VMware Communities : Thread List - Richmond Area VMware User Group

Vmware Home Lab

ralphferro — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:42:34 GMT

I am new to working with Vmware. I want to install it on a non-production learning computer. What are the minmum requirements.

Do I need a dual-processor motherboard?

How do I change my registration information?

hstagner — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:15:57 GMT

Hello All,

Does anyone know how I can change my registration information for the VMUG's? The single-click registration has my old details. I would like to fill in my new employer details. Thank you.

Link aggregation, LACP, and Etherchannel

fr0gger03 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:12:30 GMT

I would like to clear up some misconceptions surrounding link aggregation and ESX. One of my colleagues, Dan Whitman, wrote up this very nice summary of our stance regarding link aggregation. Hooray for Dan! Seriously, thanks Dan for the clear and concise summary.

Unfortunately, we don't document this very well but we do in fact support 802.3ad in specific configurations. We have to be careful when we refer to LACP generically because there are two modes which can be employed: Static and Dynamic and both are in the 802.3ad IEEE standard. While the whole premise of the LACP standard is to enable dynamic "routing" of Layer 2 traffic, there is a facility built into the standard to allow the forcing of static paths. Interestingly enough, the little documentation we have says that while we support 802.3ad, we do not support LACP. The appropriate statement should be that ESX doesn't support the dynamic aspect of the standard but does support static mode in the 802.3ad specification.

I have worked through this conundrum with several customers and the configuration below has been proven to work in single switch and multi-switch environments. Note that while spanning-tree is not needed simply because there is no way to link vSwitches together (without doing extreme networking in the VMs), enabling spanning-tree is the only way I've been able to find that allows the enablement of portfast which trims off 30secs of downtime during port failovers.

At the end of the day, ESX 3.x does support 802.3ad and LACP in STATIC configurations. Below are the configurations of both the Cisco switch (6500 in this case) and peer vSwitch in ESX to support Link Aggregation Control Protocol (802.3ad) and port trunking/grouping (Cisco Fast EtherChannel - FEC).

Supporting links

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

Cisco switch example commands to group 2 physical ports in 1 trunk group

interface Port-channel10

description ESX Server 1

switchport

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport mode trunk

spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet3/1

description ESX Server 1 NIC vmnic0

speed 1000

duplex full

switchport

switchport mode trunk

spanning-tree portfast trunk

channel-group 10 mode on

interface GigabitEthernet3/2

description ESX Server 1 NIC vmnic1

speed 1000

duplex full

switchport

switchport mode trunk

spanning-tree portfast trunk

channel-group 10 mode on

vSwitch example screenshot showing the necessary configuration to accommodate the Cisco port configuration above

dan whitman - system engineer - air force team - vmware

Training - Richmond, VA

media_gen — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:04:05 GMT

Does anyone know of any local folks that are certified VMware instructors? We are considering sending a few folks away for training and are weighing the possibility of bringing someone in to teach a training class.

Real-World VDI Experience

fr0gger03 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:22:25 GMT

At our most recent Richmond VMUG meeting, we had an excellent presentation from Mike Wells of NTelos, where he shared his company's experiences virtualizing over 400 XP desktops for their call centers. Mike was kind enough to share his presentation, and I am posting a PDF of it here with his permission.

For anyone considering virtualized desktops, I would recommend downloading a copy of this presentation and reading through it for some excellent lessons-learned.

How to join the Richmond User Group?

anaghavartak — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:20:56 GMT

Hi all,

I am local to Richmond and am interested in becoming a part of the Richmond VMware user group. Where and how do I join/register for the group?

My apologies if I have posted this in the wrong section.

Thanks!

Finally got my VCP!

hstagner — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:41:46 GMT

Hello All,

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I finally got my VCP on VI3. Passed the test last Monday with a 93! Reading the extra material from VMware (Resource Guides, Configuration Guides, etc.) and seeing the many awesome tips in the community really helped.

Thank you to all of you who are active members of the VMware Community.

Regards,

Harley

ESX 3i vs 3.x

kchan@landam.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:45:01 GMT

I have been managing 30 ESX (mix of 2.x and 3.x) for 2+ years and I have been keeping myself from moving forward to ESX 3i because of my liking of the Linux console in 3.x that allows me to script some tasks during install and for maintenance. However, I found out that I can actually modify all my scripts to run from the remote CLI. Now I am interested in knowing all the benefits, advantages that 3i has over 3.x specially in performance and stability. Thanks in advance for any inputs.

Kevin

User Group Meeting - June 26th

Kristyn — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:25:04 GMT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Richmond Area VMware User Group Invitation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please join us for the upcoming Richmond Area VMware User Group meeting on Thursday, June 26, 2008.

Please join an innovative group of VMware users at Byrd Theater to network, share ideas and learn how to get the most out of your VMware solutions.

This is a great opportunity to meet with your Richmond Area based peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices and the latest technology.

Date: June 26, 2008
Time: 2:00pm - 5:00pm

Location: Byrd Theater
2908 W Cary St
Richmond, VA 23221

Directions: http://tinyurl.com/5lctod

To register: http://www.vmware.com/resources/communities/usergroup/events.html

Agenda

2:00pm - Register and Networking
2:30pm - Introduction
2:40pm - Peak 10 Presentation: Replication between two Peak 10 sites using Site Recovery Manager & some additional services, products, and capabilities specific to Peak 10
3:40pm - Break and Networking
4:00pm - Customer Presentation - TBD
4:30pm - Upcoming VMware capabilities and open Q&A with Tom Twyman
4:50pm - Wrap-up
5:00pm - Depart

For more information, please contact: vmugteam@vmware.com

Sponsored by Peak 10

Real time performance and capacity management using agent-less self-learning technology

AJRC — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:23:30 GMT

Organizations leveraging virtualization often struggle to answer questions such as:

What impact is any particular VM having on the performance of the host, or other VM's?
Where is the root cause of any perceived performance issue?
Can "badly-behaving" VMs be readily identified?
How do I correlate performance end-to-end across my physical and virtual infrastructures?

Netuitive's agent-less software is the only self-learning, real time, performance analysis solution that integrates directly into VirtualCenter. We won "Best of VMWorld" finalist award last year for our ability to fully automate performance and capacity management in large environments where rule-based approaches are humanly impossible. In a nutshell, we provide the proactive management capability that allows you to manage production VMware deployments and critical applications with confidence.

Traditional systems management tools or manual approaches are unsuited to handle virtualization due to the increased complexity and interdependencies. Only Netuitive's self-learning technology using real-time analysis and statistical correlation provides benefits such as:

Automated and dynamic baselining and thresholding, without rules or scripts
Real-time performance management across the virtual infrastructure (and the physical as well, if required)
Real-time workload reporting for host and VM's
Statistical correlation of IT, Quality of Service, and Business data
Forecast performance issues up to 2 hours in advance of becoming an incident
Immediately pinpoint root cause of performance issues
Identify "badly-behaving" VM's
Proactively manage system health, end-to-end

To learn more, please contact Andrew Carter, ~~mailto:acarter@netuitive.com~~, 703 609 3215, or visit www.netuitive.com

VM Server Console : Using the MMC tool in WINXP Virtual Machine

Cedricopsmgr — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:02:38 GMT

My question is related to add/remove snap in tool , I trying to add users/group from the WIN2000 pro on my virtual network and keep getting the error message access is denied now of course Im logged as adminstrator on this OS so why am I not able to access this tool ?

Advanced Settings

bycristian — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:47:40 GMT

Please, anybody help-me...

I need a documentation about "Advanced Settings ESX Server", Could you please help me?

Thanks in advance!

bycristian

Lessons learned - Antivirus in your vms...

fr0gger03 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:14:50 GMT

This is an anecdote from a colleague of mine - lesson - NEVER believe that nothing is happening in a guest OS. J

"I had a similar experience earlier this year in a 2.5 environment, and I'm sure it would have occurred in 3.x as well. We had production vm-guest machines dropping dead from I/O timeouts in Windows, and this MUST be a VMware problem.

The server admin was ABSOLUTELY convinced that nothing was running in the guests at 3am, so we spent weeks working with EMC to capture data on the SAN. After weeks of frustration, I started troubleshooting as if this was a physical server so that I could blame ESX as well. I had the customer run a perfmon report on some random guest machines during the same peak for a couple of days so that we could get a view on the problem from a different angle.

After weeks of chasing this phantom that MUST be a VMware problem, the ‘problem' turned out to be that their anti-virus definitions were scheduled to update at 3am on all of their guest machines. The server admin was using their ‘standard build', which couldn't possibly be doing anything at 3am.

Interestingly, after we changed the antivirus definition update setting, there was still a significant spike during the 3 to 4am period. And, again, this must be a VMware problem. Again, perfmon to the rescue!! The customer was also running their backups at that time with Netbackup, and this was installed by default in their ‘standard' image that does nothing at 3am.

So, there were two lessons learned;

* This customer had been adding virtual machines over time, and eventually the spikes that did not overlap when Physical servers had Local storage, crept up and bit them in the virtual world. The customer was not changing the processes that were successful in a physical world, and we were not advising them to do so.

* The separation of responsibilities at the account had everyone convinced that NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE GUESTS AT 3AM. The only connection between the team that builds the Windows OS images, the Storage team, and the ESX admin team at the account was me. "

Happy computing!

Tom Twyman

Sr. Systems Engineer

VMware, Inc. - Southern VA

vMotion - how's it do that?

fr0gger03 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:10:29 GMT

One of the most common questions I get from customers goes something like this - How can we guarantee consistency of our data and ensure we are capturing all transactions during a vMotion event, especially for a high-throughput app.?

The answer, of course, lies in how ESX and Virtual Center execute the transaction, and in the understanding that when a vMotion event occurs, CPU instructions are not being mirrored or moved or shunted to the new system in any way. We are simply performing a copy of the data held in memory and the

# How can we guarantee consistency of the db and ensure we are capturing all transactions during a vMotion event, especially for a high-throughput app.?

When an administrator issues a vMotion command, ESX and Virtual Center do the following:
Provision new VM on target host.
Provision new VM on target host
Precopy memory from source to target, with ongoing memory changes logged in a memory bitmap
Quiesce VM on the source host and copy memory bitmap to target host
Start VM on target host
"Demand page" the source VM when applications attempt to read/write modified memory
Note - The new VM comes up before ALL the memory is copied over. We can do this, because once the initial copy has taken place, subsequent changes to the app touch only a fraction of all the memory pages.
"Background page" the source VM until all memory has been successfully copied
Delete VM from source host

*Ar**e there in fact situations in which we can't vMotion because there are too many transactions?*
1. Theoretically, we agree there may be applications that just move too fast for vMotion to keep up with, and therefore ESX may never actually finish the memory copy from one ESX server to the other. Matt and I both agree, however, that this is extremely rare, and we ought to be able to architect around it. If you are seeing this to be the case, Mike, we should examine the situation in detail to make sure the implemented solution matches the business goals.
Can I use vMotion with instances of RAC that are clustered?
1. Absolutely you can vMotion an instance of a clustered Oracle database - there is nothing inherent in the design of the application that would prevent this.
Does all of this apply to SQL as well (as far as you know)?
1. There are of course, many differences in the manner in which Microsoft and Oracle have implemented clustering, and there are therefore some considerations regarding design, implementation and support, but in general the same discussion applies, yes.

So there are a couple of take-aways from this -

The original vm is used for a brief period of time to grab memory pages (if necessary) that haven't yet been copied over.
The copy progress continues in the background while the new vm is up and running.
We are not touching the data - we only copy the active memory pages from one VM to another. This is significant, for as Matt will tell you, Oracle consistency doesn't depend on what is in memory, but the logs on the disk, which don't move during a vMotion event. Therefore:
- if the transaction completes, it will be on disk. Case closed.
- If, in the very rare event there is actually a transaction sitting in memory that hasn't been flushed to disk, the memory bitmap will refer us to the source vm for that page/set of pages.

Long story short, it works. If any of you are in fact seeing you have some databases that you haven't been able to vMotion, I would be very interested to know more about that vm and the ESX host systems it is running on. Where are we seeing the traffic? Disk I/O? Network I/O? What caused the timeout? You get my drift.

Thanks, and happy computing!

Tom Twyman

Sr. Systems Engineer

VMware, Inc. - Southern VA

vMotion Compatibility

fr0gger03 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:58:29 GMT

Vmotion compatibility for:

Intel CPU - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1991

AMD CPU - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1992

Overriding Masks - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1993

2008 Q1 Richmond VMUG topics

Jeff Tharp — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:56:20 GMT

Hello VMUG participants. Michael and I are kicking around possible topics for our next VMUG meeting and want to get some input before our next meeting. So far some potential topics are:

the four disciplines of application deployment (Virtual Desktop)
NFS vs. ISCSI vs. Fiber
Disaster Recovery

Any other topics? I would like to gather ideas in this discussion, then post a vote. Majority rules for our next VMUG topic.

Thanks all!

Jeff Tharp

jeff.tharp@gmail.com

540.455.1840

VMDK Mount utilities

rdufour — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:20:55 GMT

Did anyone catch the names of the utilities used to mount a vmdk file? I know it was done with the NetApp using loopback mount. I was told other utilities can do this from a windows system?

VMUG meeting???

extensivegroup — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:39:36 GMT

I got an email with the attachment.

When was the meeting? Where? How do I somehow get the notes but no invite?

--
Erik Grotz
Extensive Consulting Group, Inc.

08-03-04 Richmond VMUG Presentation

sjwray — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:18:53 GMT

All,

I have posted all of the presentation information in the documents section of the portal. Let me know if you have any questions.

Dell IT Assistant and VirtualCenter Integration?

scottmillerinva — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:26:43 GMT

Just checking to see if anyone has fooled around with the Dell IT Assistant and its VirtualCenter integration. I'd be interested in peoples experience so far.

lost data

rookie123 — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 09:13:53 GMT

Can any one help? I have a new 24 in IMAC with VMWARE fusion with Windows XP and various windows software and data. All gets saved via Time machine , I thought !
My chain of disasters ! I connected my new phone via bluetooth but then lost my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse only in Windows but not in Mac partition. I was advised to restore Leopard OS as bootcamp drivers were corrupted so I did. No joy! Then I thought I will re install VM Fusion, but then windows did not load as it produced "unable to connect peer ... something error" I do not know how but some how I managed to delete some thing and hey presto I had windows running again but data I have is from when I originally installed windows in Sept when I brought new mac. I seem to have lost windows data for last few months that I cannot find. I tried restoring from Time machine and even restored all MacHD but still cannot find the data. Any ideas where the elusive data may be? I have some backup but not all Please help BOB

VMUG Forum how-to Webinar

Jeff Tharp — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:50:47 GMT

Who is interested in a how-to webinar on the VMUG forum site? If there is reasonable interest I will get VMWare to schedule one for us.

Thanks,

Jeff