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lust zu poppen?

poppen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:26:57 GMT

scharfe luder wollen poppen! wenn du auch mal mit diesen fotzen lust auf ein spielchen hast, dann schau dir erstmal diese geilen porno filmchen an! es gibt jede menge vids die man sich runterladen kann also man sollte nicht zögern! hinzu gibt es auch noch diverse andere sternchen. wenn ja dann kannst du auch gina wild beim poppen erleben.

andererseits kannst du auch noch diverse andere kontaktanzeigen finden mit denen du dich amüsieren kannst. probiere s einfach mal aus

WDW-1.0 Wikimedia Drupal Wordpress Ubuntu Server VM testing platform

focaccio — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:29:33 GMT

This - WDW - procedure will detail my creation of an Ubuntu Server virtual machine for the purpose of serving as a Wikimedia, Drupal, and WordPress testing platform. I want a compare Wikimedia and Drupal for creating both personal and public information systems. WordPress will also be installed for testing. In addition to testing the applications, this procedure will create the virtual machine for use in the next procedure: RES - Restore from External Storage. In the RES procedure I will use the successfully completed BES (Backup to External Storage) procedure on the WDW virtual machine, delete the WDW virtual machine, then figure out how to restore it.

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition/Commentary, X-Exploration research

C WDW 1.0.0 - This procedure is based on the one at this link http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Ubuntu

A WDW 1.0.1 - Create Ubuntu Server 9.10 virtual machine in ESX Server 3i 3.5
a. Custom Virtual Machine
b. 2 Virtual CPUs
c. Choose memory size recommended for best performance: 4864MB
d. 1NIC, VM Network, Flexible
e. SCSI LSI Logic
f. Create new virtual disk, 11 GB, browse to "datastore2"
g. Installation of Ubuntu Server 9.10 from ISO successful

A WDW 1.0.2 - Configure Static IP on NIC
a. CLI type: sudo su
b. CLI type: vi /etc/network/interfaces
c. (assuming eth0) edit with appropriate IPv4 values then save:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address A.B.C.D
netmask Am.Bm.Cm.Dm
network An.Bn.Cn.Dn
broadcast Ab.Bb.Cb.Db
gateway Ag.Bg.Cg.Dg
d. restart the network daemon, CLI type: /etc/init.d/networking restart

A WDW 1.0.3 - Install Wikimedia
a. CLI type: aptitude update
b. CLI type: apt-get install mediawiki
c. CLI type: apt-get install php5-gd
d. CLI type: apt-get install imagemagick
e. CLI type: apt-get install mediawiki-extensions
f. CLI type (to edit a file): /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf
g. edit file to uncomment out the following then save:
Alias /mediawiki /var/lib/mediawiki
h. CLI type (to restart apache): apache2ctl restart
i. in browser go to: localmachineIP/mediawiki

R WDW 1.0.4 - Initial installation successful. With: localmachineIP/mediawiki in the browser I see MediaWiki Flower (1.15.0) with a link to set up the wiki first

A WDW 1.0.5 - Follow link to enter values for database name, database user, database user password, turn-on superuser account, and other items, then click on the install button.

R WDW 1.0.6 - Installation successful with this direction:
Installation successful! Move /var/lib/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php to /etc/mediawiki

A WDW 1.0.7 - More configuration 1
a. CLI type: sudo chmod a+rwx /var/lib/mediawiki/config
b. CLI type: sudo mv /var/lib/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php /etc/mediawiki

R WDW 1.0.8 - Wiki page is now visible in browser at: localmachineIP/mediawiki

A WDW 1.0.9 - More configuration 2
a. CLI type (to edit the LocalSettings.php file): vi /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
change: $wgEnableUploads from false to true
add: $wgFileExtensions = array('pdf','png','jpg','jpeg','ogg','doc','xls','ppt','mp3','sxc','nse');
b. CLI type (to edit php.ini file): /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
change: upload_max_filesize = 50M (if you want 50Meg uploads)
change: memory_limit = 64M (if you want scripts to get 64M memory)
c. CLI type (to edit the LocalSettings.php file): vi /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
limit account creation only to sysop: $wgGroupPermissions = false;
limit page creation to sysop and users only: $wgGroupPermissions = false;
limit edits to sysop and users only: $wgGroupPermissions = false;

A WDW 1.0.10 - Get the localIP to be the Wiki instead of localIP/mediawiki
Thanks to another forum for this important direction:
http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11857&highlight=focaccio
a. CLI type (to edit and save an apache2 config file): vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
comment out as such: #DocumentRoot /var/www/
add the following: DocumentRoot /var/lib/mediawiki/
b. CLI type (to restart Apache): /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

R WDW 1.0.11 - The Wiki is working
The framework of the WikiMedia platform it working as is should. The home page comes up with just the IP of the server (thus allowing easy port forwarding on the firewall) and only sysop and users are able to edit and add pages. The rest is adding the content, formatting and configuring / extending as needed.

to be continued...installing Drupal and WordPress and then...working out the RES procedure

Just Passed VCP 410

Paule83 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:24:21 GMT

After 2 days off from work for training at home, I just managed to pass my VCP 410 with 438 Points.

Let's see, how long it will take, until VMware sends me my stuff.

esxtop valores recomendados

xacolabril — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:57:16 GMT

Display	Metric	Threshold	Explanation
CPU	%RDY	10	Overprovisioning of vCPUs, excessive usage of vSMP or a limit(check %MLMTD) has been set. See Jason's explanation\ for vSMP VMs
CPU	%CSTP	100	Excessive usage of vSMP. Decrease amount of vCPUs for this particular VM. This should lead to increased scheduling opportunities.
CPU	%MLMTD	0	If larger than 0 the world is being throttled. Possible cause: Limit on CPU.
CPU	%SWPWT	1	VM waiting on swapped pages to be read from disk. Possible cause: Memory overcommitment.
MEM	MCTLSZ (I)	1	If larger than 0 host is forcing VMs to inflate balloon driver to reclaim memory as host is overcommited.
MEM	SWCUR (J)	1	If larger than 0 host has swapped memory pages in the past. Possible cause: Overcommitment.
MEM	SWR/s (J)	1	If larger than 0 host is actively reading from swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.
MEM	SWW/s (J)	1	If larger than 0 host is actively writing to swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.
NETWORK	%DRPTX	1	Dropped packages transmitted, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization
NETWORK	%DRPRX	1	Dropped packages received, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization
DISK	GAVG (H)	25	Look at "DAVG" and "KAVG" as the sum of both is GAVG.
DISK	DAVG (H)	25	Disk latency most likely to be caused by array.
DISK	KAVG (H)	5	Disk latency caused by the VMkernel, high KAVG usually means queuing. Check "QUED".
DISK	QUED (F)	1	Queue maxed out. Possibly queue depth set to low. Check with array vendor for optimal queue depth value.
DISK	ABRTS/s (K)	1	Aborts issued by guest(VM) because storage is not responding. For Windows VMs this happens after 60 seconds by default. Can be caused for instance when paths failed or array is not accepting any IO for whatever reason.
DISK	RESETS/s (K)	1	The number of commands reset per second.

Estos son los valores que http://www.yellow-bricks.com/ ha estado recopilando y revisando a través de whitepapers y presentaciones de VMWare. Creo que son de gran utilidad al igual que la Biblia del esxtop, de lectura recomendada y necesaria en determinadas ocasiones:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279

Saludos.

Remove the ESXi web welcome screen

xacolabril — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:50:51 GMT

Me parece interesante el siguiente post de las Communities donde se habla de cómo eliminar u ocultar la pantalla web al connectarnos a un ESX desde un navegador:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11864

RVTools 2.8

xacolabril — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:46:03 GMT

Nueva versión de las RVTools. Incluye:

On vHost tab field "# VMs" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vHost tab field "VMs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vHost tab field "vCPUs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
On vDatastore tab field "# VMs" now only calculated for VM's which are powered on.
Health check "Number of running virtual CPUs per core" now only powered on VMs are counted.
Health check "Number of running VMs per datastore" now only powered on VMs are counted.
During Installation there will be an application event source created for RVTools. This to fix some security related problems.
Some users run into a timeout exception from the SDK Web server. The default web service timeout value is now changed to a higher value.
New fields on vHost tab: NTP Server(s), time zone information, Hyper Threading information (available and active), Boot time, DNS Servers, DHCP flag, Domain name and DNS Search order
New Health Check: Inconsistent folder names.
Improved exception handling on vDisk, vSwitch and vPort tab pages.

http://www.robware.net/download/RVTools.msi

VCP310 Pass

Realitysoft — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:56:22 GMT

Welcome!

Bit of info about myself and my progression through the VMware Certification lifecycle. In the future plans and information will be uploaded of my activity.

I studied and attempted the VCP310 on December 6th but failed short by 6%. I didn't feel confident but was happy to retry before the end of the year but had a nightmare due to not realising the 7 business day gap and finding somewhere open! and then along came the snow . I passed 2^nd^ time and only just but now studying in anger for vcp410 to hopefully pass in January as I don't have the funds available to jump on the vSphere 2 day upgrade course. If I fail I will have to dig deep for the course itself but with currently only having VI3.0 infrastructure we cannot justify the outlay for our training budget.

We have a small vSphere configuration (single host 64Gb - 1tb disk attachment). I have also invested in 2 new servers for my home test/training lab. These are Dell T100s that are compatible with vSphere and are excellent entry level boxes. I have also invested in a Cisco Managed Switch to allow for some network traffic understanding. A QNAP TS-259Pro storage device which has recently been certified has also been purchased. To compliment my home lab.

Delivery Wednesday 13th Jan so shall update as I go.

Any information or questions - realitysoft@hotmail.com

Previous post migrated from original blog.

How to Retrieve Task Info

dmitrif — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:26:04 GMT

Posted a message about how to retrieve a task info in you have the task MOR to the community forum and at

http://blog.fedorov.ca/2010/02/02/how-to-retrieve-task-info/

Virtual Center 2.5 Update 6

xacolabril — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:15:42 GMT

Buenas, el pasado 29 de Enero se liberó el Update 6 de Virtual Center 2.5

VC 2.5U6 Release Notes

Novedades:

Guest Operating System Customization Improvements
Support for Firefox 3.x Browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access
Bug and security fixes

VMware TAM Newsletter Edition 2.2 - 1 Feb 2010 (Virtual Center 2.5 Update 6, Life Cycle Manager 1.1, new KB’s, VI end of availability)

nisserow — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:53:35 GMT

Hi everyone, loads of news this week including Virtual Center 2.5 Update 6, Life Cycle Manager 1.1, new KB’s, VI end of availability information and loads more. Be sure to take a look at the newsletter and of course please let me know if you require anything at all.

Have a safe and enjoyable week.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP3 | Technical Account Manager - Queensland |
VMware Australia |

Disk Expansion Issue in VMguest

Bharathvmware — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:05:43 GMT

Im unable to extend the drive from 700 Gb to 1150 GB.

My block size is 8 MB LUN has free space.

Im getting "General System error" Please help me to fix this issue

Thanx!

Bharathi

Main Blog Link

dmitrif — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:32:08 GMT

There is a separate blog I maintain at http://blog.fedorov.ca/

Also I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook

Products and features comparison

AndreTheGiant — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:01:57 GMT

One of the most complete and up to date products comparison (feature by feature):
Virtual Infrastructure products: features comparison - http://www.it20.info/misc/virtualizationscomparison.htm

VMware products comparison:
http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/vmware-esx-and-esxi-4-0-comparison/
ESXi vs Full ESX
VI 3.5 vs vSphere 4.0
VMware Server vs VMware ESX/ESXi

VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 is now GA

Gabriel Maciel Ottawa — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:14:59 GMT

What's New

Guest Operating Systems Customization Improvements

Customization support for the following guest operating systems has been added in this release:

Windows 7 Enterprise (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows 7 Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition (64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Server (64-bit)

Support for Firefox 3.x Browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access

This release adds support for Firefox 3.x browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access. Firefox 3.x is not a supported browser for ESX Server 3.5 Update 5 Web Access with this release.

Changes to Virtual Infrastructure Client Installer

The VI Client standalone installer (available from ESX Server Web Access) allows installation of the VMware Infrastructure Update service, which is used for updating and patching ESX Server 3i hosts. The standalone VI Client Installer is now modified to allow optional installation of the VMware Infrastructure Update service. The VirtualCenter Unified Installer (available as part of the VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 download) now includes an option to install VMware Infrastructure Update service when you choose the VI Client installation option.

VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 6 can be downloaded here.

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

Apple iPad as Virtual Desktop Client - Probably Not

ToddMuirhead — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:43:25 GMT

There has been a discussion on twitter starting just after the big Apple iPad announcement about using the iPad as an endpoint or client device for virtual desktops. Probably not a good idea - and here's a few reasons why.

While the iPad looks really cool, that won't make it a good device to connect to your desktop running the virtual cloud. The current desktop computing environment assumes a mouse and keyboard. The iPad doesn't have either. The touch screen can easily substitute for a mouse, but the keyboard is more difficult to truly replace.

The screen of the iPad is way bigger than any phone, but it isn't nearly as big or high resolution as a standard monitor from 3 years ago. This limits the amount of screen real estate for your desktop and leads to a lot of resizing and or scrolling. Additionally, if you have to use an on screen touch keyboard this just gets worse.

The cost of the iPad is much higher than a Netbook and is equivalent to a low end notebook, while not having some of the things that make these devices better desktops. Namely a keyboard and more screen real estate.

I do think that the iPad could be a great device for reading books, checking out Facebook, reading blogs, and catching up on your favorite sites on the internet. I'm just not so sure about connecting to your virtual desktop and getting alot of work done.

Todd

Why did I set up this blog?

DMayo — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:33:36 GMT

Really don't know why I set up this blog. Just sitting in the fast track for vSphere trying to stay awake...

Primer dia

sanmarfe — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:41:02 GMT

Hoy es el primer dia de mi blog.

Aqui intentare contar mi dia a dia con la tecnologia de la virtualizacion, intentando contar mis experiencias, mis descubrimientos, mi experiencia y los resultados obtenidos en el dia a dia ...

How to use ESXi Datastore Browser to easily upload Tar, Zip, Rar without Network drives in VM

crownadmin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:32:37 GMT

I have always had an issue creating a VM then having additional software needing to be transferred to it. Since ESXi does not have USB support your limited to Network Drives or downloading it from the website. From my own experience, using Linux Server Distro and other Win versions make drive connections a real pain. Use native ESXI functions to transfer these files using the Datastore Browsers Upload (file/folder) function and the VM's CDROM Image drives to move the files around.

What Software you'll need:

ISO Creating Software - I use PowerISO
full version. Pay the $9 and get the full functionality, as it limits
the ISO size on the shareware.
ESXi (any version) - "obviously"

Note ** all the below steps should be done prior to turning ON the VM and adding the needed hardware can be configured after initial creation of the VM

To start, download what your going to need to create the VM (in my case, my servers lack the CD Rom Drive, so Burning a CD is pretty useless, and a waste of a CD, and attaching a USB drive is a pain). My example project will be: To create an Ubuntu VCenter Converter Server. The OS will be any level of Unbuntu and I had the Ubuntu 9 Distro ISO on my PC, so I used Vsphere Datastore Browser to upload that ISO from my desktop to the datastore. But we also need the Linux VCenter Converter Tar.gz which I already had download also. So lets get going and get the tar.gz ready on the datastore 1st.......

Steps
#1 - Located the tar.gz in an accessible location, like desktop
#2 - Open PowerISO and add the file
#3 - Save this as an ISO file
#4 - Open Vsphere Client and log into ESXi
#5 - Now right Click your datastore were your going to install the VM and click Browse Datastore
#6 - Click "Upload files to the datastore" the Icon with the Disks with Up Arrow
#7 - Point to the ISO File you created and the file will be loaded to the directory
#8 - Now Create the VM and Make sure you add Hardware for a CDROM using image of Ubuntu ISO
#9 - (Configure VM for your Need)
#10 - Start the VM and it should boot from the ISO CDROM, follow normal Installation of OS (Bios should be set to boot off CDRoms)
#11- After Installation, power VM Down and Add/swap Installation ISO with Vcenter Converter ISO thats on the DataStore
#12 - Start VM and now Ubuntu will have a CDROM with the tar.gz waiting
#13 - Now transfer the tar.gz to your Ubuntu desktop or particular folder. Thats It!

Guia de referência rápida para o esxtop

aandriolli — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:47:19 GMT

Caraca, sai cada uma...

O cara desse site já tinha feito uma legal montando um "reference card" para vSphere, que postei aqui anteriormente. Agora, ele vez um para o esxtop. Pra quem administra ambiente VMware e eventualmente tem que lidar com troubleshooting de performance, é uma mão na roda. Está disponível em.

http://www.vreference.com/esxtop-precis/

SQL Server Data Consistency Levels with VCB Backups

vmroyale — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:05:37 GMT

I was recently involved in defining a backup strategy for multiple SQL Servers running in a vSphere environment. The latest version (1.5 U1) of VCB was being used along with the latest release (6.5.5) of NetBackup . Part of this process involved creating a matrix of Microsoft supported Windows/SQL configurations and the data consistency levels of these supported configurations. The chart below summarizes the current state of data consistency levels, when using VCB for Windows/SQL Server backups.

Not Supported:
Microsoft does not support this combination of Windows and SQL Server. A combination unsupported by Microsoft.

Crash Consistent:
This is the state in which a system would be found after a system failure or power outage.

Application Consistent:
This is the state in which all databases are in-synch and represent the true status of the application.

The customer, in this case, was not willing to assume the risk of crash consistent data for SQL Servers. With this particular VCB and NetBackup setup, the reality is that any Windows/SQL pair that does not provide application level consistency will either need to be backed up as a native SQL flat file backup or utilize the NetBackup SQL Agents. This decision would ultimately lead to additional spending in the form of either disk space or the purchase of NetBackup SQL Agents, and would add operational complexities with multiple backup strategies. There is also hope that NetBackup 7 may allow us to revisit this issue very soon and find a more singular approach for SQL Servers.

Note: This information is valid as of January 28, 2010 for VCB 1.5 U1 and vSphere 4.0 U1 editions.

As always, thanks for reading.
Brian

Exámen VCP 410

xacolabril — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:20:40 GMT

Ayer me presenté al exámen de certificación de vSphere, VCP 410. UYn año después de hacerlo con VMWare VI3, VCP 310.

Para quien pueda interesarle y a falt y de sólo tres días para que finalice el plazo para poder certificarse en vSphere, siendo certificado en VCP310, sin tener que hacer el curso obligatorio presencial; el material de estudio que he utilizado ha sido el siguiente:

El documento de VMWare sobre Máximos para vSphere, publicado en la web.
El documento de VMWare sobre administración de vSphere, publicado en la web también.
Haber asistido a un par o tres de sesiones de presentación de vSphere, una de ellas el curso gratuito VMWare vSphere Overview.
El día a día con VI3, ESX 3.5.
El blog de Simonlong, donde pude hacer algunas preguntas online: http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp-vsphere-4-practice-exam/
Sentido común.

Ánimo para los interesados/as.

Un saludo.

Aumentando a segurança em ambientes vSphere 4

aandriolli — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:55:29 GMT

Provavelmente você já conhece o guia de "security hardening" para o VI3. Security Hardening é como administradores geralmente se referem aos passos para aumentar a segurança.

Agora, a VMware acaba de publicar a primeira versão, ainda em desenvolvimento, do guia atualizado de security hardening p/ vSphere 4. Eles estão disponíveis em:

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: Introduction (RevB)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11843

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: COS (Rev B)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11848

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: vCenter (Rev B)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11847

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: vNetwork (Rev B)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11846

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: Host (Rev B)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11845

vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide: Virtual Machines (Rev B)
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11844

PCoIP Review

gunnarb — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:50:02 GMT

PCOIP REVIEW
I’m smack dad in the middle of a terminal review to see if PCoIP is all it’s cracked up to be. I am testing two terminals the P20 by Wyse and the FX100 by Dell. I am pretty familiar with VDI and have been a proponent of this technology since the get go, it is my hope that PCoIP will take the technology out of the infant stages and into the main stream.

TERADICI
Setting up the Teradici PCoIP appliance, while simple, could be made much easier by changing the format it comes in. Currently it is shipped as a VMDK file, which I thought was great, until I imported it to my SAN and tried to add it to my cluster. The VMDK is designed for Workstation/Player use only and I had to use converter to get it to work on ESX. Not a huge deal, honestly I just thought this was weird as View requires ESX so why would you make an appliance that runs on something else.

Understanding the PCoIP Management Console was simple enough, I still haven’t read all of the instructions but I was able to figure out enough to get my terminal up and running in a short amount of time. My first take is that they could improve on this interface but overall it gets the job done and has some pretty cool features (I really like that it can detect what devices are plugged into the zero client).

The only thing I had to do outside of installing this appliance was a small DNS change, with that setup it was time for me to plug in the terminal.

P20
I’m not really sure what to review on the terminal itself. All I did was take it out of the box, plug it in and it worked; honestly isn’t that exactly what we want in a zero client.

USB
I do not try to hide my allegiance to Citrix, they’ve been around much longer than VMware and know a thing or two about getting a desktop to an end user. However, even with the most advanced Citrix system I still have to do some magic to do anything with a USB port. What impressed me the most with all of this PCoIP stuff was the simplicity in USB; I’ve put in some random devices in this USB port and every one so far has worked. My favorite part about it is that it shows up identical to a USB device plugged directly into a workstation. I’m sure there are plenty of things that don’t work, but the integration I’ve seen so far has been very impressive. I’m not sure if this is PCoIP or the Wyse P20 that deserves the credit, either way great work.

CPU
Admittedly the first thing I wanted to see on PCoIP was some rockin video, so I went to youtube and did a search for HD Trailer and clicked on whatever I found. Initially my results were terrible. The CPU would max out and the video would sputter along as did the sound. Warren Ponder took the time to set the record straight about this issue in a get forum post and I learned a bit about Client Side Rendering and Host Side Rendering. The short version is that View using Client Side Rendering which burns more CPU cycles and bandwidth but allows more flexibility in video formats. The solution to this according to “wponder” is to get over my mind set of 1-CPU per VM and move on to 2-CPU per VM. This makes perfect sense as HD Video is going to choke on just about any PC with 1-CPU, so the work around was simple enough. After adding a second process I had the best looking HD video I’ve ever seen over a remote connection, however my CPU was still burning about 40% on both processors. With the HD video running at acceptable rates I moved on to a glaring issue, my second monitor wasn’t working.

MULTI-MONITOR SUPPORT
Getting the second monitor to work was a huge hassle that I made for myself. I was following too many google searches and didn’t realize a simple truth. The settings in View Manager override the settings for the VM. View Manager actually modifies the VMX files in the VMs to match what is set on the Desktop Pool. Many online articles were having me modify the VM video RAM, amongst other things but these settings kept getting overwritten by View Manager. As I was on a Wide Screen the calculations are incorrect in View Manager (thanks again to wponder who clarified this for me) so all I had to do was increase the resolution in View Manager and low and behold I had dual screens… on Windows XP. For Windows 7 I had to do some non-documented tricks (again thanks to wponder), I’m not sure if I’m not supposed to tell but oh well: basically all you do is remove the WDDM video driver and replace it with the SVGA video driver located: C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMWare\Drivers. I have been warned that this can cause BSOD but I want my dual screen to work so I’m dealing with the looming threat.

UAC
Out of the box UAC on Windows 7 just doesn’t work, period. Switching to the SVGA driver solved this issue, also switching off UAC also solved it… but that resolution is a bit more obvious.  I have been told that VMware is working on an updated driver for Windows 7 that will solve this and the Mult-Monitor issue, however it is what it is for the time being.

BLACK SCREEN
While troubleshooting my multi-monitor support problem I managed to screw the entire VM so that neither monitor worked. I’m pretty sure I did this while fooling with the amount of video RAM to give to each VM. The only solution I had for this was to reinstall both VMWare Tools and the View Agent. Once those were reinstalled I was back in business with at least one screen.

SCREEN SAVER
Another issue I had with the WDDM driver is the screen saver. As soon as the machine kicks on the screen saver I would lose all access to the VM. After chaning the driver this issue also went away.

WINDOWS XP VERSE WINDOWS 7
It comes as no surprise that I did not have any major issues with Windows XP. Maybe I should read a manual because it probably says somewhere that Windows 7 is not supported. If it is supported then it’s a ways off from working properly from the get go.

CONCLUSION
Well obviously I had some issues with my setup, but 1 day of work to get both XP and 7 working isn’t that big of a deal. If I were deploying this for a customer I’d have no issues doing it with XP, truly USB and HD video is VERY impressive. Setting up the Teradici is very simple and a great relieve to an admin who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time fooling with zero clients. As for Windows 7, well like I said, it probably is written somewhere that it’s not support, in which case I’m just wasting my own time. Windows XP however works very well in just about every area I tested.

I’m writing this article on my PCoIP terminal and am pretty happy with the results. I’ve decided for the time being I’m going to give myself the PCoIP treatment and see how long I had take it. Right now, I’m pretty happy. We’ll see what the future brings.

I’m really interested in your comments as I’d like to continue to push both XP and 7, so please let me know if there is anything I can do in my lab that you’d like to know about.

The Novell Issue

MrBeatnik — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:25:20 GMT

We are currently a mixed environment running AD and Novell eDirectory. We also have Novell drives that need to be networked. We are working at moving away from this to be a pure MS site, but in the mean time we need to be able to work as normal with Novell.

Novell Client is required for attaching to Novell drives.
Novell Zenworks is required for delivery of apps (albeit we are looking at thinapp as well).

To get the pass-through authentication working with Novell Client, we needed the following setup:

Novell Client 4.91 SP5

HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon : GinaDLL = "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Agent\bin\wsgina.dll"

HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon : VdmGinaChainDLL = NWGINA.DLL

HKLM\Software\Novell\Login : TSClientAutoAdminLogon = "1"

HKLM\Software\Novell\Login : DefaultLocationProfile = "Default"

This allows the SSO/passthrough to work with RDP (not yet supported in PCoIP at all), and seems to be quite well documented around the web. We have been having no trouble with this. Of course, the workstation needs to be registered correctly with eDirectory to allow the logins to take place correctly.

Novell W/S Registration:

We have created a Post-Synchronization script that registers the machine with eDirectory once built. We use a similar process with real desktops that runs after image/mini-setup time. We do this by using a Novell Import Server (a service that is set up as part of the Zenworks server services).

We use the zwsreg.exe which doesn't need a elevated user as we use an import server to do the work.

We have setup the Novell Client in the master image to point correctly to our servers etc, so only the registration needs to take place.

Side note: We are facing some chanllenges with Post-Syncrhonization scripts for persistent desktops, which I will address in another post.

VMware TAM Newsletter Edition 2.1 - 25 Jan 2010

nisserow — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:45:38 GMT

Hi everyone, please see attached for this week’s VMware TAM newsletter. Please note a number of important items in the newsletter including the new VMware support name changes, ZImbra announcement, Springsource information and new KB articles of importance for the week.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP3 | Technical Account Manager - Queensland |
VMware Australia |

System recipes and configuration management with Puppet

msnodderly — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:34:25 GMT

http://people.redhat.com/dlutter/puppet-app.html http://people.redhat.com/dlutter/puppet-app.html

What you (or your boss, really) want for your web application cluster is a system recipe, a formalized description of all the things that need to be present and configured on the machines in your cluster. Since it is very unlikely that your application vendor will be able to give you the best recipe for your specific hardware and software combination, such a recipe must be composed from ingredients published by a variety of sources, and leave you free to tweak it to your liking: some parts will come from your OS vendor, others from the database vendor and yet others may be contributed by the community or the result of your internal testing and tweaking.

"Is your sysadmin dumber than a hamster?"

msnodderly — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:26:46 GMT

Cute powerpoint on developer/ops relations, configuration management and infrastructure automation:

Agile Sysadmin and the Art of Infrastructure Automation

See also: http://bitfieldconsulting.com/agile-sysadmin

How to check HBA performance

ygao — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:03:14 GMT

How to check HBA performance

ESXTOP
D
F
deselect B, C
Select J

To ESXi and beyond

larstr — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:06:47 GMT

Like I also blogged about in a previous blog posting, the Service Console of ESX is being discontinued and that leaves us with ESXi as the only option for the future. vMA will take the Service Console’s role for command line stuff and you only need one of these for managing many servers.

First I’d like to give a shortened history lesson so we can better understand where we are today and where we’re heading. I didn’t include every new feature here, but only those I regard as the most important ones regarding the evolution from tightly bound systems to stateless ones.

VMware have provided technologies that for each iteration has had a greater level of statelessness than the previous version. Version 1.x of ESX could run one VM per physical cpu. When ESX 2.0 was released in 2003 you could no longer count the cpus to get the number of VMs anymore as this limit was removed. Instead of binding each VM to a cpu it would load balance all of the running VMs across all available cpus, and it could now also run multiple VMs per cpu. After the introduction of Virtual Center in 2004, data center admins no longer needed to know which physical server a VM is running on. Virtual Center gave you the ability to administer all your ESX hosts from a single interface and with VMotion you could move your VMs from physical host A to B without any service interruption.

ESX 3 was released in 2006 and brought in new important features such as a Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Availability Services (VMware HA). These new features would ensure that the performance of your environment was optimal at any time and that all of your VMs was running, even if a host died or if a VM or two would start eating up a lot of resources.

ESX 3.5 was released late in 2007 and came with the ability to migrate VMs between different cpu models (EVC), the ability to change datastore for your VMs while running and a software update utility for hosts and guest VMs. ESXi (or 3i as it was called back then) was also released at the same time and could do everything that a full blown ESX host could do, except for the missing Service Console.

In 2008 we had the release of Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Having a recovery site (a datacenter at a remote location that will host all your services in case of a disaster) is something that has existed in the physical world for quite some time, but there has not been a unified solution that would work equally for all kinds of services. Virtualization is a game changer here as it uncouples the servers from their physical hardware and with SRM you could also bring up a copy of your main datacenter at the disaster site within minutes by the click of a single button.

With vSphere 4.0 they also introduced host profiles and distributed switches for making it easier to deploy the same configuration across multiple ESX hosts. SRM was also updated to support two active data centers.

VMware demoed booting of ESXi from the network back at VMworld 2009, and it is surely something that will be coming as an official feature from VMware in the future. By doing this you get the same advantages that you get with your VMs today as you’re unbinding the systems from their hw. It also lowers your deployment time (of a new host) as you don’t have to install anything. We also have a similar technology from VMware already with VMware View where all users boot from the same disk image (linked clones). The users may also already be using stateless thin clients to access these desktops.

A couple of years ago I showed some end users from the company I worked for around in the data center and they were wondering what server “their” system was running on. My answer was that I didn’t know. All I knew was that their system was running on one of the ESX servers, but it could change server without anyone knowing it and without anyone noticing it. I also told them that there were around 80 virtual servers running on these 4 physical boxes and that it would have taken two full racks of pizza box servers if we had not been running it like that.

As we all know ESX is an acronym for Elastic Sky X. I don’t know if they were having cloud computing in mind when they invented that name, but it surely seems to be a name that fits the future. Now that traditional ESX is going away we’re left with ESXi which gives us Elastic Sky XI. XI in roman numerals equals 11, something I take as a hint to that 2011 is the year ESXi can help use move VMs into the sky.

So I guess when I show around end users again in the data center in a year or two, my answer would be “your system may be running on these boxes here, or on one of the similar ones in our secondary data center, but if it is running some heavy transactions it may also have been temporarily migrated to a more powerful system out somewhere on the internet”.

Heartbeat for SRM

Superwin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:41:30 GMT

I have a production site which will run SRM and Continuous Access and fail over to my new Dissaster Recovery Site and be fully Virtualised.

My question is, i am not sure how the heartbeat will connect up over the WAN. At the moment the heartbeat is only within a single environment on a switch running 192.X.X.X.

All our virtual and physical machines are in a seperate DMZ 172.X,X.X and our DR building is again in another DMZ.

How can i connect up the heartbeats on both sites and do i need to with SRM.

Sorry to sound so vague but any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Paul

About Us and our plans

MrBeatnik — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:33:01 GMT

We are a UK based university planning on rolling out a VDI infrastructure to an entire campus with a plan to spread to all campuses. This direction was chosen to help achieve a few things:

Assist with "Green Status" - Bream Excellence award, cutting carbon footprint, etc.
Centralised management of desktops
Accessible desktops for students outwith the University (no VPN access for studens as they have no dedicated desktop).

Initially we plan to roll about 600 clients.

So why VMWare?

We were already a dedicated early adopter of for VMWare server infrastructure with almost all our servers virtualised. The backend (ESX) choice of VMWare was therefore simple as we are familiar with the setup and maintenance. After evaluating a few different types of VDI directions (including the likes of Citrix), we decided to use VMWare VDM (now View of course) due to VMWare skills in house from the ESX/Workstation use, minimal management console and performance of VMs in our POC.

We have also evaluated different virtual application choices, and have gone with ThinApp due to the way it has developed, integrated with AdminStudio, and license inclusion with View. We also liked the ability to deliver to home users from over the internet or in a take-away USB format (within reason)!

So VMWare all the way!

Why Blog?

MrBeatnik — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:12:51 GMT

Hello!

This blog will try to be as imformative as possible in regards to our own experiences of setting up VMWare View in an Education Environment; what is expected, what is required, how things are progressing what challenges are faced. Ideally it will be a record for me to check how we are doing without all the other red-tape that goes in our real, official, private, report.

Educational based VDI can be a very different kettle of fish to the typical corporate models that are out there, and that most documents, seminars, adivce, etc is based on. We have many many different applications to run, many types of input devices, high turn over of users and different multimedia requirements.

Hopefully there will be some of you out there that can advise us on issue we face, as well as resolve some issues of your own.

Virtualized Data Center Summit (Jan 21): Virtualized SAP Applications - From the Datacenter To The Cloud

jorad — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:21:35 GMT

We will be participating in in the Virtualized Data Center Summit at BrightTalk on Thursday, January 21, and we will be presenting on the move of SAP applications towards internal and external clouds. The session will run live on Thursday, January 21, 2 pm PDT. You can view the live session (and later the recorded session) right here.

We will also be participating in a roundtable discussion at 4 pm PDT.

Sign up and join us!

Joachim

Standardizing the Measurement of Cloud Performance

ToddMuirhead — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:01:53 GMT

While thinking about the performance of clouds it turns out that there doesn't seem to be any type of established metric or score. There exists many different benchmarks to measure the performance of cpu, network, storage, and a very wide range of applications. A great example is theDVD Store for testing database performance! But there doesn't seem to yet be a standard way of measuring the performance of a cloud.

I did a google search for "Cloud Performance" and I'm clearly not the first person to think of this, but at the same time I don't think the answer has been found yet. On his Elastic Vapor blog, Reuven Cohen points out how nice it would be to have a standardized way to measure performance of clouds. Randy Bias talks about how oversubscribing in a cloud can have big impact on performance if the circumstances are just right (or just wrong depending on how you look at it). Finally G.H. Brooks uses a personal experience with a cloud based blogging application to break down performance into four categories on his blog.

While we could use existing tools to measure the performance of a single server within a cloud, that wouldn't address the other infrastructure involved - primarily network and storage. In order to get a good measure of the potential performance of any given cloud, many factors would need to be included. Then cloud providers could charge according for higher or lower performance.

It will fun to watch this topic over the next year or two to see what standards emerge. When you go to make your move into a cloud, how will you know what to expect in terms of performance?

Todd

HBA firmware

ygao — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:59:46 GMT

To check the HBA's firmware and info

check the /proc/scsi/qla or lpfc

VMware TAM Newsletter Edition 2.0 - 18 Jan 2010

nisserow — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:18:45 GMT

Hi all, please find attached the first VMware TAM newsletter of 2010 packed full of news and VMware related information including KB articles, new vSphere Troubleshooting course and lots more. Please enjoy this newsletter and feel free to send me any feedback that you have.

Update to Home Data center - vSphere Rocks!

jbooth21 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:12:02 GMT

Okay, Successful delivery of 2 new Dell t100 servers 4gb mem and 64bit Single socket quad core proc and finally received 2 additional PCIe 1gb Nics. (I will require a further 2 for FT testing in due course). Along with the new kit I have now received as promised the Cicso/Linksys Managed 8 port switch which will now allow me to further work with traffic shaping/networking knowledge. The only downside to this particular unit is its fan is quite noisy but cannot grumble due to the low cost for such a great device. Check the Cisco site out for the srw2008p (Power over Ethernet).

Final part I am now waiting on is a QNAP TS-259 Pro. I have been watching the forums and waiting in anticipation for these devices to be VMware certified and thankfully they have! Wooha On to iscsi in due course.

I had previously experimented with Openfiler and Freenas for iscsi but eventually used freenas for NFS which to be honest for small scale disks has been pretty cool for testing purposes. I wouldn't rate the speed overall but again this is ideal for training and getting a good understanding of iscsi within VMware. I don't have the cash for fibre and I need to draw the line somewhere

I have the VCP410 booked for Wednesday so off to study for the next few hours as I fear there is still lots to cover!

Back with an update and hopefully some diagrams/useful notes for noobies in a few days.

So far tested - Install, config for ESX/ESXi, iscsi, Nics'networking, HA/DRS, VCenter, Migration, VM Build, performance and too many other demos to list here right now.

Jim

Oracle support for VMware in SAP environments

m@t — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:01:59 GMT

Happy New Year 2010 to all readers of our blog I am very excited to make a great announcement just as we start into business in 2010.

In the past months, I have spoken to many SAP customers that told me about ONE issue they face, when virtualizing SAP: Oracle would not support SAP production landscapes on VMware. While many customers continued virtualizing SAP on Oracle despite these restrictions, some did not and had to delay their project. We have worked with SAP and Oracle to improve the support situation and in Q4 09 the stack was already under evaluation.

Now, I am happy to announce that Oracle modified their policy to support SAP/VMware users as follows (see SAP Note 1173954 for details):

1. Since Jan 13, 2010, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Interestingly, there is also a new note (SAP Note 1426182) created about “Support of Oracle Databases for XEN", which clearly highlights that “XEN virtualized environments on the Linux platform impact critical runtime related areas for the Oracle Database such as process scheduling, network and disk IO access. Therefore Oracle does not support to run production databases in XEN virtualized environments.” Also there is still no support from Oracle for Hyper-V.

To make this real simple:
All databases Oracle, IBM DB2, SAP Max DB, and MS SQL Server now support SAP production environments on VMware.
On x86 platforms:
• VMware was the first virtualization solution that supported SAP on Windows
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that supports SAP on Windows and Linux
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that is supported by all database vendors

If you haven’t done so already, now, it’s time to think about virtualizing SAP on VMware. There will be nothing that stops you.

View4 Deployments out there......

olentsch — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:51:28 GMT

I am searching for some real world configurations of VMware View4

i.e. 200 View4 Users

Windows XP with 1GB Ram and 1 vCPU using PCoIP

How many servers (CPU´s)

How much RAM per Server

Which Storage , How many disks (which Disks) which Raid Level?

What about the Read/Write Ratio?

Which Apps are frequently used?

Any Real World experience is highly welcome ;o)

regards/Oliver

Cisco UCS with vSphere

rManic — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:26:09 GMT

This is Manic. I have been working in the IT Infrastructure field for over 6 years.I have been working with VI3 and vSphere for more than 2 years.

I have started evaluting Cisco UCS. I welcome to discuss on UCS and it is performance with vSphere.

Regards

Manic

MCITP,MCSE,CCNA,CCA,VCP,ICSNS

VMware v4

lazarusgoh — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:53:28 GMT

Replacing MCSE with Fault-tolerance or failover.

Fault Tolerance Cons:
Fault-tolerance is limited by 1 CPU and this is not acceptable from performance perspective. And it will take up CPU and RAM on the passive standby system.

Fault Tolerance Pros:
Instantaneous Failover without downtime.

Failover Cons:
There will be downtime with the Failover features (via Vmotion). Re-booting.

Failover Pros:
Can use the CPU and RAM to the application's requirement. And no need to cater to the passive system CPU and RAM needs.

vSphere 4.0 Upgrade Part 1.5: Additional Considerations

Virtual_JTW — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:28:01 GMT

After reviewing the planning resources in the previous article I've identified some additional concerns/considerations that need to be addressed:

Hardware: BIOS/Firmware Updates

Since we're going to have the servers down anyway, we sould update the system BIOS and firmware of the system components as necessary. For my QLogic iSCS HBAs, while they were on VMwares I/O HCL, it was unclear what BIOS/firmware rev they should have. A quick email to support and the response was BIOS 1.15 and firmware rev "53". I was at 1.14/"49" so I needed to update all of my hosts.

Platform: ESX or ESXi?

If you've been following, you know I've been pretty hard on the ESXi/USB combination in previous articles. I experienced a problem with ESXi, iSCSI HBAs and SRM recovery plan tests causing random reboots of my ESXi hosts. This has been fixed since then. Also, rumor has it that the next major release will be ESXi-only. VMware is certainly steering customers in this direction now. I beleive this is really a now-or-later decision. And to add to the good ESXi news, HP has much better support for CIM providers with vSphere 4.0 in the form up an update package that can be installed on each host.

As for the USB keys, I won't be going back to those any time soon if I can help it. Having local disks on the host gives us another benefit with ESX 4 - it can now use these for the scratchconfig files as needed for the HA feature. See Duncan's post here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/03/esxi-lessons-learned-part-1 So ESXi embedded may work fine for you, but if I go back to ESXi, it will be the ESXi installable route. Another task to add to my upgrade plan.

Platform: Upgrade or Clean Install?

My experience with ESX upgrades goes back to my first ESX 1.5 server. I don't think there was an upgrade for ESX 1.x to 2.0 and 2.x to 3.0 was a nightmare. I had limited success upgrading ESX hosts and then once they were upgraded, you had to upgrade VFMS in a staged/controlled fashion. It wasn't pretty and my guess is that most admins performed a clean install. The good news ist that upgrading ESX 3 to 4 is a much better experience. This seems to be due to VMware doing a better job this time around (not that they've had some more experience?) and that VFMS doesn't require an upgrade. You can upgrade VMFS but it is a minor point update and it doesn't sound like it buys you much based on what I heard listening to the VMware Communiuies podcast on vSphere 4.0.

However, I just can seem to escape the fact that a clean install provide a good, well-known installation from which to start fresh. If I switch back from ESX to ESXi the point will be mute - I'll have to do a clean install. I'll get a better idea of this as I progress thru the test plan.

vCenter 32 or 64bit?

Decisions, decisions! Another bit floating out there in rumor-land is that the next release of vCenter will be 64bit-only. I think this one makes more sense since most development is moving in this direction if it hasn't already (a.k.a. Windows Server 2008 R2). VMware does support vCenter running on a 64bit operating using a 32bit DSN. There are instructions on how to do this that can be found in the vShpere Upgrade Center (see links in previous article).

And while we're at it, why include a little more future-proofing and do a clean install of vCenter on Windows Server 2008? Please review VMware's vSphere compatibility matrix as there are some distictions when considering the OS in either R1 or R2 flavors. In my evironment, we don't use Update Manager for scannig or patching VMs, so Windows Server 2008 Standard R1 64bit will work quite nicely. The vSphere components you're using in your environment will largely drive your OS choice.

Perception of Clouds and Performance

ToddMuirhead — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:47:26 GMT

I attended SAP TechEd in Phoenix last fall and really learned a ton about SAP. I naturally attended lots of sessions with virtualization and cloud based themes. Most of these sessions were pretty good, but there was a few striking observations that I came away with. So stay with me for a couple of paragraphs and I'll get to the point.

In the virtualization specific sessions there was alot of emphasis on performance. Many presenters would give specifics in terms of number of users or CPU utilization. Direct performance comparisons were given between older physical environments and new virtualized environments, that showed some pretty good consolidation ratios. Based on the questions, there were still some who were concerned about performance becuase SAP was being virtualized.

If the session was centered around cloud, then it was about ways to use SAP in the cloud. The key issue with SAP in the cloud today was support and how to make it work. Performance was not mentioned as a potential issue, and it even seemed to be assumed that performance would be good because of the large scale nature of a cloud. Based on the questions that I heard asked, customers just wanted to know when they would be able to begin moving to the cloud. Nobody questioned the performance.

Following this experience I started paying more attention to the way that people think about clouds and I believe that most are not concerned about performance. Using virtualization seems to have always raised questions about performance, going back to the very early versions of VMware Workstation and ESX Server.

The funny thing about this is that clouds are typically based on virtualization - but cloud seems to equate to good performance in most people's minds. By using the word "Cloud" instead of "Virtualization" many of the performance questions seem to go away.

Todd

Add and remove physical NIC to vSwitch

ygao — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:43:32 GMT

To list physical NIC

esxcfg-nics -l

To list virtual switch

esxcfg-vswitch -l

to add Phyiscal NIC to vSwitch

esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch0

to remove Physical NIC to vSwitch

esxcfg-vswitch -U vmnic0 vSwitch0

To restart the NIC

service network restart

How to use esxupdate

ygao — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:42:57 GMT

esxupdate --bundle file:///tmp/ESX-4.0.0-update01.zip stage

esxupdate --bundle file:///tmp/ESX-4.0.0-update01.zip update

How to change password on ESX server

cfo — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:11:29 GMT

1. Use Virtual Center to Vmotion all of the VMs to other ESX hosts. (if you have a stand alone host then power down all your VMs)
2. Put the host in Maintenance Mode
3. Reboot your ESX host.
4. Physically go to the ESX console. You will not be able to use a remote console like WinSCP for the next few steps.
5. At the first menu type "a"
6. At the next prompt type "single"
7. After ESX finishes booting you will end up at a # prompt
8. Type "passwd" and enter a new password
9. re-type the new password again when prompted
10. Reboot the ESX server normally. ( just type "reboot" at the # prompt)
11. Don't forget to take the host out of Maintenance Mode in Virtual Center.

Ubuntu Rsync Daemon Configuration Tips

ecrossley — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:47:37 GMT

I understand that this isn't the standard and some frown upon it; however, sometimes you just have to buck the trend because you have to.

I recently ran across a situation where my home NAS system, a Iomega ix4-200d, had a fantastic backup job feature that I wanted to use for my Ubuntu systems at home. While the NAS could be configured as an rsync server, the copy job feature uses a configuration-less (if thats a word) rsync copy command that essentially goes out to your specific Linux hosts and compares files in a backup location on the NAS to changes on your remote Linux box.

In order to get this to function properly, I had to learn more than I ever wanted to learn about the rsync daemon and how to configure excludes for it.

It took a bit of trial and error; hopefully, someone can benefit from what I learned.

Once you have completed the rsync daemon configuration at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync, then make the following changes to exlude specific files from your rsync daemon presents. Make sure that you have installed the following packages - rsync, xinetd and ssh onto your system.

1. Edit the file /etc/rsyncd.conf and add your exlude filter configuration location. I put my exclude file under my user home directory to ensure that it gets backed up during any rsync backups (Note - Do not include the section between the ** ):

Example /etc/rsyncd.conf

max connections = 2
log file = /var/log/rsync.log
timeout = 300

**share** - The ** should be brackets but the blog system replaces them, so I had to change to ** so you could see it.
comment = Public Share
path = /home/share
read only = no
list = yes
uid = nobody
gid = nogroup
auth users = user
secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
exclude from = /home/USERNAME/LOCATION **(My location is /home/ecrossley/rsync.exludes)**

2. Create a file and list your excludes or includes in that file. This is the file that the rsync daemon will read and use to determine what files and locations to "show" to the remote rsync connection. In the example below, I have opted not to present my Music, Pictures, Videos, Internet browser, etc. to the rsync client. I did this because my media files (Music, Videos and Pictures) are already stored on a centralized NAS and I use NFS to mount these locations in Ubuntu. By excluding them, I ensure that I'm not backing up my NAS media files as part of my Ubuntu backups. The way I have chosen to "exlude" items is backwards from other's in that I want everything visible but WHAT I tell it to hide. Most others "exclude" everything and only "include" what they want visible. I don't have the time to keep up with changes on my system and track them in a filter file, so I keep it simple. My system is secured behind a firewall and anything internal can access anything on the box by design so I'm not concerned about security.

(For those of you not in the know, NFS presents your remote drives in Ubuntu as Directories on your local system. Ubuntu treats them as file folders with content and shows them as such. As I sync many systems, I want to minimize file irregularities across them and therefore NFS mount specific locations to make sure that any files I update, add, change are all presented to all of my Ubuntu systems the same.)

Example /home/ecrossley/rsync.exludes

- Music/
- Pictures/
- public/
- Videos/
- *Xauthority
- EMCSohoClient/
- .juniper_networks/
- .cache/
- .config/
- .mozilla/
- .local/share/Trash/

With exludes, it's important to note that you and use wildcards if you so desire. There are many references on what the wild cards are and how to use them. From above you can see that * is a global wildcard and anything following the * would be excluded (both files and directories).

3. Verify your rsync daemon shares to ensure that what you told it to exlude are exluded. You can do this with the following command in terminal:
sudo rsync USERNAME@HOSTNAME::share **Replace USERNAME with the configured username you put into your /etc/rsyncd.secrets file and by using your Ubuntu system's Hostname**

That's it. Have fun playing with excludes. I'm attaching my rsync.conf and rsync.excludes files for your reference.

ix4-200d Iomega 4tb NAS and Ubuntu 9.x

ecrossley — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:04:01 GMT

So I run Ubuntu at home and figured that I'd post my experiences with the ix4-200d and some of my configurations to help anyone else out there through the process of configuring the NAS with my setup. (I'm also posting this so that in the event I lose my ubuntu box or have to build a new one, I'll have it online )

Configuration setup information by topic:

1) Rsync copy job
a) I followed the rsync setup and configuration at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/rsync
- This page shows you how to setup and configure rsync, the rsync daemon and the files necessary to make it all play nice.
- You MUST install the rsync, xinetd, and ssh packages for your distro to make this work
- I have attached copies of my /etc/default/rsync, /etc/xinetd.d/rsync/, /etc/rsyncd.conf and /etc/rsyncd.secrets for your reference on how these files should look.
- In the attachments I've changed my specifics and indicated items you need to change in ALL CAPS.
b) After configuring the above and using the files as shown, you can then successfully use the rsync copy job command to backup your ubuntu system.
c) NOTE: If you use NFS and have mapped NFS drives inside of your /home user area, it will back these up too. This is good and bad depending on what you want on your NAS. I have scripts that unmount my NAS drives BEFORE copy job and Mount AFTER it's completed.

---UPDATED to use rsync daemon excludes, to prevent issues with item c) above. See updated code below! I added exclude from in the rscyncd.conf and a new excludes file in my home directory. I also included the test commands to run to show what your rsync daemon will present to your Iomega ---

/etc/default/rsync
[code]

defaults file for rsync daemon mode

start rsync in daemon mode from init.d script?
only allowed values are "true", "false", and "inetd"
Use "inetd" if you want to start the rsyncd from inetd,
all this does is prevent the init.d script from printing a message
about not starting rsyncd (you still need to modify inetd's config yourself).

RSYNC_ENABLE=inetd

which file should be used as the configuration file for rsync.
This file is used instead of the default /etc/rsyncd.conf
Warning: This option has no effect if the daemon is accessed
using a remote shell. When using a different file for
rsync you might want to symlink /etc/rsyncd.conf to
that file.
RSYNC_CONFIG_FILE=

what extra options to give rsync --daemon?
that excludes the --daemon; that's always done in the init.d script
Possibilities are:
--address=123.45.67.89 (bind to a specific IP address)
--port=8730 (bind to specified port; default 873)

RSYNC_OPTS=''

run rsyncd at a nice level?
the rsync daemon can impact performance due to much I/O and CPU usage,
so you may want to run it at a nicer priority than the default priority.
Allowed values are 0 - 19 inclusive; 10 is a reasonable value.

RSYNC_NICE=''

Don't forget to create an appropriate config file,
else the daemon will not start.

[/code]

/etc/rysncd.conf
[code]
max connections = 2
log file = /var/log/rsync.log
timeout = 300

share
comment = Home
path = /home/USERAREA
read only = yes
list = yes
uid = YOURUSERID
gid = YOURGROUPID
auth users = YOURUSERID
secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
exclude from = /home/ecrossley/rsync.excludes
[/code]

/etc/xinetd.d/rsync
[code]
service rsync
{
disable = no
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/bin/rsync
server_args = --daemon
log_on_failure += USERID
}
[/code]

/etc/rsyncd.secrets
[code]
USERNAME:PASSWORD
(Example: NOBODY:cr@zy)
[/code]

/home/ecrossley/rsync.excludes (these are examples of directories that I do NOT want the rsync copy job to include in the backups, edit as you feel fit. Anything with a trailing slash is a root level direcotry in my /home location. Anything with a * will exclude any patterns written immediately after. I exclude trash because no sense backing that up.)

[code]

Music/
Pictures/
public/
Videos/
*Xauthority
EMCSohoClient/
.juniper_networks/
.cache/
.config/
.mozilla/
.local/share/Trash/

[/code]

Testing command:
[code]

In terminal type:
sudo rsync USERNAME@HOSTNAME::share

My example: sudo rsync ecrossley@Quad64::share

Replace USERNAME with the username identified above in the secrets file and hostname with the hostname of your Ubuntu system (Quad64 in my case)

The resulting list in the terminal window shows what files your Iomega drive can see and backup using the Copy Job feature in your Iomega control panel.

[/code]

2) Printing
a) After moving my printer over (HP DeskJet 5550) to the NAS, I was unable to get my Ubuntu system to print to it properly. As a result, I used the Windows SAMBA share option in your printer configuration (System, Administration, Printing). This allowed me to print to my printer.
- When configuring using this option, I found that I HAD to set authentication to allow printing to work. I created a printer "user" via security in the StorCenter control panel and used that account for "authentication". I've been able to print perfectly ever since.

3) NFS
a) It took me a bit to get NFS to function properly; however, it's really not that complicated (I was just being a moron).
- Make sure to set NFS options in the StorCenter settings section.
- When you edit an existing share that has security, you will be presented with an option for a host and what host access rights you want.
- Use the following commands to mount the NFS shares in your system: sudo mount IPADDRESSOFNAS:/nfs/SHAREDLOCATION /LOCALUBUNTUFILESYSTEM/LOCALDIRECTORY (Example in my case: sudo mount 192.168.xxx.xxx:/nfs/public/Media/xxxxxxx /home/ecrossley/Media/xxxxxx)
- REMEMBER: If you mount NFS under your home directory and execute a copy job, Ubuntu treats the NFS share as a local drive and will include it in your copy job. This essentially duplicates all data you have on your NAS under your backup file location. I personally didn't want this so I unmount the shares before the copy job rsync and remount them after. This is until I move the shares to a different location in my filesystem (once I get around to it).

4) FTP
a) DO NOT OVERLOOK USING FTP TO MAKE YOUR LIFE MUCH SIMPLER!!!!!!!!!
b) Copy something to your NAS only to find out if you have to change it's location you have to do it through your client? - FTP is your answer
c) After logging into FTP, you can drag and drop files using the FTP client (I use FileZilla) and not have to transfer data across your network or through the shares on your system. You can literally move things from backup locations to public locations, public directories to private, between private to private, etc.
d) This is possible because when you move something with the FTP client, it will use a RENAME feature in the FTP server and the server will just change the location of the existing files on the NAS, without it having to transfer across your network, etc.

Ok that's it for now, hope this helps someone.

VCP310 Completed

jbooth21 — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:38:20 GMT

I studied and attempted the VCP310 on December 6th but failed short by 6%. I didn't feel confident but was happy to retry before the end of the year but had a nightmare due to not realising the 7 business day gap and finding somewhere open! and then came the snow

I passed and only just but now studying in anger for vcp410 to hopefully pass in January as I don't have the funds available to jump on the vSphere 2 day upgrade course. If I fail I will have to dig deep for the course itself but with only having 3.0 infrastructure currently we cannot justify the outlay for training budget. We have a small vSphere configuration in the US but only basic access so again very difficult to cover the experience I want to have. So... I have invested in 2 new servers (Dell t100) That are compatible with vSphere and also a Cisco Managed Switch to allow for some network traffic playing. I hope to also purchase a QNAP storage device as these have recently been certified. I don't mind forking out for hardware but it does help if you also can confirm that it will work

Delivery Wednesday 13th Jan so shall update as I go.

Bye for now!

Jim

Multicore Processors in a Windows Guest OS

Doug Cowie — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:29:06 GMT

I was recently asked by a customer if it is possible to have multi-core vCPUs when dealing with Windows desktop operating systems. The windows desktop OS is confined to 2 processors (or sockets), whereas the processor could have multiple cores. Unfortunately, VMware ESX, by default, presents 1 core per processor regardless of the processor density of the underlying host, so creating a VM with two processors gives the guest two cores.
Prior to vSphere, there was no way around this limitation. There is an undocumented work-around in vSphere, however:

1. (With the VM turned off) edit settings
2. Select the "Options" tab
3. Select the "General" entry under "Advanced" settings
4. Click the "Configuration" button
5. Click the "Add Row" button
6. The "Name" is "cpuid.coresPerSocket" (without the quotes)
7. The "Value" is a digit (1, 2, 4 ) -- make sure not to exceed the density of the underlying host. ESX will try to keep all the vCPUs of a VM on the same physical processor, if it can. There are performance hits if you try to spread across multiple physical processors (sockets)
8. Click the "OK" button to save and exit the configuration screen.
9. Click the "OK" button to save and exit the VM Properties screen.
10. When you start the VM, you should see multiple cores in the taskmanager performance window. Another method is to download and run the "CoreInfo.exe" from Sysinternals (www.sysinternals.com) in the System Information Utilities section.

Remember, this is not a VMware GSS supported work-around.....

LSI Logic SAS driver flp Disk for windows 2003

rManic — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:32:21 GMT

We can use the attached flp to windows 2003 on VM with LSI Logic SAS SCSI driver.

Steps

1.Create VM

2.map attacehed flp image to the VM floppy drive

4. boot the VM with windows 2003 CD or iso image

3.start the installation

4.press F6

6. Select the LSI Logic driver from floppy disk.Then press enter

7.Continue the installtion steps

Issue resolved

HDD will not be detected without the driver on flp disk.

Performance Testing the SAP SD Benchmark Kit on vSphere - Or - Where I've Been for the Past Few Months

ToddMuirhead — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:27:43 GMT

Immediately following VMworld 09 in September I began spending a significant part of my time working with SAP on vSphere. Although I had only a small amount of experience with SAP up to that point, I had put in a lot time with all the other pieces over the years. I had done a lot with databases and vSphere and other mission critical apps.

Now don't get me wrong, I knew that SAP is not something that you can easily pick up. I knew that it was going to be difficult to get fully up to speed. Fortunately we have lots of other people here at VMware with lots of experience and they answered all of my newbie questions.

The goal of all this work was to be able to do some testing with SAP on vSphere to be able to produce some new whitepapers and blog posts showing the performance. After overcoming a learning curve that involved lots of SAPnotes (these are basically SAP KB articles) and getting some great assistance from others in our engineering and technical marketing organizations - I was well on my way to having some data to talk about at the very first of this year.

I just needed to do about another week or so of tests.....

A little background - The standard benchmark for SAP is the SD (Sales and Distribution) benchmark. It uses the current dates and must be rolled forward every month with a script. At the end of each year a little bit more than just this script is needed to get everything just right.

It turns out that when a new decade is started, there are even more things that need to be updated and it actually requires some updates from SAP to the benchmark kit itself. I discovered this on Monday when I returned from vacation and we are now in the process of getting the update.

The end result - I hope to have some new performance data with SAP on vSphere in a couple of weeks. Thanks to the Dell TechCenter guys for their cooperation on this testing. I've been using a couple of M710 servers with Intel 5500 series processors (Nehalem) and EqualLogic iSCSI storage to get some pretty good results so far.

1/11/2010 - Update - The SD benchmark kit with the stuff for 2010 is now in my hands and I'm restarting testing.

Todd

Please accept my sincere congratulations to the new year 2010 and Merry Christmas!

MariaSidorova — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:30:27 GMT

Command to monitor snapshot deletion

nikkar — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:50:20 GMT

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007566

Blog location

Iwan Rahabok — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:11:06 GMT

My blog is at http://virtual-red-dot.blogspot.com/

Thanks

Hello VMWorld!

xacolabril — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:58:18 GMT

Para poder acceder al blog, pulsad AQUÍ.

Saludos.

AQUÍ

Profile Image + Avatar Drawing Winner!

RDellimmagine — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:50:36 GMT

Yes, we have a winner for the Profile Image + Avatar Drawing!! And the winner is....

(drum roll)

TristanT

Congratulations, Tristan! I am now sending you a US$50 iTunes gift card that you can redeem for $50 of goodies from www.itunes.com. Enjoy!

A big thank you to the 140 people who have uploaded both a profile image and an avatar (and were in the drawing), as well as the additional 300+ people who have one or the other but not both (and therefore didn't qualify for the drawing -- but I thank you anyway!). I encourage every VMware Communities member to upload at least one image, so that people can learn a bit more about you.

And thanks to the Web site http://www.random.org for generating a true random number -- no pseudo-random numbers used here -- for the drawing.

Regards, Robert (see Upload a Profile Image + Avatar, and Win! for drawing details)

Connections & Ports in ESX/ESXi - v4

DudleyAtVMware — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:53:04 GMT

Connections & Ports in ESX/ESXi v4 in .PDF format.

Source: VMware Network Ports Compendium v4

--Dudley Smith

VMware Network Ports Compendium -v4

DudleyAtVMware — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:51:34 GMT

VMware Network Ports Compendium v4 in Excel .XLS format.

--Dudley Smith

NFS Solution by using Windows Unix Service (NFS Service)

stanleykwan — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:37:19 GMT

I plan to use NFS on our vmware infrastructure,

We looking for different hardware, but due to the limited budget, we want to use our current NAS (HP storage work)

just plug a service (Windows Unix Service) and active a NFS mount point.

But the performance seem not really good

Attach with the result I test.

Anyone can help to improve the performance?

Monitoring ESX 4.0 Hosts - CIM or not CIM

frank_wegner — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:01:05 GMT

With the release of vSphere VMware fully supports monitoring using CIM for ESX and ESXi hosts. This is very cool since it eliminates the need for 3rd party monitoring agents and brings you a big step closer to Service Console-less environments (ESXi). You can find the hint on the What's New in vSphere page when you search for "CIM".

Monitoring with CIM involves multiple elements:

The hardware vendor provides a CIM agent which collects information about the hardware like health status, temperature, or similar.
This information is passed to the VMware CIM framework using a standard protocol and displayed in the vSphere Client hardware status tabs.
vCenter Server can generate Alarms and messages based on the collected information.

This works very fine for most hardware types and ESX variants. However, there is an important requirement which you should be aware of: The CIM monitoring only works if point 1. above is fulfilled. There are cases where the hardware vendor does not provide or support the required CIM agent, for example classic ESX on HP hardware. In this case you have the following options:

Work with your VMware TAM to document the exact situation. The TAM will contact the VMware internal hardware vendor alliance team. Though this is not providing a direct solution it will help raising the awareness even further.
Provide your hardware vendor contact details to the VMware TAM. He can talk to your hardware vendor directly or together with you. Ultimately, only the hardware vendor can provide the solution.
As a short term solution you may have to revert back to the well known SNMP monitoring or classic 3rd party monitoring agents.

This very important situation is not documented in the VMware HCL, and VMware does not have any plans to document this in detail for each hardware vendor since the information can vary too fast. So the strong advice for you is: Before you decide to purchase hardware for vSphere ESX hosts not only consult the VMware HCL but also ask your hardware vendor directly if he provides and supports CIM agents for VMware if you plan to use CIM.

Your VMware TAM can help you steer into the right direction.

ESX Purple Screen of Death (PSOD)

aCrazyPenguin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:23:32 GMT

Some useful VMware KB articles covering the PSOD and how to “read” them.

Types of purple screen errors – link
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006794
Service Console stops responding and displays a purple screen error – link
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006800
Decoding Machine Check Exception (MCE) output after a purple screen error – link

A VMware TAM is more than just Better Support

frank_wegner — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:03:30 GMT

Many companies have concepts of a Technical Account Manager (TAM). They mostly provide technical guidance and support, are paid by the hour, and work mostly reactively. TAMs are often part of the support organization at other companies.

VMware's concept is very different. TAMs are part of the VMware Professional Services Organization (PSO). Despite the identical job name, and VMware TAM does much more than just reactive work. The official TAM Datasheet indicates the advanced services you get from a VMware TAM. Most notably this includes proactive work like architecture discussions, product roadmap presentations, arranging feedback sessions with VMware corporate teams, and much more. For example we have a TAM called Neil from Australia who regularly publishes a TAM Newsletter in his VMware TAM blog.

VMware TAMs facilitate the communication between customers, partners, and VMware departments like product management, marketing, engineering, and support. Weekly calls with the customers' VMware teams and regular - normally quarterly - on-site visits are the foundation of a strong customer relationship.

One TAM covers up to six customers. Customers can buy the TAM service separately for a fixed price per year. Very often the TAM Service is also included in Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs). TAM hours are not counted or tracked officially, but the TAM is available all the time. The TAM can be seen as a special customer resource which is a member of the customer's VMware team.

TAMs do not do consulting work like creating architecture blueprints or installing and configuring VMware software. This is done by VMware consultants or partners. The VMware TAM can indirectly drive business for these consulting services if the customer identifies the need based on the advice given by the TAM.

Future entires in the blog cover more aspects of my life as a TAM. The disclaimer holds true: This is my personal view and not statements of my employer.

Attended VMWare Fusion 3 Training

f173023 — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:31:39 GMT

Happy New Year!! Started the new year learning something new about VMWare Fusion 3. Initially the training seems relatively unattractive but after attending it, the section on Chapter 6 - Understanding Wndows Activations was truly lesson learnt.

Never thought the VMWare tools plays a critical role in this activity. Whenever the VM starts up, VMWare Tools matches the activation codes in it's records for the VM. This would be significantly noticeable in bootcamp environment.

Bootcamp physical hardware and virtual hardware does differ and this would trigger activation as explained in the course material. Thus, the next time the Bootcamp VM is started up, VMWare Tools would handle the activation.

Applications catering to the eastern world

girishvmware — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:30:57 GMT

VmWare solutions have been accepted very well in the western world; for cultural reasons or otherwise the penetration in the easten world seems to be low in comparision to the western world.

Integration of Applications related to project/people management to the suite of products.

DBX-1.0 Database Transfer (vm1 ongoing wiki db to new wiki install on vm2)

focaccio — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:37:01 GMT

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition, X-Exploration research

C DBX 1.0.1 - This is not a strictly VMware procedure. It will however be an essential procedure in the maintenance of my virtual infrastructure so is fitting here. The idea is to take the ongoing Mediawiki wiki I've been working on (running on vm MAP1) and export whatever needs to be exported so that I am able to import whatever needs to be imported into a fresh Mediawiki install on a second vm so that after the import the wiki on vm2 is identical to the ongoing original.

A DBX 1.0.2 - Preparing vm2: Install Wikimedia (as in WDW 1.0.3)
a. CLI type: aptitude update
b. CLI type: apt-get install mediawiki
c. CLI type: apt-get install php5-gd
d. CLI type: apt-get install imagemagick
e. CLI type: apt-get install mediawiki-extensions
f. CLI type: cd /etc/mediawiki
g. CLI type (to back-up original file): cp apache.conf orig_apache.conf
h. CLI type (edit file to un-comment the following then save): vi apache.conf
Alias /mediawiki /var/lib/mediawiki
i. CLI type (to restart apache): apache2ctl restart
j. in browser go to: localmachineIP/mediawiki and follow the link

A DBX 1.0.3 - Preparing vm2: Configure Mediawiki part 1 (as in WDW 1.0.5)
a. enter values for wikiname, admin user credentials, datbase host, database name, database admin credentials, superuser credentials

A DBX 1.0.4 - Preparing vm2: Configure Mediawiki part 2 (as in WDW 1.0.6 and 1.0.7)
a. move /var/lib/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php to /etc/mediawiki CLI type:
cd /var/lib/mediawiki/config
cp LocalSettings.php orig_LocalSettings.php
mv LocalSettings.php /etc/mediawiki

A DBX 1.0.5 - Preparing vm2: Configure Mediawiki part 3 (as in WDW 1.0.10)
a. CLI type (to edit and save an apache2 config file):
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
cp default orig_default
vi default
comment out as such: #DocumentRoot /var/www/
add the following: DocumentRoot /var/lib/mediawiki/
b. CLI type (to restart Apache): /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

R DBX 1.0.6 - type the local host IP into a browser to see the vm2 is successfully prepared with a fresh Mediawiki install.

X DBX 1.0.7 - Now it is time to research how a wiki may be backed up and have its database transferred from vm1 to vm2. Posted thread here:
http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?13953-Ubuntu-to-Ubuntu-Migration-or-back-up-on-A-restore-on-B&p=46058#post46058

R DBX 1.0.8 - The research from 1.0.7 has yielded absolute success. I was able to move an exact copy of my wiki from vm1 to vm2. I will soon be detailing the complete procedure in a post on my wiki (search for MBX at http://www.3BX.US), but in the meantime the post mentioned above in 1.0.7 has the rough path I took to get where I needed to go.

Central Storage (iSCSI / NFS)

stanleykwan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:28:32 GMT

Looking for a central storage for Vmware Infrastructure.

iSCSI / NFS ???

For budget...can using the current NAS (just enable the NFS service)

The performance not that good as I expected.

for iSCSI.....due to limited budget...boss turn me down.

I try to use Open-E software iSCSI target server, so far is okay, but cannot apply on Production environment.

Any other way out???

Stopping a VM gone crazy

aCrazyPenguin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:51:46 GMT

Sometimes a virtual machine which has gone “crazy” can’t be stopped via the VI Client – the task simply hangs.

There are a number of options to stop the virtual machine from within the service console.

Option 1
Stopping the virtual machine by issuing the command:

vmware-cmd /vmfs /volumes /path / to / vm /<vmname>.vmx stop

This must be done on the ESX host where the virtual machine is running.

Option 2
If this command does not work, try adding the extra parameter “hard”:

vmware-cmd /vmfs / volumes /path / to / vm /<vmname>.vmx stop hard

This will try to kill the virtual machine instantly.

Option 3
Another way to stop the “run-away” VM and gather some logs for later analysis is to ssue the commands:

vm-support -x (note lower case ‘x’) to list the running virtual machines and their “World ID”
vm-support -X <world id> (note higher case ‘X’)

This will then prompt you with a couple of questions, run a debug
stop of the VM, and create a set of log files which you can be used to
troubleshoot why the VM went “crazy”.

Option 4
A final option is to kill the PID (process ID). At the console, type the following command:

ps auxfww | grep <vmname>

The first number to appear in the output is your PID. You can use the PID to kill the process:

kill -9 <PID>

The virtual machine will be powered off after the kill.

New Bug Found

aCrazyPenguin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:49:50 GMT

This week we had a PSOD on one of our 3.5 hosts with the following details in the logs:

<0>Assertion failure in journal_stop() at transaction.c:1415: “transaction->t_updates > 0″
<4>———— cut here ————
<4>kernel BUG at transaction.c:1415!
<4>invalid operand: 0000
<4>loop ppdev parport ipmi_devintf ipmi_si_drv ipmi_msghandler
ipt_REJECT ipt_state ip_conntrack ipt_LOG iptable_filter ip_tables
vmxnet_console sg usb-storage k
<4>CPU: 0
<4>EIP: 0060:<c0196614> Tainted: P
<4>EFLAGS: 00010282

VMware have confirmed its a new bug (we’re getting good at finding
these) and its currently out with their Engineering team. Hope they get
back soon with a fix.

Identifying an ESX host with a process holding a VM lock

aCrazyPenguin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:43:51 GMT

One of the most troublesome tasks as an administrator of ESX is when
a host has a lock on a VM and you are unable to start that VM on
another host. This can occur, for example, after a host failure where
the lock has not been released correctly.

The following procedure steps through each stage of identifying
which host is running the process that is holding the lock, and killing
it.

1. With the hostname of the last known ESX host where the VM was running, log on to the console.
2. Run the following commands:

vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/path/to/vm.vmx
less /var/log/vmkernel and scroll to the bottom, you will see output like shown below:

Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: 2:00:11:13.723 cpu6:1038)FS3: 130: <START vmware-6.log>
Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: 2:00:11:13.723 cpu6:1038)Lock [type 10c00001 offset 45823900 v 21, hb offset 6290651
Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: gen 26595, mode 1, owner {color:#ff0000}58422081-629bc75a-9826-00173b845ca9 mtime 10611865]
Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: 2:00:11:13.723 cpu6:1077)Addr <4,
332,6>, gen 20, links 1, type reg, flags 0×0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 644
Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: 2:00:11:13{color:#808080}.723 cpu6:1077)len 23973, nb 1 tbz 0, zla 2, bs 65536
Dec 17 12:00:10 host5 vmkernel: 2:00:11:13.723 cpu6:1077)FS3: 132: <END vmware-6.log>

4. The host with the lock is highlighed above in red, the last part of the ID is all that is needed, for the above it would be 00173b845ca9
5. Run the following command on each ESX host in the cluster to get the system uuid of the ESX host.

esxcfg-info | grep -i ’system uuid’ | awk -F ‘-’ ‘{print $NF}’

6. When the ESX host has been located which matches the uuid owner, log on to the host and run the following command:

ps -elf|grep <vmname>

You should see something like:

4 S root *{color:#ff0000}5650 *1
0 65 -10 – 737 schedu Dec17 ? 10:44:52 /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -ssched.group=host/user/pool2 -@
pipe=/tmp/vmhsdaemon- 0/vmxf6fb22ef3b8a3222;vm=vmxf6fb46ef7b4b3223
/vmfs/volumes/440d24d6-47076d77-a7c3-021c98aed2d/testvm/testvm.vmx0

7. Kill the process by {color:#000080}*kill -9 <PID>* – in the case above just type: kill -9 5650
8. The lock on the VM should now be released and the VM should be able to be powered on.

VMWare Converter

f173023 — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 10:09:03 GMT

Without much of a disappointment, 3 Windows desktop and laptop are being converted without any surprises today. On my Mac Pro with 5 VM simultaneously running at one go, this is close to my previous experience managing ESX 3.5 Infrastructure.

Virtual Machine Conversation

f173023 — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:25:53 GMT

Had spent hours trying to copy a VM to Mac. After many hours of trial and error, the solution was to allocate a single processor to the Virtual Machine. Start up the Windows XP and install VMWare Tools. After shutdown, change to 2 processors and everything works.

An update to my third party vendor related blog postings

larstr — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:44:26 GMT

I’ve had feedback from each of the vendors that I’ve blogged about so it's probably time to update the status on these topics

NetApp: NFS vs FC
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/larstr/2009/02/06/nfs-vs-fc

The first vendor I blogged about was NetApp and some material that was part of their ASAP training. I had done some testing using NetApp storage back at VMworld 2006 that gave results that didn’t match those slides from the training. When these slides came up during training I told the trainer that I thought these slides could not be valid and told him about the testing I had done myself a few years back. He couldn’t comment any further than that these slides where part of the official NetApp course.

A few months later I received an email from Mike Shea (@NetApp) who had read my blog and informed me that “the slides from NetApp is factual, but it is old and very out of date.”.

VMware also released a paper during the summer confirming that FC is still king of the hill on storage performance.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf_vsphere_storage_protocols.pdf

Even though FC gives best performance I still prefer to use NFS for my customers with NetApp storage due to the extra benefits you get from using it.

I don’t know if the ASAP course still is teaching about superior NFS performance. Maybe someone who has taken it more recently would care to share their knowledge?

CheckPoint: Riding the virtualization wave
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/larstr/2009/06/17/riding-the-virtualization-wave

The second blog posting was about CheckPoint’s virtual firewall solution for VMware that had insane pricing and licensing. A few days after writing this post I also discussed this issue with a local CheckPoint SE who wasn’t aware of this issue, but he agreed with me that this didn’t look right. He checked my findings and he could also only find the same information about this as I did. All he could offer me was special pricing if I showed him a customer case, but I told him the point here was not special pricing for a single case.

1.5 half monts later there was a CheckPoint sales presentation at my office. They where talking about upcoming products and here also the virtual firewall appliance (“Virtual Edition”) was mentioned. The upcoming version was supposed to be much better than the previous one as it was using VMsafe and it would be a specialized solution for VMware environments. I raised my hand and asked if they were planning to fix their broken licensing model too.They were not aware of the licensing model, but since this was a non-released product licensing wasn’t necessarily 100% nailed yet

I sent them an email with a link to my blog posting and it reached the people within CheckPoint responsible for this product and they wanted a conference call with us. In the end they came visiting the local CheckPoint office for a meeting about this.

At VMworld I also visited the CheckPoint booth for a demo of the upcoming version and it surely looks nice.

We still haven’t seen the final results of this, but I’d be very surprised if their licensing model for VE remains unchanged.

Trend Micro: My view on the new TrendMicro Smart Scan Server Virtual Appliance
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/larstr/2009/06/26/my-view-on-the-new-trendmicro-smart-scan-server-virtual-appliance

The third vendor I blogged about was TrendMicro who had just released a series of virtual appliances where I did a peek into one of them during a customer install. TrendMicro was the ones I had the quickest feedback from. Within an hour I got feedback on twitter from a Trend Micro employee stating: ”Thank you sir, I have already passed your suggestions on to the dev team.”

http://twitter.com/rik_ferguson/status/2344954320

During VMworld in San Francisco I also talked to a Trend Micro marketing guy (@Solutions Exchange) from whom I also learned that they would now start using .ovf files instead of .iso files for distributing their virtual appliances (great move). If they will also start having VMware Tools preinstalled remains to be seen.

Using solid-state drives to improve performance of SQL databases on vSphere hosts when memory is overcommitted

chethank — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:16:01 GMT

Performance of certain applications such as databases running in a vSphere based virtual infrastructure can be affected when demand for memory increases beyond what is available on the host. vSphere uses complex memory reclamation techniques to acquire and reallocate memory to VMs that need it. Swapping memory pages of a virtual machine to a swap file located on physical storage media is one such technique. Swapping is known to have a negative effect on the performance of the application in the VM. The degree to which the performance is affected depends on the I/O performance of the storage media used to host the swap file. Recently, I ran a few experiments to study the possibility of using a solid state device (SSD) as swap storage in virtualized SQL environments.

Experiments showed that when the workload became active in a VM with a portion of memory swapped to disk, within 2 minutes the SQL workload performed at:

~88 % of its baseline performance with the VM's swap file on SSD local to the host
31% of baseline performance with the VM's swap file on Fibre Channel disks in a SAN
17% of baseline performance with the VM's swap file on SATA disks local to the host

Methodology

A vSphere host with 2 VMs was used for the experiments. The host was in a memory overcommitted state, i.e. total memory allocated to the VMs was more than what was available for the VMs on the host. SQL server was allowed to use its own memory management techniques. The workload in each VM was configured to become active and run at random intervals. As the workload became active after the VM was powered on, the SQL data buffer grew in size. This in turn increased the demand for memory in the guest OS. vSphere attempted to allocate all the memory assigned to the active VM but could not as the host was in a memory overcommitted state. vSphere, eventually, resorted to memory reclamation techniques to reclaim memory from the other idle VM and allocate it to the active VM. Thus a portion of the memory allocated to the idle VM was either ballooned or swapped to disk.

Subsequently, when the idle VM became active, vSphere had to swap-in the memory pages that were swapped to disk earlier. The memory that was reclaimed before through ballooning had to be reallocated. To show the impact of host-level swapping alone on application performance, I collected application metrics for the first 2 minutes after the SQL workload became active in the idle VM. The results are presented in the next section.

Results

The graph in figure 1 compares the performance of the virtualized SQL workload (DVDStore version 2.0) when using different storage media - SSD, FC and SATA disks for host swap. In each case, before the workload became active, the VM was idle and a portion of its memory was swapped to swap storage. Performance of the SQL workload running in the VM whose memory was not swapped serves as a baseline for comparison.

Figure 1: Application throughput under memory pressure

From the graphs we can conclude that

With SSD as the swap destination, vSphere swapped-in the memory pages of the VM very quickly from the swap file. In this case, the latency of swapping back the memory pages had minimal impact on the performance of the SQL workload. Performance remained at ~88% of the baseline through out the period.
With the swap file on Fiber Channel disks in a SAN, it took a longer time to read the swapped memory pages. This affected SQL performance significantly with performance starting at 7% and ending at 31% of the baseline during the 2 minute period.
When a local SATA drive was used as the swap destination, it took the longest time of all to read the swapped memory pages. SQL performance started at 6% and rose to 17% of the baseline during the 2 minute period.

Conclusion

Spikes in memory consumption in a memory overcommitted scenario can cause vSphere to use host-level swapping for reclaiming memory from VMs. Host-level swapping is seen as unwanted because of its negative effect on performance. To avoid swapping, customers have to reserve more free memory which means less or no memory overcommitment. The experiments conducted in our labs show that the performance of virtualized SQL databases are not affected as much when vSphere swaps memory pages from SSDs as compared to that when swapping from rotation based drives. Thus, SQL databases running in a vSphere based virtual infrastructure with high memory overcommitment can see significant improvement in performance when using SSDs as swap storage.

Experimental Setup

Hardware Configuration:

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Intel Xeon CPU 5160 @ 3:00GHz, dual socket, dual core
8GB Memory

ESX Configuration:

VMware ESXi 4.0.0 build-164009
Maximum memory that can be reclaimed through ballooning: 1536MB (configurable)

VM Configuration:

Windows Server 2008 (64bit)
Virtual Hardware Version 7
2 vCPUs
4GB Memory
SQL Server 2008 64bit with SP2
DVD Store Database (20GB version): 45GB (data) + 10GB (log)

Swap Drives:

SSD: 32GB (local)
FC: 4*146GB, 15K rpm FC drives configured as RAID-0 (SAN)
SATA: 2*146GB SATA drives configured as RAID-0 (local)

RES-1.1 Restore Virtual Machine from External Storage backup

focaccio — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:15:31 GMT

This is the second attempt to get a working restore procedure based on the procedure found here http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10595 On the first try, the script said that it had completed successfully, but no files appeared to have been transferred. This time the restore will be attempted from the NFS share created in the BEN procedure.

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, (F)A-(Failed) Action, (F)R-(Failed) Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition, X-Exploration research

C RES 1.1.1 This procedure will follow the lines of RES 1.0

A RES 1.1.2 Transfer the ghettoVCB-restore.sh script to the same directory as ghettoVCB, on my system:
/vmfs/volumes/datastore2

A RES 1.1.13 Make the script executable with command line input (CLI): chmod +x ghettoVCB-restore.sh (done)

A RES 1.1.14 Use vi to create the data file that the script will use as input. The data file will contain - in order -source;destination; and file type
a. Here is my input data file vms_to_restore:
"/vmfs/volumes/machines8/DEV1/DEV1-2009-12-21--1;/vmfs/volumes/datastore2;1"

A RES 1.1.15 Stop, then delete the DEV1 vm from the host in the Virtual Infrastructure Client. Right click on the vm then select delete from disk.

A RES 1.1.16 Execute the script as such from /vmfs/volumes/datastore2
./ghettoVCB-restore.sh -c vms_to_restore -d 2

(F)R RES 1.1.17 The result fails even though the debug of the script reports that it has completed without error.
Restoring VM: DEV1
DEBUG MODE LEVEL 2 ENABLED
Start time: Mon Dec 21 20:59:45 UTC 2009
Restoring VM from: "/vmfs/volumes/machines8/DEV1/DEV1-2009-12-21--1"
Restoring VM to Datastore: "/vmfs/volumes/datastore2" using Disk Format: "zeroedthick"
Creating VM directory: "/vmfs/volumes/datastore2/DEV1" ...
Copying "DEV1.vmx" file ...
Restoring VM's VMDK(s) ...
Updating VMDK entry in "DEV1.vmx" file ...
SOURCE: "/vmfs/volumes/machines8/DEV1/DEV1-2009-12-21--1/DEV1.vmdk"
ORIGINAL_VMX_LINE: ~~>scsi0:0.fileName = "DEV1.vmdk"<~~
DESTINATION: "/vmfs/volumes/datastore2/DEV1/DEV1-0.vmdk"
MODIFIED_VMX_LINE: ~~>scsi0:0.fileName = "DEV1-0.vmdk"<~~
Registering DEV1 ...
End time: Mon Dec 21 20:59:45 UTC 2009
Completed restore for DEV1!
Start time: Mon Dec 21 20:59:45 UTC 2009
End time: Mon Dec 21 20:59:45 UTC 2009
Duration : 0 Seconds

C RES 1.1.18 The following steps are not properly part of the RES procedure, but are taken from th MBR procedure

A RES 1.1.19 Manually copy (using the datastore browser in the virtual infrastructure client) the .vmdk and .vmx files backed up in the BES 1.2 procedure to the Ubuntu server NFS store back to the original datastore into a manually created directory.

A RES 1.1.20 Right click the .vmx file copied back to the original datastore then select add to inventory.

R RES 1.1.21 The DEV1 vm is now restored and can be powered on and logged in to.

C RES 1.1.22 The RES procedure using the ghettoVCB-restore.sh script fails in my environment, though the script does not error out. The MBR procedure is fully sufficient to my needs at this point.

BES-1.1 Backup Virtual Machines to External Storage

focaccio — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:09:28 GMT

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, (F)A-(Failed) Action, (F)R-(Failed) Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition, X-Exploration research

C BES 1.1.1 - Since I had perfect success with backing up and restoring a virtual machine in the manual procedure MBR, it is not crucial that I get the BES and RES procedures, which incorporate ghettoVCB and ghettoVCB-restore scripts respectively, working. I would, however, like to have an alternate back-up method so am undertaking a second attempt at the BES/RES procedure for backing up and restoring a virtual machine running in ESX.

C BES 1.1.2 - I will be following the general outline of steps from BES 1.0

A BES 1.1.3 - Allow SSH to ESX host server (already completed)

A BES 1.1.4 - Get script to ESX host server (already completed)

A BES 1.1.5 - Create list of VMs to back up
a. created a file (DEV1backup) with vi, the contents of which is: DEV1

(F)A BES 1.1.6 - Create destination for backups
a. Run Allegro NFS on local W7 system, create NFS share to export called /machines4
b. Open VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC) to add the /machines4 share as a datastore
c. select host machine
d. select Storage in hardware then select add storage link
e. select NFS then next
f. input the static IP of the backup destination
g. input the path of the backup destination ( see a above)
h. do not check Mount NFS read-only
i. input the name of the new datastore
j. click next and finish

(F)R BES 1.1.7 - Windows 7 fails (even with firewall service stopped and disabled), where XP worked. VIC responds with: Unable to Mount Filesystem

C BES 1.1.8 I'll have to re-try this after I get another Ubuntu server built.

A BES 1.1.9 Re-Do of 1.1.6 - Create destination for backups
a.Built bare metal Ubuntu Server 9.10 and used BEN procedure to create an NFS share that is now a valid datastore (machines8) on my ESX server.

A BES 1.1.10 - Configure the ghettoVCB script
(This step is only necessary on the first instance and every time you need to reconfigure the script)
Use vi to edit the ghettoVCB.sh file on the ESX server
a. first make a backup of the script: cp ghettoVCB.sh unmodified_ghettoVCB.sh (done)
b.. VM_BACKUP_VOLUME=/vmfs/volumes/backup or whatever the path of the NFS share is from BES 1.1.9
in this case it will be: VM_BACKUP_VOLUME=/vmfs/volumes/machines8
c.. any other changes needed based on reading of script
d.. write changes and exit vi

A BES 1.1.11 - Run the script
(This step will be needed every time you want a backup unless a cron'd)
a. execute the script: ./ghettoVCB.sh DEV1backup

R BES 1.1.12A The script is running with current output as such:
Starting backup for DEV1 ...
Start time: Mon Dec 21 15:57:59 UTC 2009
Destination disk format: VMFS thick
Cloning disk '/vmfs/volumes/datastore2/DEV1/DEV1.vmdk'...
Clone: 9% done.

R BES 1.1.12B The script completed successfully as such:
Clone: 100% done.
End time: Mon Dec 21 16:11:38 UTC 2009
Completed backup for DEV1!
Start time: Mon Dec 21 15:57:56 UTC 2009
End time: Mon Dec 21 16:11:38 UTC 2009
Duration : 13.70 Minutes
Completed backing up specified Virtual Machines!

C BES 1.1.13 This completes the BES procedure successfully. Next step is the RES restore procedure - which failed on the last attempt and prompted me to log a comment in the following location: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10595

BEN-1.0 Building an External NFS datastore for ESX with Ubuntu 9.10 server

focaccio — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:41:41 GMT

The purpose of this procedure is to provide a repeatable method for building Ubuntu server NFS datastores for an ESX system.

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition, X-Exploration research

C BEN 1.0.1.A I am really excited to have made this procedure work. It will free me from the limitations of the disk space on my host DL360 G3 system. I will be able to create more virtual machines and be able to create backups and snapshots as needed. It is also nice that the technology comes free of charge.

C BEN 1.0.1.B The software systems used in this procedure were VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5.0 Build 147633, ESX server 3i 3.5.0 Build 153875, Ubuntu server 9.10

A BEN 1.0.2 Install Ubuntu 9.10 server with a static IP address

A BEN 1.0.3 Set-up NFS share using procedure outlined here http://www.ubuntugeek.com/nfs-server-and-client-configuration-in-ubuntu.html
a. Command Line Input (CLI): sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
b. CLI: /etc/init.d/portmap restart
c. Create the directory that will become the NFS share with something like:
root@915PBL:/# mkdir machines8
d.Use vi to add the exact path ( in this case /machines8 ) of the directory created above to be the NFS share to the "exports" file with CLI: vi /etc/exports
e. Restart the NFS daemon with CLI: /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart
f. CLI: apt-get install portmap nfs-common /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart
g. CLI: /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

A BEN 1.0.4 Add the datastore in the ESX server Virtual Infrastructure Client
a. select the host machine
b. select the configuration tab
c. select storage link in the hardware box
d. select add storage link
e. select NFS and do not select read-only
f. enter the IP from 1.0.2 above
g. enter the export exactly as added to the /etc/exports file (in this case /machines8)
h. enter the name for thenew datastore

R BEN 1.0.5 The new datastore will appear in the list of datastores.

A BEN 1.0.6 Test to make sure you can write to the new share
a. SSH to the ESX host server and go to the new datastore, in my case CLI:
cd /vmfs/volumes/machines8
b. create a test file with vi

R BEN 1.0.7 From the Ubuntu server you see that the test file shows up in the directory created at 1.0.3.c The datastore is now ready to be used.

Running ESX 4.0u1 on Lenovo Thinkpad T500

larstr — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:56:35 GMT

I needed to run a demo for some customers, but our lab environment is going through a relocation process to a new datacenter so I had issues with both VLANs and SAN connectivity that wasn't fully available as needed.

Instead of bringing a noisy server to the event I could have installed ESX inside VMware Workstation (or Player).

Instead I decided to try to install ESX 4.0U1 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 (dual core 2.8 GHz,, 4GB ram). It comes with an Intel based nic and Intel based SATA controller so I thought it should have a fair chance on being able to run ESX.

I booted the ESX cd and the installation process would only run in text mode, but that's not a big deal. After entering text mode I answered all the questions the same way as if it was a real server and I did not need to load any extra drivers.

After finishing the installation steps I successfully started up ESX, configured it, and setup a few VMs. It worked out quite well. The io is quite limited when running your VMs from a single SATA disk, but it can easily run a handful (low load) VMs. As always, the cpu is not the limiting factor: RAM and storage performance are, and I did get way high disk latency while doing installation on multiple VMs simultaneously (40-50ms). Other than that, the VMs were running quite well once installation was finished.

The system was running very stable, but I had a few PSODs during shutdown of ESX. I didn't look more deeply into these (during ESX shutdown) PSODs as this system is a 100% unsupported config.

vdr (vmware data recovery) Size (See Update1 on Free column on destination screen)

JCData — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:43:35 GMT

OK first off let me say how awesome vdr is before I start bashing it. One of the best new products they released this year besides the big ones view4, vsphere4, etc... Perfect for solving our smb markets single san single point of failure issues without forking over the bucks for another san and implementing costly replication or other means to backup the data to quickly recover from a SAN failure.(ok dont drill me on vcb and other ways to backup these vm's without spending big dollars because their cost are huge on the time factor of setup, and as a consulatnt selling these solutions I need quick reliable ways to do back up these vm's without paying anything additional for it.)

Now here is my wish list:

1. WE NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH DATA IS BEEING BACKED UP WITH RATIOS OR SOMETHING ABOUT THE DEDUPED data. Maybe Im just overlooking it but my issue is that if I back up a 20GB vm 3 times and run a integrity check manual afterwards each time the data keeps incrementing by 20GB. So after 3 times it shows 60GB used. Now here is the weird part if you now go in and create a new backup job the nice little gui says my 196GB storage has 180GB free. So what gives why does a integrity check see 60GB of data and the gui shows only 16GB used.

2. Same as above but more specific to each of the nodes. I want to be able to right click a restore point I want to see how big it is and any other information realitive to whats in it how it was backed up etc....

3. More documentation on vdr as our single pdf leaves me constantly searching the net for more info. And the best practices link was not much info there either just another link back to the same pdf that refered me to it in the facts and qa section.

Now this is a new product so I hope this starts getting better as time goes on.

-----------------------------------------------UPDATE1 - Dec17,2009--------------------------------------------------------

I was just was playing around on the Destinations screen and sure enough my screen is hiding part of what I have been looking for this seems to happen alot on there screens not recognizing its out of space and putting up scroll bars. To the far right there is a field column FREE and in my screen on 3 different systems this is almost 100% covered up, but if you click next to the Capacity field you can actually click on the free column and drag it over. Its the same display when you go to back up a vm and you choose a destination.
Last night I ran my full backup of my vms. 3 20GB vm's 1 40GB vm vShield, vCMA, router and a view 4 linked set of vm's. Integrity check sees 191.1GB of data on the volume, but my free sapce shows 170GB free on a 196GB volume. So still some confusion as to why the full set of backups show in the integrity check!!!! Had 1 error last night that is related to the linked view 4 VDM's They failed to backup I only assume because they are linked clones that you cant snapshot anyhow. Im going to check and see if I can backup the user disks though.

BUG found during my backup of a linked clone with little docs or application aware messages telling us not to back them up it failed. Doesn't surprise me though because the way the system works is it creates a snap of the disk and then mounts the disk on vdr vm using SCSI hot add. But what it fails to do is if the vm fails to backup it does not back out and properly detatch the disk from vDR. This is a major issue if you do alot of backups the next morning you can come in and find multiple disk hanging aroun or fail your backup because Im sure there is some limit on how many SCSI disks you can add to a vm. So I will be turning this one in for review to vmware.

NEW Feature request: We need some way to email notification reports on the status of our jobs I have yet found anything on here to do this. Maybe I will write one as free addon that just reads the logs and send emails notifications out.

I will try to upload any new info I have or find out as Im currently setting this up for a client and we shall see how well it holds up in the real world, and I will see how long before my storage runs out on my test enviroment.

James Craft

Portas no firewall para os vários componentes do vSphere 4

aandriolli — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:12:59 GMT

Para saber que portas de rede abrir no firewall para usar algum componente do vSphere, basta consultar o KB 1012382, certo? Certo.

Mas, se você preferir uma representação gráfica disto, pode usar o mapa visual que o o dudley criou em http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/89EFA582-2C35-F6A2-9ED1-7AD4810266C2/

Fica bem legal:

HyperThreading no ESX

aandriolli — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:54:34 GMT

Estive hoje em um cliente da VMware, e acabamos discutindo justamente o uso de HyperThreading com VMware ESX. Habilitar ou não habilitar?

Para quem tem dúvidas a respeito, o Scott Drummonds, do time de performance da VMware, criou um ótimo documento de referência para tirar dúvidas:

Hyper-Threading on ESX Server

vSphere 4 Reference Card

aandriolli — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:43:39 GMT

Já devia ter postado isso aqui. Deixei pra depois, acabei não postando. Ainda bem que o Berti me lembrou disso hoje.

Este é um guia de referência para o vSphere - já atualizado para o vCenter 4 U1 e ESX/ESXi 4 U1. Sei que muitos admins vão colocar na parede (já que as empresas não costumam permitir posters mais "interessantes"):

http://www.vreference.com/vsphere4-card/

2010 Predictions for Storage Virtual Appliances

StorMagic — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:20:00 GMT

Economic conditions will continue to make IT budgets tight. Most organizations will be looking for a very quick return on IT investment. Many will be looking to reduce their operating costs by implementing a server virtualization strategy. They will also have difficulty hiring more employees to manage their IT environments. Maintenance and operating costs will force a hardware refresh but this will be offset by implementation of server virtualization.

Server Virtualization will become more broadly accepted in the SMB. Virtualization vendors will put additional focus on this growth area in 2010. Microsoft and Citrix are getting more aggressive and with their recent releases; they can offer competitive features. VMware has been working hard to build out their SMB offerings. With the recent release of Essentials and Essentials Plus, they have created SMB packages that reduce the cost and complexity of implementation. Many of the small and midsized organizations that can benefit from the features of server virtualization have not adopted it yet. The technology is widely accepted in the enterprise, but has seen slower adoption in the SMB due to cost and complexity.

Business Continuity will become a priority for the SMB. As they move to a server virtualization infrastructure, the SMB will be faced with a requirement to implement a Business Continuity plan. By consolidating independent servers and applications onto a virtual server platform the impact of a single failure becomes business critical. Organizations will need to provide seamless access to the application and data even in the event of a failure.

Planned downtime that limits user access will be a concept of the past. Users will demand that they have access to applications and data no matter what the time of day or night. This requirement will be another factor in both virtualization and business continuity planning.

Cost and complexity of shared storage will limit the success of VMware's business continuity features in the SMB. SMB customers have had to go without the high availability and ease of management features they get with VMware HA, VMotion and DRS, because of the cost of the external shared storage. It is also too complicated. Many storage vendors have tried to address the cost issue by releasing "lite" versions of their higher end SAN products, but they haven't addressed the complexity issue.

Storage Virtual Appliances will remove the Business Continuity barrier to entry that most SMB's face. Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) unlocks the resources (disk drives and processor) of the ESX server and provides a virtual SAN that enables datastores to be shared in the same way as an external shared storage system. By using the internal disk drives of the ESX server to create a virtual SAN, SVAs provide a cost effective shared storage environment without having to install a complex external SAN.

A SVA provides enterprise-class data storage services, but instead of running them on an external storage system it runs them in a virtual machine running under ESX. This enables it to take control of a VMware ESX server's internal disk drives (commonly referred to as Direct Attached Storage or DAS). The SVA virtualizes these drives as part of the virtual SAN. The SVA uses the server's DAS storage to create datastores, which can be made available to and shared by any ESX server on the network. The SVA runs in a standard VM and communicates directly with RAID hardware via an agent.

In most environments, virtual servers are implemented as part of a server consolidation strategy. Usually the servers' applications are critical to the organization, and unplanned downtime is unacceptable. A hardware failure on a virtual server platform could result in many VMs and virtualized servers becoming unavailable. To prevent this downtime, it is essential that the entire virtualized environment is built to provide High Availability, with no single point of failure. The SVA offers High Availability, so that even if an ESX server and its SVA become unavailable, its datastores can still be accessed.

Hans O'Sullivan, Founder and CEO Hans is co-founder and CEO of StorMagic. Hans has been working in the technology industry for 25 years and today has seven patents in his name. Prior to founding StorMagic in 2006, Hans was CEO of Elipsan, a software development organization spun off by data storage array vendor Eurologic, another company founded by Hans (in 1989). Elipsan's expertise was in the area of IP-based storage and protocols and it was one of the primary developers of what became known as iSCSI. Elipsan was sold in 2004.

Eurologic, where Hans held the position of CTO, grew to $350 million in revenue and more than 400 people. It became the number one supplier of storage platforms in the world to companies such as Network Appliance, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Avid, and many others. Eurologic was sold to Adaptec in 2003.

Hans started his career as a design engineer at the Mentec Group, where he was responsible for designing a PDP-compatible computer. Hans holds a bachelor of engineering in Electronics from the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he graduated with honors.

Understanding VMware Fault Tolerance benefits and requirements

karavinds1 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:52:35 GMT

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) is a new high availability feature in VMware's vSphere 4. With Fault Tolerance, your virtual guest machine runs on a primary ESX host server while the memory of that virtual machine (VM) is mirrored (using vLockstep) over to a secondary (ghost) ESX host server. If the primary ESX Server fails, the virtual machine immediately resumes operation on the secondary ESX Server with zero downtime to the VM, application or end user using that VM.

The benefits of VMware Fault Tolerance

Unlike traditional high-availability (HA) technologies, VMware's Fault Tolerance works regardless of the operating system and you aren't charged for every server that uses this HA feature. FT is based on VMware Workstation's Record/Replay features that can play back what happened in a VM.

Fault Tolerance is not used for load balancing - it is strictly for high availability of a VM in the event that an ESX Server goes down. Unlike VMware HA clusters (VMHA), with FT, the VM that was protected doesn't have to be rebooted. Thus, with FT, unlike VMHA, there is no downtime for end users.

The best thing about VMware FT is that, to enable it all you need to do is to right-click on the primary VM and enable Fault Tolerance. At that point, FT takes over, creating the secondary VM that will protect the primary VM if the ESX server running the primary VM has a failure.

The hardware requirements for VMware Fault Tolerance

VMware FT requires Intel 31xx, 33xx, 52xx, 54xx, 55xx, 74xx or AMD 13xx, 23xx, 83xx series of processors (or greater). Moreover, you can't run FT on just any vSphere-compatible server because FT uses special features of the CPU. Today, FT is also supported only on VMs that have a single CPU (no multiprocessor VMs can use FT).

High availability, in general, is an excellent part of any large scale disaster recovery strategy. With Fault Tolerance you have the added protection for smaller-scale disasters such as the loss of a single ESX host server running 50+ virtual machines.

VMware's Fault Tolerance (FT) is supported in vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. VMware's vCenter is also a required component.

VMware vShield Zones

karavinds1 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:40:05 GMT

What is vShield Zones?

VMware addressed the growing virtual machine (VM) security concern with two vSphere releases: VMsafe and vShield Zones. VShield Zones is essentially a virtual firewall designed to protect VMs and analyze virtual network traffic. Whereas VMsafe are the APIs for third party vendors to create security products for VMware. With VMware's vShield Zones, you can monitor network traffic in a virtualized environment and ensure regulatory compliance by segmenting users and sensitive data on a network. VMware's vShield Zones is VMware's virtualization security offering that is based on technology that VMware bought from Blue Lane Technologies in October 2008.

Just as many companies need to create demilitarized zones (DMZs) for their physical servers, vShield Zones lets them create security zones for virtual servers. An added benefit of vShield Zones is that companies can receive a tremendous amount of network traffic flow-monitoring, analysis, and reporting.

How vShield Zones works

vShield performs Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) and tracks dynamic connections such as FTP. Better yet, vShield understands your virtual infrastructure and works with vCenter to track traffic between virtual machines and event, VMotion-associated traffic.

With vShield, you can create various levels of administrative permission and assign that to your hierarchy of network and VMware administrators.

VShield Zones works by having a single virtual machine (VM) act as the vShield management station. VShield monitoring VMs are then deployed to monitor each virtual switch (vSwitch) on each ESX Server. You can create policies on the management station to police your virtual infrastructure network traffic and report on both allowed and denied network traffic.

VMware's vShield Zones is offered in three of the six vSphere Editions: Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

Is anyone out there? - Storage failover script

Kyle Weir — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:13:17 GMT

So far I've posted a few scripts, helped out in the community a little bit. And what I'm wondering is has anyone noticed? I've got more powershell scripts, and aparently people have downloaded the ones I've posted, and given me a few points for them. But no one's commented on my own blog, here, or pretty much anywhere else to let me know if the scripts were helpful.
In any case here's a script I wrote a few weeks ago for doing a HP EVA CA failover or any SAN/storage failover (without purchasing SRM ) just using powershell.

This program will work with Vsphere or vcenter - at the moment I haven't had time to perfect passing the login credentials to sub threads. So you'll have to put the credentials in two places.
It makes it a bit easier to deal with things, as it will give you a list of LUN's which you then select the one that you want to failover.
It will shutdown/suspend the VM's and then prompt you to rescan after you have done the failover via your Storage appliance. After you've done a rescan - or two (in case you rescan before your storage is available again)
then it will resume/start only the VM's that were powered on when you began.

When I have time, I plan on getting it to detect if it's Vsphere and to do a datastore rescan across all of the hosts (it's new in vsphere) and developing a way to have it verify that the lun is available again before it resumes/starts the VM's I believe one of the newer vsphere powershell commands will allow you to send and receive files from a ESX server so I'll probably try to write/read a file from the lun.

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Stubborn NICs

MitchV85 — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:30:59 GMT

While performing one of my first ESX host server builds today, I noticed that a few of the vmnics on the ESX server were showing as "down". Three in total...the network team confirmed cabling and switch configurations, but for some reason the NICs that handle NFS traffic to the NAS, as well as one of the NICs we use for VM traffic, were showing as down...

Since initial troubleshooting with the network team yielded no results, I took a look at the duplex settings of the NICs that were showing as down...for some reason the three that were showing as down were listed as half duplex as shown below:

Name PCI Driver Link Speed Duplex MTU Description
vmnic2 16:04.00 tg3 Down 0Mbps Half 1500 Broadcom Corporation Broadcom BCM5715S Gigabit

There were two other NICs with the same status...these were vmnic4 and vmnic5 (used for NFS traffic)

In an attempt to bring this three NICs up I tried manually setting the speed and duplex to 1000 Full using the command

esxcfg-nics -s 1000 -d full vmnic2

That command didn't seem to work because vmnic2 still showed as half duplex with no link...after this didn't work I tried setting vmnic2 to auto-negotiate for speed/duplex and the following error was kindly provided back to me:

esxcfg-nics -a vmnic2
Error: Function not implemented: Function not implemented

Since I couldn't make heads or tails of what the issue was I tried the magic reboot. After the server came back up it had appeared that the reboot did in fact work it's magic on one of the three previously "down" NICs, as vmnic5 now showed as "Up". vmnic2 and vmnic4 were still down though showing half duplex.

This is where I'm at now and hoping to figure out what's going on soon. Seems like it should be something basic that I'm overlooking so any suggestions are welcome

vSphere 4.0 Upgrade Part 1: Planning

Virtual_JTW — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:05:06 GMT

Planning is the most important step of any upgrade project and this one is no exception. Luckily VMware provides a very good resources to help with this step. The first and most important stop is the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/

Many of the following links can be found in the Upgrade Center. I recommend you watch VMware's "How to Upgrade to vSphere" webcast:
http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/248

And watch VMware's "How Do I Upgrade" video series:
http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-intro.html
http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part1.html
http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part2.html
http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part3.html
http://download3.vmware.com/vsphere/vsphere-migration-part4.html

The Upgrade Center also hosts the VMware vSphere Upgrade Advisor tool. Run this to determine next steps:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/advisor/

Per advisor tool:

Check VMware Infrastructure Licenses
1. vSphere 4.0 (vCenter/ESX)
2. Site Recovery Manager 4.0
Review Support Contracts
1. Make sure the proper PLA has been identified and setup
Check Hardware Compatibility (use VMware Certified Compatibility Guides portal here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php)
1. Systems: HP ProLiant DL380 G5, in my case
2. SAN: EMC Celerra, iSCSI
3. iSCSI HBA: QLogic QLE4062c
4. Requires firmware upgrade
5. NIC: Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad Port GbE
Review Guest OS Support
Review the Migration Pre-requisite Checklist

Some of the items in the checklist will be redundant but it doesn't hurt to be thorough given what we're trying to accomplish. After reviewing the previous resources, you will have a strong understanding of what the upgrade for your environment is going to require and should have drafted up at least a draft of your upgrade plan.

With plan in hand, it's time to test!

VCP4 TAM Study Club

Trevor Davis — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:53:22 GMT

Week 5

Readings

Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_san_cfg.pdf

Study Questions and Answers

1. How do VM access virtual disks - through virtual SCSI controllers
2. how does VMFS keep multi host environments safe -- with distributed locking
3. max number of physical storage extents - 32
4. What are the performance gains of VM's on RDM's over VMFS - None
5. What is the WWPN –World Wide Port Name
6.When does the FC switch assign a port ID? – when the device logs into the fabric.
7. What are the two storage system types? -- active / active and active / passive.
8. What is the new storage pathing type in vSphere? - Round Robin
8. What is VMFS Metadata? -- holds mapping information for VMFS objects
9. VMFS Metadata is updated when what is changed? --
Creating, growing, or locking a virtual machine file
Changing a file's attributes
Powering a virtual machine on or off
10. How many VMFS datastores should a LUN contain? – one
11. Suggestion – Study the “Making LUN Decisions” section.
12. How can you prioritize disk bandwidth consumption of a VM – using Disk Shares
14. What is the VMware multiplathing module – Native Multipathing Plug-in
15. What two plug-ins are used with the native multipathing plug-in? – Storage Array Type Plug-in and Path Selection Plug-ins.
16. What tasks does storage SATP implement – monitors health of each physical path, reports changes in state and performs array specific actions, i.e., can active passive paths.
17. What is the function of path selection plug-in? – choosing the physical path for I/O requests.
18. Boot from SAN Consideration --
The HBA should be plugged into the lowest PCI bus and slot number
When you boot from an active/passive storage array, the SP whose WWN is specified in the BIOS configuration of the HBA must be active.
19. General Setup Considerations for Fibre Channel SAN Arrays
LUNs must be presented to each HBA of each host with the same LUN ID number.
Unless specified for individual storage arrays, set the host type for LUNs presented to ESX/ESXi to Linux, Linux Cluster, or, if available, to vmware or esx.
If you are using VMotion, DRS, or HA, make sure that both source and target hosts for virtual machines can see the same LUNs with identical LUN IDs.
20. For what reason would you decide to boot from SAN ?
If you do not want to handle maintenance of local storage.
If you need easy cloning of service consoles.
In diskless hardware configurations, such as on some blade systems.
21. Benefits of Boot from SAN?
Cheaper servers – Servers can be more dense and run cooler without internal storage.
Easier server replacement – You can replace servers and have the new server point to the old boot location.
Easier backup processes – The system boot images in the SAN can be backed up as part of the overall SAN backup procedures.
Improved management –Creating and managing the operating system image is easier and more

Week 4

Readings

vSphere Upgrade Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_upgrade_guide.pdf

vSphere Web Access Administrator's Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_web_access.pdf

More Information From This Week's Discussion

It doesn’t appear there is an expiration date set at this point, for more information on the VCP4 2nd change program see http://mylearn1.vmware.com/portals/certification/

Thin Provisioning Fragmentation … here is some information from the VMware product management team.
Most think of file system thin provisioning where this was more of an issue due to much smaller allocations of space to grow a thin provisioned file. In vSphere we grow the thin provisioned vmdk file in increments of whatever block size is set on the VMFS volume (1 MB by default). With a large access unit size (1 MB) the performance impact of fragmentation in the datastore is very low. Not zero, but not significant to most people. If you move the VM either with Storage VMotion or a cold migrate it will defrag.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf

Study Questions and Answers

vSphere Upgrade Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_upgrade_guide.pdf

vSphere Web Access Administrator's Guide http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_web_access.pdf

1. What are the key features of vSphere Web Access (Page 10)

a. Access ESX hosts and vCenter Servers from Linux and Windows systems.
b. Access virtual machines on ESX hosts and vCenter Server instances without installing the vSphere client.
c. Create new virtual machines on ESX hosts.
d. Configure existing virtual machine settings.
e. Add virtual machines to the inventory.
f. Remove virtual machines from the inventory.
g. Perform power operations (start, stop, reset, suspend, and resume) on virtual machines.
h. Monitor the operation of datacenters, ESX hosts, and virtual machines.
i. Interact with the guest operating systems running within virtual machines that use the VMware Remote console.
j. Generate URL and desktop shortcuts for virtual machines.
k. Create and manage snapshots of virtual machines.
l. Perform complete virtual machine snapshot hierarchy management
m. Provide end users with access to virtual machines.
n. Use client devices (such as CD/DVD drives) from your own computer to install software or copy data.

2. Supported Operating Systems

a. Microsoft Windows 2003 Web Edition Service Pack 1
b. Windows 2003 Standard Edition
c. Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1
d. Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3
e. Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2
f. Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4
g. Windows 2000 Server Service Pack
h. Windows 2000 Advanced Server Service Pack 4
i. Linux kernel 2.2.14 or later
j. glibc 2.3.2 or later
k. XFree86-3.3.6 or later
l. gtk+2.0 or later
m. fontconfig (also known as xft)
n. libstdc++5 or later

3. Max size of a disk that can be added to new VM

a. 2047 GB

4. What does Optimize for safety mean

a. Saves all changes to the virtual disk before notifying the system.

5. What does optimize for performance mean

a. Acknowledges changes to the virtual disk immediately, but saves them at a later time.

6. Difference between persistent and non persistent disks

a. Disks in persistent mode behave like conventional disks on your physical computer.

b. Changes to disks in nonpersistent mode are discarded when you power off or reset the virtual machine. Nonpersistent mode enables you to restart the virtual machine with a virtual disk in the same state every time.

7. What hard disk types can you change capacity of

a. SCSI Only Page

8. What SCSI controller type can you select for HW version 7 only

a. LSI SAS

9. What Virtual Machine Advanced Settings can you change

a. Advanced settings include log management, enabling or disabling acceleration, paravirtualization support, MMU support, and modifying virtual machine configuration files.

10. Which Linux guest is currently VMI 3.0 enabled

a. Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) or later

11. What type of virtual disk can be added to powered on VMs with HW versions earlier than 7.0.

a. You can add a SCSI virtual disk to a powered-on virtual machine with hardware versions earlier than 7.0.

12. When Not to Take a Snapshot

a. It is best to take a snapshot when no applications in the virtual machine are sending transactions to other computers.

13. What will affect the redo log files?

a. When you remove the snapshot, the changes accumulated in the redo log files are written permanently to the base virtual disk files.
b. When you revert to the snapshot, the contents of the redo log files are discarded. Any subsequent changes are accumulated in new redo logs.
c. If you take a snapshot when the virtual machine already has a snapshot, the changes accumulated in the redo log files are written permanently to the base virtual disk files. Any subsequent changes accumulate in new redo logs.

14. Look at section on Troubleshooting vSphere Web Access Errors, pages 61 – 65.

15. When should the vSphere Host Update Utility be used and when should vCenter Update Manager be used for upgrading to vSphere.

a. Host Update Utility: This tool is for upgrading ESX 3.x/ESXi 3.5 standalone hosts to ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 and for patching ESXi 4.0
b. vCenter Update Manager is for upgrading ESX/ESXi hosts that are managed in vCenter Server.
c. With Update Manager 4.0 you can perform orchestrated upgrades of hosts and virtual machines. Orchestrated upgrades can be used to upgrade the virtual machine hardware and VMware Tools of virtual machines in the inventory

16. How does licensing change in vSPhere

a. 25 key centralized

17. What is different for VM upgrade to ESX 4.0

a. Upgrade tools then Hardware

18. The requirements for a cold migration upgrade with vCenter

a. One or more machines meeting ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0 requirements.
b. Empty host storage sufficient to hold a portion of your virtual machines. Ideally, the storage should be large enough to hold all of the migrated virtual machines. A larger capacity for virtual machines on this extra storage means fewer operations are required before all your virtual machines are migrated.

19. What happens to datastores when you move from ESX to ESXI

a. VMFS datastores are overwritten unless they are moved to another host before the upgrade.

20. ESX hardware requirements

a. 64bit
b. 2 GB RAM
c. One or more network adapters.
d. sCSI, fibre Channel or internal RAID Controller
e. know the differences beween ESX and ESXi

21. vCenter Requirements

a. 32-Bit or 64-Bit Operating System for vCenter Server
b. 2 CPUs
c. 3 GB RAM
d. 2 GB disk

22. vCenter server required ports

a. 80 and 443
b. 389 – Directory Services
c. 636 – linked mode
d. 902 – host communication
e. 8080/8443 – vCenter management webservices

23. Review vCenter Server Upgrade Summary … such as

a. Vi client 1.x not supported
b. Oracle 9i not supported

24. Review Table 5-2, Configuration and Patch Requirements

25. vCenter server computer name max size

a. 15 chars

26. Downtime during vCenter Server Upgrade, what does not work and what keeps working?

a. DRS does not work, HA does.

27. What is the database upgrade log name

a. VCDatabaseUpgrade.log

28. Be familiar with tables 9-2 and 9-3, Datastore Privileges and Network Privileges.

29. Can you use DHCP IP addresses for ESX hosts during upgrade

a. - No Static only

30. What will the Host Update Utility not upgrade that Update Manager will?

a. VM hardware
b. VM Tools
c. Guest OS (SP and patches)

31. The upgrade to ESX 4.0 preserves the following files from the ESX 3.x file system

a. Basically all of them, your configuration, network, security and storage configuration is in-tact.

32. What versions of ESX/i are supported for upgrade?

a. 3.0.0 onwards

33. How much space does the service console VMDK require in ESX upgrade –

a. The service console VMDK requires at least 8.4GB of available space.

34. How do you view the Upgrade Logs?

a. Open %TEMP%\VCDatabaseUpgrade.log.

35. If you decide to roll back to ESX 3.x what will be lost?

a. Changes to service console

b. VM functionality if VM hardware was upgraded.

36. What OSes go down for VMware Tools Upgrade

a. Windows (guest OS reboot)

b. Linux, network and Solaris stay up.

37. Virtual Hardware Upgrade – what OSes stay up?

a. None.

=======================================================================================

Week 3

Readings

vSphere Basic System Administration:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_admin_guide.pdf

Study Questions and Answers

1) The following requirements apply to each vCenter Server system that is a member of a Linked Mode group:
a) DNS must be operational for Linked Mode replication to work.
b) The vCenter Server instances in a Linked Mode group can be in different domains if the domains have a two-way trust relationship. Each domain must trust the other domains on which vCenter Server instances are installed.
c) When adding a vCenter Server instance to a Linked Mode group, the installer must be run by a domain user who is an administrator on both the machine where vCenter Server is installed and the target machine of the Linked Mode group.
d) All vCenter Server instances must have network time synchronization. The vCenter Server installer validates that the machine clocks are not more than 5 minutes apart.

2) What does vCenter Server 4.0 uses to enable Linked Mode
a) ADAM/AD LDS

3) Troubleshooting extensions
a) vCenter Server extensions running on the tomcat server have extension.xml files which contain the URL where the corresponding Web application can be accessesed (files are located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\extensions). Extension installers populate these XML files using the DNS name for the machine

4) How do you config snmp communities - vicfg-snmp.pl

5) What is SYSLOGD
a) All ESX/ESXi hosts run a syslog service (syslogd), which logs messages from the VMkernel and other system components to a file.

6) How do you Collect ESX Log Files Using the Service Console
a) Run the following script on the service console: /usr/bin/vm-support

7) What can you use the Datastore Browser to do:
a) View or search the contents of a datastore.
b) Add a virtual machine or template stored on a datastore to the vSphere Client inventory.
c) Copy or move files from one location to another, including to another datastore.
d) Upload a file or folder from the client computer to a datastore.
e) Download a file from a datastore to the client computer.
f) Delete or rename files on a datastore.

8) What does Enable Lockdown Mode achieve?
a) disable remote access for the administrator account after vCenter Server takes control of this host. This option is available for ESXi hosts only

9) What is the difference between disconnecting and removing a host in VC Server
a) You can disconnect and reconnect a host that is being managed by vCenter Server. Disconnecting a managed host does not remove it from vCenter Server; it temporarily suspends all monitoring activities performed by vCenter Server. The managed host and its associated virtual machines remain in the vCenter Server inventory. By contrast, removing a managed host from vCenter Server removes the managed host and all its associated virtual machines from the vCenter Server inventory.

10) What does the host health monitoring tool present
a) data gathered using Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) profiles

11) Guided consolidation network ports
a) 135, 137, 138, 139 and 445

12) In guided consolidation what does Confidence show –
a) Confidence – Indicates the degree to which vCenter Server is able to gather performance data about the system and how good a candidate the system is based on the available data.

13) Virtual Machine Versions –
a) Version 4;
i) Compatible with ESX 3.0 and greater hosts and VMware Server 1.0 and greater hosts. Recommended for virtual machines that need to run on ESX 3.x hosts and for virtual machines that must share virtual hard disks with other version 4 virtual machines.
b) B. Version 7;
(1) Compatible with ESX 4.0 and greater hosts. Provides greater virtual machine functionality. Recommended for virtual machines that do not need to migrate to ESX 3.x hosts.

14) What are the OS choices when creating a new VM
a) Microsoft Windows, Linux, Novell NetWare, Solaris, Other

15) What guests support Paravirtualized SCSI
a) Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux (RHEL) 5

16) When can you not decide a virtual disk format
a) On NFS

17) What does vmwareUser.exe and vmware-user do?
a) The VMware user process (VMwareUser.exe on Windows guests or vmware-user on Linux and Solaris guests), which enables you to copy and paste text between the guest and managed host operating systems.

18) When can the hardware version of a virtual machine can be lower than the highest version supported by the ESX/ESXi host it is running on?
a) You migrate a virtual machine created on an ESX/ESXi 3.x or earlier host to an ESX/ESXi 4.x host.
b) You create a new virtual machine on an ESX 4.x host using an existing virtual disk that was created on an ESX/ESXi 3.x or earlier host.
c) You add a virtual disk created on an ESX/ESXi 3.x or earlier host to a virtual machine created on an ESX/ESXi 4.x host

19) What nic's support wake on lan
a) Flexible (VMware Tools required), vmxnet, Enhanced vmxnet, vmxnet 3

20) What HW version for paravirtualized scsi
a) V7

21) Virtual Hardware Requirements for Guest Customization
a) VMware Tools installed
b) 32-bit or 64-bit hardware corresponding to the 32-bit or 64-bit operating system being installed
c) SCSI disks

22) Where are windows and linux errors reported during booting
a) %WINDIR%\temp\vmware-imc.
/var/log/vmware/customization.log.

23) Discuss options for migrating VMs (page 187)

24) EVC Requirements
a) Vc 2.5 update 2
b) All virtual machines in the cluster that are running on hosts with a feature set greater than the EVC mode you intend to enable must be powered off or migrated out of the cluster before EVC is enabled. (For example, consider a cluster containing an Intel Xeon Core 2 host and an Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2 host, on which you intend to enable the Intel Xeon Core 2 baseline. The virtual machines on the Intel Xeon Core 2 host can remain powered on, but the virtual machines on the Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2 host must be powered off or migrated out of the cluster.)
c) All hosts in the cluster must have CPUs from a single vendor, either AMD or Intel.
d) All hosts in the cluster must be running ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 or later.
e) All hosts in the cluster must be connected to the vCenter Server system.
f) n All hosts in the cluster must have advanced CPU features, such as hardware virtualization support (AMDV or Intel VT) and AMD No eXecute (NX) or Intel eXecute Disable (XD), enabled in the BIOS if they are available.
g) All hosts in the cluster should be configured for VMotion. See “Host Configuration for VMotion,” on page 187.
h) All hosts in the cluster must have supported CPUs for the EVC mode you want to enable.

25) Read Storage VMotion Requirements and Limitations Page 198

26) What snapshots are not supported –
a) Snapshots of raw disks, RDM physical mode disks, and independent disks are not supported

27) What are the ESX/ESXi host default users
a) root and vpxuser

28) Default Roles for ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server
a) No access, read only, administrator, VM power user, VM user, resource pool admin, vm consolidated backup user, datastore consumer, network consumer

29) What are the 2 alarm triggers –
a) Condition or State and Event

30) By default, vCenter Server has four collection intervals:
a) Day, Week, Month, and Year.

=======================================================================================

Week 2

Readings

ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_vc_installation_guide.pdf

ESX Configuration Guide:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_server_config.pdf

Follow up Information From Last Week's Club Meeting

vMA Resources
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/234641
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vima/index.html
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/vima

Paravirtualized SCSI and Direct Path Compared
http://professionalvmware.com/2009/08/vmdirectpath-paravirtual-scsi-vsphere-vm-options-and-you/

vSphere Command Line Interface
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_vcli.pdf

vMotion and Change Management
http://viewyonder.com/2009/05/12/vmotion-and-change-management/

Fault Tolerance Resources
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf-vsphere-fault_tolerance.pdf
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmroyale/2009/05/18/vmware-fault-tolerance-requirements-and-limitations

Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN / Use Cases Also Included

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/performance_char_vmfs_rdm.pdf

Study Questions

Ports
1. 80 - direct http, redirects to https,
2. 389 LDAP for DS,
3. 443 vSphere Client,
4. 636 Linked mode SSL,
5. 902 managed hosts, heartbeat,
6. 902/903 vSphere client to display VM consoles
7. 8080 WS HTTP
8. 8443 WS HTTPS
Is IPv4 and v6 supported with PXE Boot ESX installation?
1. No
Difference between standard and advanced installs
1. Standard configures default partitions on single hd/lun, default partitions are sized based on capacity.
2. Advanced allows you to specify console.vmdk partition settings, kernel options, bootloader location, password.
3 ways to install
1. Graphical, Text, Scripted
In a scripted install what does the default ks-first.cfg script do
1. The default ks-first.cfg script reformats the /dev/sda disk and sets up default partitioning
Differences Between Kickstart and ESX Commands
1. ESX scripted installation is similar to, but incompatible with Red Hat's kickstart: In general, kickstart and ESX scripts differ as follows: ESX scripts use the UUID format for specifying disks. ESX scripts use MAC addresses to specify network adapters. ESX scripts generally allow file and NFS URLs. ESX command options and their values require an equal sign (=) instead of a space.
Required Partitions (Page 61 and 62)
1. /
2. /boot
3. Swap
4. Vmfs3
5. Vmkcore
Optional Partitions (Page 62)
1. /home
2. /tmp
3. /usr
4. /var/log
For remote DB's
1. Configure Microsoft SQL Server TCP/IP for JDBC - Protocol Keepalive must be 30000 (Page 78)
Advantages of installing vc server in a VM: (Page 89)
1. Rather than dedicating a separate server to the vCenter Server system, you can place it in a virtual machine running on the same ESX host where your other virtual machines run.
2. You can provide high availability for the vCenter Server system by using VMware HA.
3. You can migrate the virtual machine containing the vCenter Server system from one host to another, enabling maintenance and other activities. You can create snapshots of the vCenter Server virtual machine and use them for backups, archiving, and so on.

Networking

Name 3 types of network services in ESX
1. Connecting virtual machines to the physical network and to each other
2. Connecting VMkernel services (such as NFS, iSCSI, or VMotion) to the physical network.
3. Running management services for ESX via the service console.
Max number of vSwitches per host
1. 127
Default number of ports per vSwitch
1. 56
Max number of port groups per host
1. 512
What type of VLANs can you see on VLAN ID 0
1. only see untagged (non VLAN)
What type of VLAN ID 4095 -
1. See traffic on any VLAN
What traffic does the VMKernel TCP/IP Stack handle -
1. iSCSI, NFS, and vMotion
How do you view the current CDP mode for the a vSwitch
1. esxcfg-vswitch -b <vSwitch> command.
How are private VLANs used between the ESX host and the rest of the network.
1. To use private VLANs between an ESX host and the rest of the physical network, the physical switch connected to the ESX host needs to be private VLAN-capable and configured with the VLAN IDs being used by ESX for the private VLAN functionality.
vSwitch networking policies
1. Load balancing and failover / Route based on the originating port ID, Route based on ip hash, Route based on source MAC hash
2. VLAN (vNetwork Distributed Switch only),
3. Security,
4. Traffic shaping,
5. Port blocking policies (vNetwork Distributed Switch only)
Traffic Shaping Policy
1. Average Bandwidth, Peak Bandwidth, Burst Size (Page 50)
VMDirectPAth - How many passthrough devices connected per VM?
1. 2
WHat features are unavailable for VM's with VMDirectpath
1. VMotion
2. Hot adding and removing of virtual devices
3. Suspend and resume
4. Record and replay
5. Fault tolerance
6. High availability
7. DRS (limited availability; the virtual machine can be part of a cluster, but cannot migrate across hosts)

Storage

Maximum virtual disk size
1. 2TB with 8MB block size
Maximum file size:
1. 2TB - 512 bytes with 8MB block size
Block size:
1. 1MB (default), 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB
Number of VMFS datastores –
1. You can have up to 256 VMFS datastores per system, with a minimum volume size of 1.2GB
Max Number of hosts per VMFS vol
1. 32
Some of the vSphere Features Not Supported by Storage Type (see table 7-2 of Server Config Guide)
1. vMotion – No local storage
2. RDM or VM Cluster – No local storage or NFS
iSCSI initiator discovery methods –
1. Dynamic and Static
Max number of extents per datastore –
1. 32
What is PSA
1. Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). The PSA is an open modular framework that coordinates the simultaneous operation of multiple multipathing plugins (MPPs).
What is SATP
1. Storage Array Type Plugins
What are the 3 PSP (Path Selection Policy's)
1. Fixed, MRU, Round Robin
What is NPIV
1. N-Port ID Virtualization: Makes it possible to use the NPIV technology that allows a single Fibre Channel HBA port to register with the Fibre Channel fabric using several worldwide port names (WWPNs).
When can you use NPIV
1. You can use NPIV only for virtual machines with RDM disks.
Limitations of RDM's
1. Not available for block devices or certain RAID devices – RDM uses a SCSI serial number to identify the mapped device. Because block devices and some direct-attach RAID devices do not export serial numbers, they cannot be used with RDMs.
2. Available with VMFS-2 and VMFS-3 volumes only – RDM requires the VMFS-2 or VMFS-3 format. In ESX, the VMFS-2 file system is read only. Upgrade it to VMFS-3 to use the files that VMFS-2 stores.
3. No snapshots in physical compatibility mode – If you are using an RDM in physical compatibility mode, you cannot use a snapshot with the disk. Physical compatibility mode allows the virtual machine to manage its own snapshot or mirroring operations. Snapshots are available in virtual mode.
4. No partition mapping – RDM requires the mapped device to be a whole LUN. Mapping to a partition is not supported.

Security

How can using VMware assist with a DoS attack
1. resource limit on that machine prevents the attack from taking up so much of the hardware resources that the other virtual machines are also affected.
What do Default certificates created on ESX use for encryption
1. SHA-1 with RSA encryption as the signature algorithm.
What are the ports for connecting to the Virtual Machine Console through a Firewall
1. Port 443 communicates with - vmware-authd
2. Port 902 communicates with vmkauthd
3. Ports between hosts - 443 (server-to-server migration and provisioning traffic)
4. 2050–2250 (for HA traffic)
5. 8000 (for VMotion)
6. 8042–8045 (for HA traffic)
Table 12-1. TCP and UDP Ports (Page 151)
Virtual switches and VLANs can protect against the following types of attacks.
1. MAC Flooding, 802.1q and ISL tagging attacks, double encapsulation, multicast brute force, spanning tree, random frame attacks
Service console security recommendations
1. limit user access, use vSphere client, only use vmware sources to upgrade components you run in the service console

Host Profiles

What are host profiles
1. The host profiles feature creates a profile that encapsulates the host configuration and helps to manage the host configuration, especially in environments where an administrator manages more than one host or cluster in vCenter Server
What format is a host profile when you export it
1. Vpf

=======================================================================================

Week 1

Readings

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html – This is the vSphere 4.0 What’s New Features Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esx_get_start.pdf -- Getting Started with ESX.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_esxi_i_get_start.pdf - Getting Started with ESXi Installable
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_intro_vs.pdf - Introduction to VMware vSphere (up to page 27).

Study Questions & Answers

What standard does vApps use - Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.0 standard
What is the requirement for the new Machine Performance Counters Integration into Perfmon - Latest VMware Tools installed in the guest OS
What is the new vMA - virtual machine which includes vSphere Command-Line Interface and other prepackaged software that developers and administrators can use to run agents and scripts to manage ESX and ESXi systems. Functions of vMA include noninteractive login, which allows you to use vSphere CLI without entering passwords on command lines and to collect log files from ESX and ESXi servers
Name a new feature of VMware Data Recovery - data deduplication
Name the 3 new Virtual Hardware features
New Virtual Hardware — ESX/ESXi 4.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware (virtual machine hardware version 7), which adds significant new features including
1. New storage virtual devices
2. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual devices — Provides support for running Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering configurations.
3. IDE virtual device — Ideal for supporting older operating systems that lack SCSI drivers.
4. VMXNET Generation 3 — See the vNetwork section of this feature list.
5. Hot plug support for virtual devices and hot add support for memory and virtual CPUs
Maximum amount of host memory: 1TB
What is VMware Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) — Paravirtualized SCSI adapters are high-performance storage adapters that offer greater throughput and lower CPU utilization for virtual machines. These adapters are best suited for environments in which guest applications are very I/O intensive.
Name the 3 vNetwork Distributed Switch enhancements: Private VLAN Support, Network VMotion, 3rd Party Distributed Switch Support
What are the 3 new guests that can be customized: * Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit), Ubuntu 8.04, Debian 4.0
Name some of the new commands in the vSphere Command-Line Interface: vicfg-dns, vicfg-ntp, vicfg-user, vmware-cmd, and vicfg-iscsi
Describe DRS - VMware DRS helps you manage a cluster of physical hosts as a single compute resource. You can assign a
virtual machine to a cluster and DRS finds an appropriate host on which to run the virtual machine. DRS places
virtual machines in such a way as to ensure that load across the cluster is balanced, and cluster-wide resource
allocation policies (for example, reservations, priorities, and limits) are enforced.
Describe HA - VMware HA enables quick restart of virtual machines on a different physical server within a cluster
automatically if a host fails. All applications within the virtual machines have the high availability benefit,
through application clustering.
Describe FT - Using VMware vLockstep technology, VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) on the ESX/ESXi host platform provides
continuous availability by protecting a virtual machine (the Primary VM) with a shadow copy (Secondary VM)
that runs in virtual lockstep on a separate host.
Describe DPM - When DPM is enabled, the system compares cluster-level and host-level capacity to the demands of virtual
machines running in the cluster. If the resource demands of the running virtual machines can be met by a
subset of hosts in the cluster, DPM migrates the virtual machines to this subset and powers down the hosts
that are not needed.
What is the DVS - A vNetwork Distributed Switch (dvSwitch) functions as a single virtual switch across all associated hosts
Layer 2 security options - Enforces what vNICs attached to a port group in a virtual machine can do by controlling capabilities for a promiscuous mode, MAC address changes, or forged transmissions.
If a LUN fails when will all VM's fail - if the LUN that has the first extent of the spanned volume. (find blog on extents)
When is RDM's useful- SAN snapshot, MSCS
Describe vApp - A vApp has the same basic operation as a virtual machine, but can contain multiple virtual machines or appliances. With vApps, you can perform operations on multi-tier applications as separate entities (for example, clone, power on and off, and monitor). vApps package and manage those applications.
How does vCenter Server communicate with ESX/i host agents - Throught the vSphere API
ESX Hardware req: 64bit, 2GB ram, 1 or more supported net adapters (Broadcom 570xx, Intel Pro 1000), SCSI Adapter, Fibre Channel Adapter, or Internal RAID Controller
vSphere client req - 266mhz+, 200MB RAM, 1GB free hd for full, 400mb on temp, gb ethernet recommended
Minimum Requirements for vCenter Server
CPU – 2 CPUs
Processor – 2.0GHz or faster Intel or AMD processor. Processor requirements might be higher if the database runs on the same machine.
Memory – 3GB RAM. Memory requirements might be higher if the database runs on the same machine.
Disk storage – 2GB. Disk requirements might be higher if the database runs on the same machine.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express disk requirements – Up to 2GB free disk space to decompress the installation archive. Approximately 1.5GB of these files are deleted after the installation is complete.
Networking – Gigabit connection recommended.
vCenter Server domain account permissions, Member of the Administrators group, Act as part of the operating system, Log on as a service

Weekly WebEx Session

Topic: VMware VCP4 Study Club
Date: Every Thursday, from Thursday, November 12, 2009 to Thursday, December 24, 2009
Time: 3:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (GMT -05:00, New York)
Meeting Number: 921 510 655
Meeting Password: vcp4

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.-----
To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)-----
1. Go to https://vmware.webex.com/vmware/j.php?ED=124023097&UID=0&PW=44e03d2d3e77
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: vcp4
4. Click "Join Now".-----
To join the teleconference only-----
Provide your phone number when you join the meeting to receive a call back. Alternatively, you can call:
Call-in toll-free number (Premiere): 1-877-647-3411
Attendee access code: 104265-----
For assistance-----
1. Go to https://vmware.webex.com/vmware/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".

You can contact me or Trevor Davis at:
dmarotta@vmware.com
1-980-722-5131
Or
tdavis@vmware.com
1- 954-854-2362

To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://vmware.webex.com/vmware/j.php?ED=124023097&UID=0&ICS=MI&LD=1&RD=2&ST=1&SHA2=R/kLsDCOdH5642Q7-eMgm0B5FvF0u6WI9YFUl0g1-Ts=

vSphere 4.0 Upgrade Project

Virtual_JTW — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:33:29 GMT

In the next six posts I will describe the process I'm using to upgrade my Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 production cluster to vSphere 4.0. BTW, am I the only one that still dislike the "vSphere" moniker? What was wrong with "Virtual Infrastructure"? At least that is more descriptive! What does a vSphere describe? Okay, I understand the "v" in front is short for virtual (maybe?). So is this a virtual sphere? The marketing folk need to rethink their branding practices. Now if they come out with some coherent brand strategy that ties the whole "sphere" thing together with their products, I'll have to take everything back, but as it stands it's worthless. But I digress...

I will publish everything in six parts:
Part 1: Planning
Part 2: Testing
Part 3: Upgrade to vCenter 4.0 and SRM 4.0
Part 4: Upgrade ESX Hosts
Part 5: Upgrade Virtual Machines
Part 6: Conclusion

How to Upgrade the Firmware on a Dell 2950 running ESXi (with no physical floppy drive).

gunnarb — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:45:01 GMT

NOTE: This tutorial is only valid if you have a DRAC card installed in your 2950.

This process was surprisingly simple. Basically what I’m going to do is use the downloaded EXE from Dell’s website. This EXE will create a bootable floopy, but instead of doing this to a physical floppy (because I don’t even have one). I’m going to do this to a virtual floopy. To do this edit the settings of any VM you have access to, Click on the Floppy Drive, then select “Create new floppy image in datastore”. Choose your location and name and hit okay, then hit okay again.

I had to go back in after this and then select, “Use existing floppy image in datastore” then select the file I just created. Don’t forget to check the box “connected” once you have done this.

Now log into the VM and format the floppy drive. Once formatted, copy the file you downloaded from Dell (the BIOS file) and execute it on the VM. This will build the “floppy”. Once completed Edit the settings of you VM again and uncheck the “connected” box.

Now you want to browse to the datastore where you created the .flp file and download it to your local desktop.

With the .flp file on the local desktop you need to log into your DRAC. And select the Media Tab:

NOTE: If you have not enabled Virtual Media, click on Configuration and change the Attach Virtual Media setting to “Attached”.

Select the Floppy Image File and browse to your desktop and select the .flp file. Now click connect.
Put your ESX server in Maintenance Mode and reboot the server. Connect to the console of the ESXi server via DRAC and on boot select F11 for boot options. When the boot options come up select virtual Floppy Drive.

From here it’s a straight forward BIOS upgrade, have fun!
-Gunnar

Thin to thick to thin again

microkid — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:11:24 GMT

Well, found a solution to get my thick thin disks thin again.
Enable SSH on the ESXi system. Then login and use vmkfstools -i infile.vmdk outfile.vmdk -d thin to convert the vmdk to thin again. Then edit the VM, attach the new disk and remove the old one. Saves me gigabytes of space

Dear Vmware world

reyesg — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:23:36 GMT

Its been some time since i have posted in here. We have virtualized over 50 servers in our data center and migrated more than half of that out to a remote data center. This is all in line with our new consolidated corporate data center infrastructure plan. I cant say i blame them...in the end it will make things easier to manage and will require less downtime for any hardware refreshing and network maintenance. I am 100% behind them in the idea and would do the same. The only thing that saddens me is that they have taken away about 80% of my virtual machines and i can no longer manage them. The vmware farm here now looks kind of sad and empty. Leave it to me to come up with a plan though! I am thinking of breaking our farm in half and sending it off to our other hospital and upgrading to ESX vSphere and toying with the idea of even setting up Vmware view. I have little to no training in vmware view, but i think the fundamentals are there. As the time comes, i will more than likely post up an update and blog about any issues i come up with here.

VMware TAM Weekly Newsletter Edition 1.15 - ESX3.5 Update 5 released, Last newsletter of 2009!

nisserow — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:19:51 GMT

Hi everyone, as this will be the last newsletter for 2009 I wanted to wish all of you a very happy and healthy festive season. I look forward to reporting all of the VMware news again from next year.

Kind Regards

Neil Isserow | VCP3 | Technical Account Manager - Queensland |
VMware Australia

PCoIP Zero Client and VMware View 4

wponder — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:03:47 GMT

For all the geek's out there.... Just in time for Christmas you should be seeing hardware PCoIP zero clients with updated firmware that works with VMware View 4 and PCoIP. What does this mean? For anyone that does not know. Teradici started PCoIP initially with a hardware based solution. This solution is comprised of a hardware zero client and a PCIe host card and for sometime now we have been working with Teradici to deliver PCoIP in software based solution for VMware View.

Historically, the PCIe host card is installed into any system with a PCIe slot and a GPU hosted in a central secure location such as a datacenter. The PCoIP zero client is deployed desk side and used to securely access the remote system across the LAN or WAN. This is intended to be used in a 1:1 manner and is extremely high performance. This solution tackles delivering some of the most demanding workstation workloads for users such as designers and illustrators that typically require dedicated 3D graphics.

With the release of View 4, existing 1:1 PCoIP hardware based solutions can be brokered by View. For existing users of PCoIP hardware, this greatly enhances the flexibility they have for addressing the entire spectrum of desktop and workstation workloads. Now they can easily add virtual desktops for thier productivity work while also providing a solution for their most demanding workstation needs using the same client and brokering infrastructure.

With the updated firmware for existing PCoIP hardware clients can easily be updated and used to access both Virtual desktops resources and PCoIP hardware resources. PCoIP hardware zero clients are not just for workstation workloads. PCoIP hardware zero clients also provide a high performance, low cost zero touch management client that can be used when accessing VMware View based virtual desktops using the software implementation of PCoIP.

With a PCoIP hardware zero client there is nothing to patch, manage or manually configure. No virus's, worms or malware. All further reducing the overall cost of a virtual desktop solution. PCoIP zero client firmware can easily be updated adding additional features. Firmware updates are easily handled in an hands off automated manner using the Teradici PCoIP Management console; a web based solution available as a virtual appliance.

Using the preferred discovery method Domain Name System Service Record ( DNS-SRV ) existing network connected PCoIP portals or newly added PCoIP portals are automatically discovered by the PCoIP management console, once discovered configuration polices or firmware updates can easily be applied to each client. For larger deployments PCoIP clients can easily be managed in groups allowing different configurations for each.

PCoIP hardware zero clients and Integrated dispaly's ( LCDs with integrated PCoIP clients ) will be VMware View Certified and available from the growing ecosystem of hardware PCoIP solution providers such as, WYSE, Samsung, Devon IT, Dell, ClearCube, Fujitsu, EVGA, ELSA, Leadtek, Amulet Hotkey and others. For a list of VMware View Certified Clients see the following - VMware View Ready Clients

The following video is a demonstration of a PCoIP hardware zero client and a VMware View 4 virtual desktop.

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VMware View 4 with PCoIP - Multi-Monitor

wponder — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 01:18:18 GMT

In the first release of VMware View with PCoIP, one of the key features we wanted to focus on was true mutli-monitor support. For years studies have shown muti-monitor significantly increases user productivity. Recent studies from NEC and the University of Utah show muti-monitor can help make users 29 percent more effective at doing tasks, multi-monitor is 24 percent more comfortable to use doing tasks and users found it 39 percent easier to move
around sources of information. In addition, users can be at least 10 percent more productive. I have used multi-monitor for years and personally cannot stand it when traveling away from my multi-monitor setup.

Despite the popularity and growing demand for multi-monitor support. This key feature seems to have eluded vendors in the server based computing and VDI markets for years now. It really was not until recently vendors started taking this seriously and going beyond basic solutions such as spanning or basic boundary detection.

Spanning allows you to span multiple displays often up to a maximum total resolution. The problem with spanning is applications often open up full screen crossing all the monitor boundaries requiring the user to manually re-size the app to fit a given display. Typically spanning is coupled with a third party or add-on software solution that adds the ability for apps to maximize but stay within the monitor boundary. The problem here is even this still has the challenge with other tasks such as the Windows logon still displaying in the middle of the screen rather than on only the primary display. This is unnatural to end users and changes the experience they are use to with a PC. It is however, better than nothing.

We wanted to get off to a better start with VMware View and PCoIP. In the first release, we are able to support true muti-monitor. In addition to properly detecting monitor boundaries we also support non-matching resolutions so each monitor can run at a different resolutions from others. We also support rotate or pivot so displays can be mixed. Displaying in landscape and or a portrait view. In addition, we also support a feature we call fit to client. Fit to client, detects the monitor configuration at connection time automatically configuring the layout so no user configuration is required. In addition, a user can exit full screen mode and the View Client will dynamically adjust the display to the window size. Fit to client is great for environments where users roam from desktop to desktop especially when there are a lot of display's that vary in size.

Preparing to deploy virtual desktops for multi-monitor is fairly straight forward and easy with a little planning. Depending on your familiarity with View and virtual desktops it might be a little different than what you expect. When developing and integrating PCoIP, we closely integrated using our SVGA display drivers and the virtual machine itself. In the long run, this opens the opportunity for us to deliver some exciting features we have planned for the future.

Because we integrate with the virtual machine hardware, some users get confused by the video settings now found with the virtual machine hardware v7 when running on ESX 4. These hardware settings currently do not affect anything and should not be used when preparing to use multi-monitor with View and PCoIP. People more familiar with ESX can get tripped up by this at first.

Another area that can trip up users familiar with View is upgrading existing VM's from View 3 to View 4. Those VMs are configured as single display VMs and need to be reconfigured to support multi-monitor if you intend to use multi-monitor. VMware View Manager can help take care of this for you.

As you can see below, VMware View Manager has new controls for configuring pools and can be used to configure or change the virtual machine hardware of an individual desktop or pools of desktops too use multi-monitor.

There are two basic settings. The max number of displays; which configures the total number of possible displays and the desired resolution of each display. In an environment where you might have several possible configurations the best thing to do is configure for the highest possible resolution. In a mixed resolution environment, fit to client will handle properly setting the resolution for the user. One important note is after changing these settings or migrating existing virtual machines the VMs must be powered off completely at least one time for the settings to take affect.

Tips for avoiding common gotchas:

Preparing templates or a View Composer parent image - When building a template or linked clone parent that will be used to deploy several victual machines. That image is often not under the management of View Manger. Although you can add the necessary settings for multi-monitor support by directly editing the .vmx of that VM this is often error prone. I recommend adding the VM to View Manager as an individual desktop and configuring it as desired. Setting the multi-monitor settings, installing necessary software and testing the image before using it as a template. Once completed, simply remove it from View Manager, convert it to a template or finish it's preparation for use with View Composer as a parent image.

Upgrading from View 3 to View 4 - When upgrading, it might and changing a pool to use PCoIP and starting to use multi-monitor. You need to change the muti-monitor settings and trigger a configuration change of the virtual machines. Remember, these virtual machines started as single display virtual machines and we need to reconfigure their virtual hardware settings for muti-monitor. Once this is done, the virtual machines will need to be powered off at least one time. Also note: the current default setting is 2 displays. If the default settings are desired you will need to make the change twice in view manager to trigger the change. We will change this in the next release to change the default to one so this is not necessary.

Once a template or View Composer parent is setup these settings will apply to all VMs deployed from that image so no extra configuration steps are needed.

Adding existing virtual machines to View Manager - This is really no different than our upgrade scenario. In this case, the virtual machine hardware is setup for one monitor and we need to trigger a change. Following the same steps as upgrading applies in this case.

Single monitor pools - Although the default pool setting is currently set for two display's. There is no affect if the target pool will only ever use one display and there is no reason to change the default settings. The default setting will be changed in the future to 1.

You might also notice once connected to a virtual desktop we disable the display settings tab in Windows. This is because fit to client takes care of properly setting the resolutions for the user. In some cases, it might be desirable to over ride this. This can be done by changing the standard Windows registry setting for controlling the display settings.

See [HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] and the NoDispSettingsPage value.