Health check: a new default in the advanced settings
We run a lot of health checks. One advanced setting changed its default in vSphere 8, and it turned up in our reports as a deviation that was not one.
We run health checks for our customers a lot. Our experts go through the components of the IT infrastructure in detail and then assess them against our good and common practices, the vendors’ best practices and the accumulated experience of the team. What comes out of it is a report with a catalogue of measures, which we present to the customer.
The tools we use for VMware infrastructure
We use several tools to read out the data of a VMware infrastructure.
- RVTools
- vChecker
- VMware Health Analyzer
RVTools
This application runs on Windows and reads the inventory of vCenter Servers. What makes it stand out is how fast it processes a large amount of data while taking very few resources.
vChecker
Based on the GitHub project vCheck, we created our own fork a long time ago and have extended and rewritten a good number of modules. We publish our work in this GitHub fork as it goes along.
VMware Health Analyzer
As a VMware partner we get to use the VMware Health Analyzer (vHA), which is partner-only. It reads data from VMware solutions such as vSphere and Horizon and compares it against VMware’s catalogue of best practices. This is where we usually get the most false positives, and where we filter the results with our own experience so that the customer only sees the deviations that matter.
RemoteDisplay.maxConnections
Among the many things vHA assesses are the advanced settings, on ESXi and on VM level. One of them, from the security area, is “RemoteDisplay.maxConnections” on the VMs. It sets how many simultaneous connections to a VM console can be opened from the vSphere Client. Out of the box this is not limited, and the recommendation is to set it to 1 or 2.
Up to vSphere 7 the default was 0. From vSphere 8.0 it is -1. As a rule -1 means a setting is disabled, which in this case makes more sense than the previous 0. Because of that change, our recent health checks reported -1 as a deviation from the default, which on closer analysis turned out to be another false positive.
Next steps
If a health check interests you and you want to know where your infrastructure stands, do not hesitate to get in touch. Our experts are here for you.