Comments on: Grappling With vSphere 5 Host Profiles

By: Some Tips for Host Profiles | VMware Support Insider - VMware Blogs

Some Tips for Host Profiles | VMware Support Insider - VMware Blogs — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 19:40:41 +0000

[...] more interesting tidbit can be found on the topic over on this blog: Grappling With vSphere 5 Host Profiles [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:41:03 +0000

For the iSCSI Adapter IQN compliance failure message, the iSCSI Adapter IQN is something that’s saved in the Answer File, so it might work better to try doing the Update Answer File action before disabling the iSCSI stuff.

Some of the other problems raised in this blog post and comments have been improved upon in vSphere 5.1. The enable/disable configuration options should be preserved across the “update from reference host” action, as are admin passwords, local users, and permissions (but maybe not iSCSI CHAP?).

The set of resource pools managed by host profiles has been limited a lot, and some of the kinks have been worked out around firewall and service configuration.

Static routes are supported in 5.1 as well.

PSA and NMP configuration still isn’t going to work well unless the storage hardware is 100% identical, but it should deal with local SAS disks better in 5.1.

By: Preetam

Preetam — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 13:19:00 +0000

Great Blog, Not sure how I missed it from my list. Thank you for sharing these valuable lessons

By: Chris Wahl

Chris Wahl — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:26:38 +0000

Very true. It would be nice if at least the enable/disable configuration options would stay checked.

By: Craig M

Craig M — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 23:29:39 +0000

I love host profiles and don’t mind spending the time to nut out these little issues (I’ve come across all of the above) for an initial setup.

But the 1 thing that does my head in, is every time you update the reference host, you have to go through the same rigmarole again. For some reason the changes I make to the Profile Configuration do not stick after an update.

That’s my facepalm moment.

By: thenexus6

thenexus6 — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:23:55 +0000

I use profiles to auto-deploy our 60-node cluster starting from release of 5.0. Well, sometimes I think I’d better use stateful install and do configuration updates via CLI scripting

Most annoying host profiles problems for me are:

1) You can’t save custom routes with profiles (so for example you get a problem with storage vmk when trying to reach the target in another subnet)

2) After “update from reference host” action you lose all passwords in the profile (yep, it’s what they call “feature”) including iSCSI CHAP passwords so the least painful solution is to forget about updating from ref host right after main configuration is complete and use “edit profile” feature only.

As a bonus I’ve got a frozen host after trying to boot 5.1 with 5.0 profile (yep, some kernel modules defaults had changed so had to skip this part).

Anyway, it’s better than nothing and if you’re ready to adapt your infrastructure to fit host profiles restrictions – they allow you to mess hard once (in a free time) and then stay calm if any configuration problem appears.