Month: June 2018

Clearing old Host Profile answer files

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We recently had a problem where the Fault Tolerance logging service seemed to be randomly getting assigned to the VMotion vmknic, instead of it’s dedicated vmknic. This obviously prevented FT state sync from occuring, a fact that I discovered in a 20 minute change window at 4.30AM 😦

I found the cause of the state sync failure by reading through th vmware.log file for the affected VM, and noticing that the sync seemed to be trying to happen between source and destination IPs on different subnets. Looking at the host IP services configuration within the cluster I found a host which was correct (fortunately the host the FT primary was on was correct too), and used that for the secondary VM which enabled sync to occur.

The problem was affecting roughly 50% of the cluster, and had apparently happened a number of times earlier and been corrected. I noticed that these hosts also had remnants of a host profile answer file – just the Hostname and VMotion interface details, whereas the hosts that were still configured correctly didn’t have any answer file settings stored in VCenter.

Easy I though, bit of PowerCLI will sort that, so had a look for cmdlets for viewing/modifying answer file settings. I hit a blank pretty much straightaway. There are cmdlets for host profiles, one of which allows you to include answerfiles as part of applying a host profile, but nothing for viewing/modifying/removing answer files.

So to the Views we go. A bit of searching turned up this which was helpful, and after a bit of testing I came up with:

$hostProfileManagerView = Get-View "HostProfileManager"
$blank = New-Object VMware.Vim.AnswerFileOptionsCreateSpec

foreach ($vmhost in (Get-Cluster <cluster> | Get-VMhost | sort Name)) {
   $file = $hostProfileManagerView.RetrieveAnswerFile($vmhost.ExtensionData.MoRef)
   if ($file.UserInput.length -gt 0) {
     $file = $hostProfileManagerView.UpdateAnswerFile($vmhost.ExtensionData.MoRef,$blank)
     $file = $hostProfileManagerView.RetrieveAnswerFile($vmhost.ExtensionData.MoRef)
     Write-Output "$($vmhost.Name) $([string]$file.UserInput)"
   }
}

This iterates through each host in the cluster, and if it has an answerfile, it replaces it with a blank one.