Blog Posts

As part of my vSphere 4.0 upgrade planning, I checked VMware's HCL for all of my hardware. I noticed that VMware's SAN HCL for vSphere 4 includes the Celerra NS350 for NAS but there's no listing for iSCSI unlike many other Celerra models that explicitly state "iSCSI" and "NAS".

Good News: I opened and SR with EMC support who verified that the Celerra NS350 is indeed supported as an iSCSI target for vSphere 4 just as it is for VI 3.5.

For future reference, one can verify this by using the e-Lab Navigator tool found on EMC PowerLink.

vSphere 4.0 Update1 にあわせて、vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update1 もリリースされた。大幅な機能拡張がなされている。
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/

新しく提供されたコマンドレットによって例えば下記のようなことが自動化できる

• ESX自体のパワーオン・オフ、パッチの適用が可能に
• 仮想マシンクローン時等のカスタマイゼーションでIPアドレス等の指定が可能に
• ゲストOSのネットワーク設定の制御可能に

また、既存のコマンドレットの拡張によって、下記のようなことにも対応できる

• 仮想マシンをThinディスクで作成可能に
• 仮想マシンのライブクローン(パワーオン状態の仮想マシンのクローン)が可能に
• 仮想ディスクのオンライン拡張が可能に

一方、vNetwork Distributed Switch の構成・管理への対応は見送られているようだ。VMworld の Break out セッションでは、VMotion や FT、NFC トラフィック を Parse する Wireshark プラグインと並んでデモもされていただけに残念。これら、PowerCLI で対応していない機能については、先日も紹介した Get-View を使って、vSphere SDK for .Net のレベルで記述することになる。

なお、同じタイミングでPowerCLI コマンドレットのオンラインリファレンスがついに提供された
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/html/index.html

We last saw our intrepid Web 2.0 adventurer about to delve back into the depths of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is old school, one of the oldest business social networks, and it's not about virtual martinis or superwalls or how many movies you have in common -- it's all about the networking.

I will admit it's been a while since I've been there -- probably since the last time I was looking for a job, which seems to be one of the major use cases for LinkedIn. The principle activity of LinkedIn, aside from the meta-activity of increasing the size of your personal network, is the Introduction -- asking your network to hand your referral from person to person until you reach the object of your affections -- Bill Clinton, a hiring manager, a prospect. I've never sent or received one of these invitations, but I do know folks that have gotten plenty of job inquiries from the site. My profile on LinkedIn is here, and no, I'm not looking for a job.

Spurred on by the current social networking frenzy, they are adding features like a Q&A section and beefier profiles. Here's Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web on how he recently used LinkedIn and his perception of its business value vs Facebook's.

After logging in and taking care of some pending connection requests, I joined Alessandro Perilli's virtualization.info Vanguards Group (not to be confused with VMware's Virtual Vanguard Awards).

After only a month and with a single announcement, Alessandro has assembled 383 virtualization professionals from across the globe. Not bad! So why do you want to be there, even if you're not looking for a job?

A wide cross-section of the virtualization industry. There are vendors (from VMware and Microsoft on out), consultants of all stripes, very experienced sysadmins and IT experts, and quite a few names you may recognize from communities.vmware.com.

You can see and contact everybody in the Group. The contact piece is configurable on a per-group and per-person basis, but Vanguards is set up by default so that we can all contact each other. Interested in finding a virtualization consultant in Norway? Looking for a contact at a vendor -- either the executive or the engineering kind? Want to compare notes with someone else in your industry? You can probably make that happen here with a quick search.

You won't be spammed. Now, since this is a business network, many people have something to pitch, so LinkedIn groups are not built for spam. In a LinkedIn Group you can contact individuals, but nobody in the Group can globally spam everybody in the group with a pitch for their latest virtualization management appliance.

LinkedIn is still very much a business-to-business network, and so what a Group can do there is still very buttoned-down and oriented at making business contacts -- LinkedIn doesn't actually offer much more to do with Groups yet. I suspect that we'll see other functionality soon: for instance, you can ask a Question to your network and the LinkedIn community at large, but I'd love to see questions just from the virtualization.info Vanguards Group. Although the Groups feature on LinkedIn is at least two years old, they've only recently opened up and become easier to create.

So you can't go wrong adding the virtualization.info Vanguards Group on LinkedIn to your professional online presence. I think since we have such a vibrant community here, I'm not going to start up a LinkedIn group specifically for VMware, but let me know if you have other good ideas.

Did you know that VMware is now offering email patch notifications for all of its products? From that page:

With this service, you will immediately be sent an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available on the VMware products you’ve purchased.

How does this work? You can initiate this activity by selecting the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link from our Support home page, providing your email address, and then, after verifying that we’ve got the right contact, you can select the product/s you would like notification on by selecting “Confirm Subscription” from within the email confirmation we will send you.

So click on the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link. From there, you put in your email address. You'll soon get an email from vmwareteam@connect.vmware.com sent to your email where you click through to a form. There you can select different VMware products like so:

Note that you won't get announcements about major releases, only about patch releases and maintenance releases. (We send out major release announcements to large swaths of our ecosystem. Let me know if it would be convenient to get major release announcements coming out through these patch mailing lists as well.)

Anyway, when there is a patch release, you'll get another nice email from vmwareteam like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subject: ESX Server 2.5.4/ 2.5.5 New Patches Available Release Date: 01/31/08 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New patches are available for ESX Server 2.5.4 and 2.5.5. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 15 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 4 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

We expect the next patch release in late February 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Regards,
The VMware Team

More later on Communities Email Notifications and VMware marketing email subscription management.

Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized the following list (highest priority first):

1. Errors when editing documents: Can no longer edit documents?
2. Display avatars on threads:
   1. Avatars (status level, vExpert, moderator, VMware employee) will display in threads; currently they display only on community pages
3. Display helpful / correct answers in threads: Cannot tell what replies are marked correct or helpful.
   1. Answers marked helpful / correct will display in the threads; currently they only display on community pages
4. IE6 errors on "All Communities" dropdowns: in IE 6 "all communities" dropdown is not clickable
5. Make new private messages easier to find: Notification of PMs
   1. The username menu title will be bold when the user has unread private messages.
6. Wider view area for threads: Please make the thread posting area wider!
   1. We are working on some JavaScript so that you can expand the thread view to cover the right column. This gives 30% more area to view threads while allowing us to keep the fixed width, which allows us to provide more consistency for the site across browsers and display sizes.
7. Truncated names: Shortened logins on forum
   1. Names will still be truncated on community pages, but they will not be truncated in places where there's plenty of space to show the whole name, e.g. on user profile pages.

In addition to this, we are also working on bringing back the "My Communities" dropdown. This requires a bit more work than the other improvements above, so we will work on it after we have completed the bulk of the above list.

I'll update here as we deploy the fixes.

Thanks, Robert

My ESXi system is running a W2K8 server that acts as fileserver. As I found the datatransfer speed to this server too slow (approx 40MB/sec) I decided to blame ESXi for capping transferspeed to and from my Dell Perc 5/i card. I thereforce decided to get myself a new motherboard with Intel vt-d so I could do a passthrough of the raid controller to the VM. So I got myself a nice Intel DQ45CB motherboard. One sunday, I swapped all hardware and fired it up with good hopes. Configured VmDirectPath, rebooted and tried to use the raid card. Windows detected the card correctly. I started restoring my backup but noticed the data written by the VM was corrupted. No matter what I tried it would not work. I then reverted to my previous setting, using the raid card in ESXi directly. This led to another problem: after creating a VMFS volume, the storage adapter was randomly removed from ESXi and could only be recovered by rescanning the storage adapters. So this was not workable either.

In the end, I found out that disabling vt-d in the bios solved things. The raid card is now correctly detected by ESXi, the VMFS volumes stay up all the time. I also re-installed the w2k8 fileserver. There must have been something wrong in the previous VM, as datatransfer speeds now get up to 100MB/sec read and 80MB/sec write

I also added some disks to the raid setup. The current setup now is: 5 x 1TB WD Green, resulting in 4TB of storage. As ESXi cannot handle LUN's or disks larger than 2TB, I split the storage into two 2TB volumes.