and Orchestrator API's have allowed us to automate much of what we do.

EldadCohen said...

Hi Brian,

Thanks a lot on your quick and detailed response.

Do you think vCloud has more enhanced support for Link-clone feature then LBM? From my experience I have a limit of 30 Link-clone machines in LBM.

My main goal is very large amount & complex of machines matrix for QA testing, What tool can achieve for me this goal, Should I stay with LBM or try other automation solutions.

Thanks in Advanced
Eldad,

Brian Smith said...

vCloud director 5.1 on vSphere 5.1 is your best choice going forward, it has feature parity with LBM. It also has many new features and improvements vSphere 4 and LBM doesn't, such as 32 host VMFS sharing (finally removing the 8 host limit), space reclaiming, and more vSphere 5.1 Storage Whitepaper

EldadCohen said...

Hi Brian,

Thanks so much on your info.
Due to budget limitations Do you think it is possible to install vDirecor on a single machine? or even on ESX 5.0 as virtual machine. I understand I need to install also DB.
What is the minimal configuration & installation I can do?

Thanks
Eldad,