Migrate vSphere 4.1 to new host and fresher infra - follow up

Recently I moved an oldish 4.1 environment to a new base of operations. The process was fairly straight forward, but a few minor things I think are worth mentioning as a follow up.

Update Manager

So I did not disable the old Update Manager installation before moving the entire thing to a new host. I had already decided to go without UM for the new setup and had not spared a thought on the consequences. Furthermore when I had originally set up the old environment, I had failed to follow the best practices and had used IP addresses instead of FQDNs throughout the setup.

The result was a connection error because VCenter was continuously trying to connect to the old Update Manager installation. Searching around I could not find a good way to remove the UM binding so I decided to walk "The Windows Walk", installed UM to overwrite the previous registration in the process and uninstalled it properly afterwards.

Connection error resolved.

In retrospect what I could have done is to enable the old UM service again, let vCenter connect to it and then uninstall it properly.

Performance Statistic Rollup

The other thing that sticks out when I check vCenter Service Status is this message:

Performance Statistics rollup from Past xxx to Past xxx is not occurring in the database

In my specific setup the notification claims roll ups are not available for the following durations:

- Previous day to previous week
- Previous week to previous month
- Previous month to previous year

VMware KB2015763 describes this issue for 5.x installations and furthermore points out to enable statistic rollups in Administration > vCenter Server Settings > Statistics.

Regardless of whether I use vSphere Operations Manager to accumulate the data now or not I am not happy about these warnings, even though they may not affect operations as such. As you may guess historical performance data is not available in vSphere for now.

Both the 5 minutes and 30 minutes interval duration roll ups were already enabled, I added 2 hours and 1 day intervals as well, to no effect.

Digging around some more I find a few possible reasons and explanations for the behaviour:

1. Using SQL Express Edition the VPXD's internal scheduler handles statistic roll ups. My installation uses an Express Edition that was not bundled with the vSphere installer. Also, if you are using a full blown SQL server and the SQL Agent is not running, the installer supposedly reminds you to start the service, which in this case it did not.
2. Another issue might be KB1030819. I followed the instructions inscribed, as the datatype was reported to be "numeric" instead of "bigint". 

After some rather tedious mucking around and trying to work out a way on how to automate statistic rollups, running them by hand a few times in the past few days I have decided to migrate the environment to a full blown SQL 2008 server. I found out that our dev team has a fully licensed SQL server running that I may utilize. Our vSphere environemtn is small enough so that no mutual performance impacts are to be expected. Gladly this migration will be very easy and straight forward again and will pave the way to move vCenter itself back to its original home base.