Every IT guy (or gal) has, at some point in their career called a friend for a lifeline when they’ve gotten stuck. And invariably, every one of us has had that friend look at our problem and say something like “Did you plug it in?”
I had one of those moments today.
You see, I’m rebuilding my lab with vSphere 5, vCloud 1.5 and vShield. I decided to go directly by the documentation (for a change!) as a learning exercise. I ran into a problem with vShield. It drove me batty. I couldn’t get VM’s to either talk to each other or to outside resources like DNS, gateway or DHCP.
Now, this was seriously getting on my nerves, I reviewed everything, I read docs, I read blog articles. I just couldn’t for the life of me find out what was wrong! What did I miss?
It was time to call in my lifeline, Rob Randell from VMware. Rob lives and breathes this product and I’ve worked closely with him on all sorts of security/VMware related stuff. If anyone could figure it out, it would be Rob.
We connected this afternoon over Webex. We stepped thru a few things, looking at settings and such. Then Rob asked me to bring up the vCenter client and asked me “Why are the vShield App VM’s not powered on?”
<facepalm><Homer D’oh!> Yea, I just go bitten by the bug we all run into. The inability to see the obvious. <insert excuse here> My schedule lately is so crazy that I’ve been doing this in fits and starts and not practicing my usually good troubleshooting skills. <\excuse>
After powering on the VM’s, network traffic started flowing and all was right with the world! I talked to Rob and said that there really should be a note in the documentation. Not a note saying “Did you power up the VM’s?” but to set the auto start settings on the ESXi hosts.
As best practices for vShield, I installed, and you should to, the vShield App and Edge VM’s to local storage on the ESXi hosts. But what I failed to do was set the VM’s to auto start on the host and after a reboot, I forgot to power on the VM.
So, click on the host in the vCenter client, click on Configuration and Start/Stop Settings. Ensure the VM is in the auto-start list. I also set the shutdown action to “shutdown” and not “power off”. I also set the power-on time from 120 seconds to 15 seconds to ensure my networking wasn’t out for some period of time after host power-on.
I’ll be sending a pointer to this blog to the vShield product management team in hopes that this one simple documentation note will help you not encounter the techie embarrassment of being asked “Did you plug it in?”
Thanks for reading.
mike
