VMware Communities : All Content - All Communities

Hitachi AMS 2300

bazza52 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:29:26 GMT

We purchased new units recently and all the firmware was up to date. The only downtime was licence installation (there are 3 licences which require reboots when installed).

We have a good relationship with the local service guys, emails are always quickly answered and onsite support is prompt. The Department I indirectly work for has a fair bit of HDS kit so there is an existing enterprise support agreement - can't comment on what the standard support would be like if, for example, a single AMS unit was the only infrastructure purchased from them.

I give -- Advanced Options

nkbaumer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:04:25 GMT

The Help button linked to the following information:

(Optional) For Microsoft Windows guest operating systems only, specify a location for the log file by entering values in the Advanced Options field.|Microsoft Windows Guest Operating Systems Advanced Values|Description|

/s /v "/qn"	Same as the default behavior. Performs a silent upgrade of VMware Tools.
/s /v "/qn" /l "<Microsoft Windows_location\filename.log>"	Performs a silent upgrade of VMware Tools and creates a log file in the specified location on the guest operating system.

The standard install switches for the setup.exe should be these:

I don't see in either location an option for a shutdown switch. Perhaps adding /shutdown as an option might work.

Missing local SCSI VMFS partition

jaygriffin — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:42:33 GMT

Yes - there was nothing on there I needed.

Checking logs for a VM that locked up

petedr — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:33:42 GMT

If we find anything else we will follow up with you off line through our support group.

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of esXpress

Linked Clones with Vista 64-bit

jaygriffin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:53:11 GMT

If there is anyone out there who has tried this, I am interested in hearing about your experience. I have no problem getting the view Manager client to install on the 64-bit workstation. I have installed it many times -- just turn off the USB support.

I powered down the virtual workstation and I created a snapshot.

When I go through the View Administrator wizard to add a linked-clone pool, the snapshot does not show up. I did a 32-bit Windows XP workstation just to make sure I didn't have a problem unrelated to the 64-bit OS. The Windows XP snapshot showed up fine. But I can't see any Vista-64 snapshots.

Is there anyone out there who has tried this? Did you get it to work?

Problems install View Manager Agent

kconnor — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:40:52 GMT

I hit upon a simple solution to the View Agent install error #28030. Specifically, I used local admin account to launch the installer, which worked. Windows XP SP2 - added to domain.

This action resolved two issues I have been encountered when installing View Agent:

1) ThinPrint Install Error: "You do not have permission to modify the settings for this printer..."

2) USB Hub and USB Device drivers: "Error 28030. The Installer failed to install the USB driver."

Frankly, I do not know specifically which policy is keeping me from installing the drivers when I log in as a domain user/administrator. I strongly suspected the local policy "load and unload device driver" - particularly because this was disabled whenever I was logged in as a domain user. This included Domain Admin user.

Incidentally, I tried to push down these rights from within AD. (Domain controller: Domain Security Policy | + Local Policies | User Rights Assignment | Load and Unload Device Drivers).

I then used GPUDPDATE.EXE /FORCE, and although the local policy changed, the install still failed for both print & USB.

The agent services & devices seem healthy when I log in as a domain user. So, I was able to move forward. Incidentally, this only led me to my next challenge... when I add desktop to an individual pool, the machine is not fully accessible. It's likely that my problem is unrelated to the view agent install workaround. I add this for completeness, only.

For enquiring minds, my situation is that the individual desktop is created in view manager, however, under desktop sources, status is "waiting for agent." This happens with more than one guest OS. As I said, I think this is unrelated to USB Driver Installation difficulties.

Hercules Load Balancer

jaygriffin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:11:31 GMT

This is kind of a crazy way, but it seems to have worked --- I used the converter to convert the files to a Virtual Appliance. Then I used the Converter to import the virtual appliance.

Stored Performance Data

jaygriffin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:27:49 GMT

Anyone?

Upgrade documentation

jaygriffin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:59:24 GMT

Thanks, but what I am really looking for is the documentation for doing the upgrade.

There appears to be a great deal of documentation and KB articles for this new product. Where is the documentation if you are doing a regular upgrade? (Upgrading a single VDM server)

ESX Networking Configuration for HP 1510i

bebman — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:00:21 GMT

If you found this helpful, please use of the Helpful /Correct buttons to award points. Thanks !!

Search Community not working

RDellimmagine — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:12:54 GMT

This is likely related to the other intermittent issues on the site. We are working with Jive and Akamai to resolve them as soon as possible.

Regards, Robert

Robert Dell'Immagine, Director of VMware Communities

Consolidated Backup and Backup Exec Questions

ederaco — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:22:29 GMT

Ive been testing VCB for the last 3 months, very tricky. browse-start command is away of mounting manually; in your backupExec after running this command will show what VM has been mounted, this is more like a testing ground. You can run a backup at file level for this. The Pre-Backup is a script backup exec uses to mount a vm for backup, what i have notice is that it actually uses the browse start bat and other scripts to go forward with processing a backup. I aslo had errors when mounting backups similar to yours. I still had a snapshot or partial snapshot mounted and this returned the same error. I ran vcbcleanup.bat to clean up the folder, then ran a backup and it worked correctly.

Are the March Patches working for you?

jaygriffin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:52:48 GMT

After I updated BESX4, I vmotioned a couple of VMs to it and it seems to be fine. Not sure why the first server had a problem, but something definitely was not right.

Vmware workstation connect to VirtualCenter 2.5

jaygriffin — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:01:55 GMT

Thanks Kevin -- I guess that's the problem then.

I found another solution. From Virtual Center, I did an EXPORT and put the files on my PC's C: drive. I specified in the export that it was a VMware workstation. After the export completed, I simply "open"ed the vm from VMware workstation. Seems to be working fine.

Hosts not responding after VPN downtime

Chamon — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:43:00 GMT

Did you just remove them from the cluster on friday or did you have to do anything else? Hope they stay.

iSCSI clearing up failed logins

cmanucy — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:03:47 GMT

Man, you'd think with as many problems as this MSA is causing people, they (HP) might consider not selling it... but nah, that'd impact the sales numbers. Wouldn't want to do what's best for the customers, now would we?

Jay, I'm sorry to tell you that shutting everything down is the only way you're going to be able to clear this out. And, unfortunately, you're going to need to get use to the idea of taking everything offline every month or so while the MSA does what it does. We've got a 1500 we've almost completely migrated off of - once we do, we're going to bash its little SCSI controllers in

HP has not been helpful to us, either. Even getting regional reps involved has proved a waste of time, despite their assurances they'd "fix" the problems. So we spoke with our money, and aren't buying HP anymore.

The only bit of helpful advice I can give you is a sequence we do on our 1500 to fix locking problems... but I don't know if it'll work for your situation, as we're on FC not iSCSI with the 1500.

1) Fail working controller in ACU.
2) Pull 'failed' controller.
3) Wait a bit.
4) Put controller back in.
5) Wait a bit.

See if things clear up. If not, repeat 1 -> 5. If it still doesn't work, after step 5, pull the other controller and follow the same steps with it.

Eventually, we'll get the unit online without taking our VM's offline, but some VMs will die due to timeouts.

----
Carter Manucy

Searching specific communities

Badsah — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:00:11 GMT

Weird, my earlier response from my Blackberry never made it through. Here is what I wanted to say, Jay:

It is a problem that the advanced search is not a link from the standard screen. We have this on our list of UI bugs. (Which Robert has since mentioned in his post.)

You do have another simple option, if you don't know the link oreeh sent you, but it is not intuitive or obvious:

(1) Go to the community/ sub-community you wish to search and perform a simple search. By default, the search engine will search that particular community only.

(2) You will also notice that in addition to getting the preliminary results, you will be presented with the advanced options that include search within a specific community. When you look closely at the initial settings, you will see the current community selected.

Thanks.

Badsah.

"VMW - The Ultimate Virtual Machine"
VMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVM
Badsah Mukherji | Senior Community Manager | VMware Communities | http://www.vmware.com/
VMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVMVM

VM won't power up after 3.5 upgrade (or very, very slow)

jaygriffin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:02:20 GMT

I get some great information from these forums, so I thought I would share this in case anyone else encounters the same problem. After upgrading to VC 2.5 and ESX 3.5 I had some VM's that would not power up or woudl take forever to powerup. Even after powering up they were non-functional -- could not even RDP into them. They all exhibited the same behavior -- when powered on they would go to 95% and hang.

Problem: The vmx file had a sched.max.cpu = "0" in it. They weren't getting any CPU time! Not sure how this like got there.

This find statement revealed all the VM's that had the problem:

find /vmfs/volumes/ -name "*.vmx" -exec grep -Hi cpu.max {} \;

Solution:

Power off the VM's -- some wouldn't and I had to reboot the ESX server.
Disconnect and Remove the ESX server from VC.
Edit the vmx file and delete the sched.max.cpu line.
Power on the vm from the command line: vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/8c72f5a5-da11b5c4-8699-8dd93c53fdb3/isweb4/isweb4.vmx start
Make sure the VM is working properly.
Add the ESX host back to VC.

If you don't remove the ESX server from VC, the vmx keeps getting updated from the database and the sched.max.cpu line gets re-added.

I am not sure how this line got in there. But I had about 6 VM's that were all created at the same time that had this problem. They all ran fine before the upgrade.

Anyway, just wanted to post this in case it might help someone down the road.

Replacing a VMware server -- not enough licenses

tom howarth — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:31:33 GMT

register for an evalulation, this will give you a 16 processor license, replace your current License with the 16 processor lic file and relicense your environement, do your vmotions and then switch off the old server, then revert to your original license key and you should be good to go.

"Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid." - David Hackworth

Kind Regards

Tom,

esXpress vs. 3.5 Backup / Restore Features

petedr — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:39:01 GMT

Hey beckhamk,

I work for esxpress and it can do both. We can backup over the LAN to network targets (ftp/ssh/smb) and can also backup LAN Free to your SAN to vmfs partitions on it.

pete@esxpress

3.0.2 Update 1

jaygriffin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:59:24 GMT

Duh! Downloaded the wrong file -- I d/l the from ESX2 file.

Notification of new patches

esiebert7625 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:25:03 GMT

You can also go to the below link and manage your subscriptions, I received an email like below last week...

****************************************************************************************

Subject: ESX Server 2.0.2 / 2.1.3 / 2.5.3 / 2.5.4 / 3.0.0 / 3.0.1 - New Patch Available

****************************************************************************************

This communication is regarding the newly available patches for ESX Server 2.0.2, ESX Server 2.1.3, ESX Server 2.5.3, ESX Server 2.5.4, ESX Server 3.0.0 and ESX Server 3.0.1.

To manage your VMware subscription, please visit VMware Subscriptions.
http://info.vmware.com/content/Subscription

HA - power on / off settings

sridharr — Thu, 17 May 2007 01:45:50 GMT

Autostart gets disabled when the host is part of a HA cluster. per host startup order does not make sense in a cluster setting where VMs move around between hosts.

Your problem is likely that you lost both networks to your service console, thereby leaving the host isolated from the network, and its isolation response kicked in. The default behavior is to power down the VM, so that it can be restarted on another host by non-isolated hosts.

HA requires redundant networking, so that if one path goes down, it at least has the other path for heartbeating and other communications.

Failed to obtain write lock

jaygriffin — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:07:36 GMT

Did not find any read only files.

I removed the VM's from my favorites and re-created using an existing file. That seemed to work. I can power them on now.

Thanks for the reponses.

Windows Clustering -- what's the value in ESX?

oreeh — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:11:00 GMT

IMHO clustering only makes sense if you need 24x7

If you already have HA I don't see any benefit to MSCS but only drawbacks (additional management overhead using the cluster management stuff, cluster unaware apps which cause trouble,...)

And yes you can use snapshots for "quick and dirty backups"

Just my 0.02

Unable to migrate ... device not accessible

impensb — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:15:39 GMT

That is expected behavior.

When trying to Vmotion, there are several checks that take place. One is to verify that the datastores are available on the host you are sending the VM to. Every disk on a VM has a datastore associated with it, including floppy drives, cd-rom's, and hard disks. If the datastore is not available on the target, the vmotion will not proceed. By disconnecting the cd-rom that datastore is no longer required to be available on the target host.

You can setup a shared datastore using NFS to help avoid this issue, but it is a best practice to disconnect your CD-ROM's when done using them.

Errors loading Win 2003 from ISO file

jaygriffin — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:10:39 GMT

Problem with the ISO file. Copied over a new one and it is working.

HA Agent Disabled on besx1.company.com in cluster Corp Cluster in Main DC

acr — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:21:31 GMT

Thx.. Glad its sorted..!

New VM - blank console

trdavis55 — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:07:31 GMT

I'm having the same problem. New Esx server and user. I created the VM, used the dd command on the root to upload the ISO but when I power on the VM, the console has always been blank. There has been nothing on the window to try to get to the boot sequence.
I am curious what you meant by deleting and recreating the virtual disk. Is this the VM or the datacenter?

Message was edited by:
trdavis55

NLB - leaving the Cluster

jaygriffin — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:32:27 GMT

I am attempting to use NLB on VMware server - my VM's are Windows 2003 Std SP1. VMware was so kind to include a section on this in their manual. That was helpful -- I have used NLB in the past, but I would not have know I needed to use multicast mode instead of unicast.

Anyway - I have VMware server running on a server called isweb2. The VM on isweb2 is isweb4. I wanted to test VMware server before putting other servers up so I NLB'ed isweb4 (the VM) with a physical server isweb1. I used to have isweb1 and isweb2 NLB'ed, but I removed isweb2 and added isweb4.

I have two NIC's in isweb1 and two in isweb2 - one used for NLB and the other for external traffic. On the VM setup on isweb2 I setup two separate bridges - one for each NIC. I use the NICs in the same manner on isweb4 -- the isweb2 external is the isweb4 external; the one that used to be for NLB on isweb2 is used for NLB on isweb4.

Today a program I use to monitor the servers told me it could not ping isweb4. I found this in the system event:

(from isweb1)
Event Type: Information
Event Source: WLBS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 69
Date: 8/25/2006
Time: 5:39:22 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ISWEB1
Description:
NLB Cluster 10.3.1.97 : Initiating convergence on host 1. Reason: Host 2 is leaving the cluster.

---- from Isweb4 -----

Event Type: Information
Event Source: WLBS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 65
Date: 8/25/2006
Time: 5:39:18 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ISWEB4
Description:
NLB Cluster 10.3.1.97 : Initiating convergence on host 2. Reason: Host 1 is converging for an unknown reason.

Not sure what to look for -- are there different NIC drivers that can be used? Any other settings I should check?

Virtual Center 2 Eval

mstahl75 — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 13:10:56 GMT

In VI3 they do come with the agents but I'm pretty sure the agent licenses are part of VC and would go in the vmware.lic file and not on the host. I could be wrong on that though since we haven't done host based licensing on VI3.

Network Load Balancing on VMware server

jaygriffin — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:12:03 GMT

I am attempting to use NLB on VMware server. VMware was so kind to include a section on this in their manual. That was helpful -- I have used NLB in the past, but I would not have know I needed to use multicast mode instead of unicast.

Anyway - I have VMware server running on a server called isweb2. The VM on isweb2 is isweb4. I wanted to test VMware server before putting other servers up so I NLB'ed isweb4 (the VM) with a physical server isweb1. I used to have isweb1 and isweb2 NLB'ed, but I removed isweb2 and added isweb4.

I have two NIC's in isweb1 and two in isweb2 - one used for NLB and the other for external traffic. On the VM setup on isweb2 I setup two separate bridges - one for each NIC. I use the NICs in the same manner on isweb4 -- the isweb2 external is the isweb4 external; the one that used to be for NLB on isweb2 is used for NLB on isweb4.

Today a program I use to monitor the servers told me it could not ping isweb4. I found this in the system event:

(from isweb1)
Event Type: Information
Event Source: WLBS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 69
Date: 8/25/2006
Time: 5:39:22 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ISWEB1
Description:
NLB Cluster 10.3.1.97 : Initiating convergence on host 1. Reason: Host 2 is leaving the cluster.

---- from Isweb4 -----

Event Type: Information
Event Source: WLBS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 65
Date: 8/25/2006
Time: 5:39:18 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ISWEB4
Description:
NLB Cluster 10.3.1.97 : Initiating convergence on host 2. Reason: Host 1 is converging for an unknown reason.

Not sure what to look for -- are there different NIC drivers that can be used? Any other settings I should check?

Why would VMware shutdown my vm?

Rumple — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 05:04:55 GMT

now you tell me...

VM Crash

boydd — Fri, 12 May 2006 14:19:38 GMT

Run vm-support - open an SR with VMware and upload the output from the script.

DB

Shared memory killing app?

dsanders — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:31:34 GMT

I would check to see if there is any swapping occuring while you reboot. That would have the most noticiable impact on performance.

It sounds like you are over committng your RAM, but the page sharing is able to free up enough memory so that is not a problem most of the time. However, when you reboot a server it has to "touch" all of its RAM and it takes a while for it share all of the pages again.

So my initial thought is that by rebooting the virtual machine you causing ESX to need to swap memory. Log into the MUI and look click on the the memory tab and see how much swapping is occuring.

virtual server NIC running at 10 mbps

jaygriffin — Thu, 04 May 2006 14:50:33 GMT

Just got a call from VMware support. He pointed out that the VMX driver is a more high performance driver.