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Changing the IP address of service console in ESX 3.x Written by Damian Murdoch Friday, 15 December 2006 If you want to change the IP address of the service console in ESX 3.x you can using a command in the service console. Read on for more. To change the IP address of the ESX 3.x host, you need to change the configuration of the vswif. By default this is vswif0 and this is assumed in this document. Login to the service console with root permissions, either by using root or doing a su - to get the permissions. Once in the service console runt the command "esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0". This command deletes the existing vswif0. Don't worry if you get a message about nothing to flush. Then you need to run the command to change the ip address, subnet mask and broadcast address. They are also specified in that order when the command is given. An example command is below. "esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p Service\ Console -i 10.1.1.1 -n 255.255.255.0 -b 10.1.1.255" In this command the -a switch is to add a vswif, the \ in the Service\ Console is deliberate, the -i is the ip address, the -n is the netmask and the -b is the broadcast address. You now need to change your default gateway, you can do this by editing the network file located at /etc/sysconfig/network. To do this at the command prompt, follow the steps below. "cd /etc/sysconfig" "vi network" Then while in vi, go to the location of the default gateway using the arrow keys. Hit "i" which will perform an insert and change the default gateway to your liking. Hit the escape key twice to exit insert mode. type ":wq!" to write (i.e save) and quit. At this point you can run some commands to restart the vmware management, but I prefer to restart the server and will recommend you do that. Once the server comes up there are a few things that still need to be done for management in virtualcenter. Open a remote console to your virtualcenter server, do a ping <yourESXhostname> to make sure the ESX host is pingable after the IP change. Make sure you are seeing the new IP address and it is assumed you have already changed that in DNS. If you are seeing the host correctly, open virtualcenter and disconnect then reconnect the host. Once the host is connected in virtualcenter we need to change a few bits of configuration information, namely the vmkernel ip address, subnet and gateway. This is so we can vmotion correctly. Click on your host and bring up the configuration tab. Select networking and then properties on the vitual switch. Select your vmkernel and hit the edit button. Change your ip address here for vmotion and subnet mask. You will not be able to change the default gateway until you hit ok and go back in. Once you have selected ok, then hit edit again on the vmkernel. Select the edit button on the default gateway and change the default gateway on the menu that appears. Select ok, ok again and then close. Please note all the commands in this document should be used without the "". Edit the /etc/hosts file to change to ip adress.

Please see my Nov13th post on split brain. I ended up with a split brain environment due to the way the paths failed over and my replication link breaking. Please spend time investigatng your own set up and make sure you have your paths correct between the esx servers and the sans when you either power down your servers, have a failure or have a power outage. It is very important that you check these paths when something happens to your infrastrcuture. Make sure they are pointing where you want them to point to. A while back after setting up 2 vmware esx3 servers and 2 sanmelody servers at work to run in high availability I decided to write up a document for everyone to help them with similar set ups. What became obvious to me when setting it up is that this is the sort of infrastructure that every smb would love but there were grey areas where datacore and vmware didnt go into and it was hard to ascertain the steps forward. Hence I put together the document. why is it such a good combo? The reason is that not only can you vmotion vm's but you can essentially have sanmotion. In vmware terms all this means is being able to switch the iscsi hba path to another san(the partner of the san server). You can then take down the other san without any interuption (wow all this for around 30k!) There will undoubtably be errors though i think it will help alot of people rather than hinder. Eventually with your help we should be able to get it perfect. There is also a lot of other parts to the docuemnt like how to set up esxpress free and how to ssh (and set it up) in a vmware environment. ALso I have set up my infrastructure with two big ups's and using the apc powerchute software, plink and batchfiles I have managed to write automated scripts for shutting down the sans gracefully. If it is only one site that goes down my script will reregister the vms and restart them on the other host (even though this is what vmwares ha is supposed to do, my script does it as well but I am hoping that one day there will be a cmmand for vmotion so that i can edit the batch files). One thing I realised is that in my set up I have to control the shutdown of the ssanmelody servers in particular ways so as to protect the vms and esx servers and sanmelody disks. But my method is not pretty. It uses ssh on the esx servers and flag files. I have written the docuement if any wants it.

Working on a new deployment tool for mass deploying workstations to support our VDI environment, here is a preview screenshot. Now i need to figure out a way to pull the total diskspace needed for the template (disk + swap), then the plan is to develop a smart datastore selection function. At first this would just be the datastore with the most amount of space available, easy enough. This function would be called each time that a clone job is started. Another thing on the list is to create a queueing system outside of VC since i dont want to kick off 10 deployments at once and drop VC to its knees.

Is a real Pain in the @$$. Wishlist: 1) VMWare to make it easier to update HTTP/NFS/FTP repositories. 2) VMWare to have a easy to download list of all their patches 3) Why can't VMWare host their updates and write something to retrieve them like Aptitude does? "apt-get update"

On my way home for the first time in about 45 days. It's been a long trip to Asia-pac, but a very fruitful one indeed. Overall, the entire region is very poised for rapid growth over the next 6 - 12 months in the virtualization space. While I was abroad I ran throught the VMware road shows in Australia and also swang through New Zealand, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Overall, adoption has been one of mixed results in my view, but as larger companies are now moving out of test/dev and into production I would expect to see a huge push towards data center migrations into VMware, as well as a big push for DR. Been on a plane for 74,000 miles in the last 45 days, an average of 1666 miles a day of travels. Been in an airplane/airport today for about 20 hours again. Time to run off to my real home for a week before heading out to Chicago next week and then off to China/Taiwan/Japan/Hong Kong/Australia. Kix

Ok, this is my first crack at Blogging, so here goes. I am in the process of setting up a sandbox environment to replicate our production website for our internal developers to test against in Lab Manger. The workspace consists of the following systems: Domain Controller Accounting DB Server (SQL 2000 SP4) Commerce DB Server (SQL 2000 SP4) CMS DB Server (SQL 2005) Web Server(MS Commerce Server) I most of the setup completed, copies of the production DB's restored to my test systems, my CMS system up and running and i start going through testing the various aspects of the Web Site make sure every thing is working correctly. The web site is coming up as expected, i start to test the commerce piece, on line ordering etc. And i start to go through the purchase process and test the various payment methods. After A day i get the Credit Card's working and so this morning when i get in i start testing PO's Wire transfers Check's etc. To find out that it hangs up every time. I go back and check my MSDTC setting under component services to make sure that i have the correct security set, because we have run into problems in the past with that. I made a few adjustments and tried again, still did not work so i tried rebooting all the machines and that still did not work. I go back and run my DTC ping from the web server back to all my DB Servers to make sure everthing is talking correctly. Sure enough i connect to every server successfully. Try the web site again and sure enough it was broken. I finally try from the DB Servers back to the web server and i get the following information in the MSDTC Log File: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DTCping 1.9 Report for WebServer ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ RPC server is ready WARNING:the CID values for both test machines are the same while this problem won't stop DTCping test, MSDTC will fail for this 10-12, 11:02:20.443-->RPC server:WebServer received following information: Network Name: WebServer Source Port: 1221 Partner LOG: SQL2000A.log Partner CID: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX So after spending some time googling the error i came up with this post that matched the systems i was seeing: bq. In regards to your question on SaveAsOrder, "During the checkout phase of a Commerce Server 2002 Web site, a Microsoft Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) transaction is used to save the order to the database. This operation is performed by an MSDTC transaction that uses remote procedure call (RPC) communications to connect to the Commerce database to save the orderform." For the complete article information that applies Windows 2000, see kb article Q820987 BUG: Hotfix Q331953 breaks MSDTC functionality for Commerce Server 2000 . The other Commerce Features do not use transactions. With that MSDTC must be working without any errors for SaveAsOrder to work. Now in regards to the error you get using DTCPING, "the CID values for both test machines are the same". This is where it gets tricky. For two reasons, MSDTC is supported by a different group and I know the basics of how MSDTC must work in order for Commerce Server to work properly. Second, I am not sure I understand what you mean by all the machines are on the same cluster. Do you mean same network but different machines? One web server and one database server. As kb article Q306842 mentions "If DTCPing returns an error message similar to the following: * Unexpected: My session guid is same as partner's guid* * check whether the current server has been duplicated or cloned from the* * other server. If so, locate the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CID key in the registry.* Under this key, you may notice more than one GUID. Locate the GUID whose underlying Description key is MSDTC. Note that this GUID is also listed in the DTCPing output window. If the other server has a GUID that is exactly the same for MS DTC in its registry, you must create a new GUID for MS DTC in one of the registries. You can use GuidGen to do this. After you add this new GUID, and also all of its underlying keys to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CID, make sure to delete the old GUID that it is replacing. So in order to try and fix the problem, i did the following: Backuped the Registry on My Web Server Generated a new guid from replaced all instances of the duplicate guid on my web server with the new one. I did not do the SQL server's because i did not want to take the chance of breaking SQL Rebooted the servers Tested the process and what do you know every Thing works just they way it is suppose to. So that leads to this question: When building a configuration in Lab Manager and using the the same template for multiple machines, am i going to see MSDTC errors on future deployments or was this an isolated instance?

Well its Thursday and havent really touched ESX today. Maybe tomorrow. Been dealing with a company that claimed they could support VMWare and then found out to our dissapointment that they can't. All I can say is only ever use a VAC partner or VM direst for your VM conultancy needs. Really boring day today. Supposed to be going out for curry later with work but at this rate I'll be asleep within the hours......z...z.z.....z.z.zz.z..zz.zz..zzzzzzz...zzzzzzz.zzzzzzzzzzzzz.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ok so this is my first blog. Not really much to report vmware wise other than the rapid reponses to my posts so far. One really quick response to simple question and 2 really quick usefull replies to latest question. Thats all today. Oh and I worked out why my VLAN failed on my latest ESX 3.0.1 server. I didnt read the white paper on 802.1q from vmware before I tried using it. tcsh.....what a numpty. :smileymischief:

As an operating system enthousiast, one cat not have too many machines. Fortunately, in 1999 I got to understand about a company VMware that had a product that would allow me to run Windows 98 on top of my Linux OS. Stemming from a Unix background, I decided to run Linux on my laptop, however back in 1999 I still needed my Word and other office programs to interact with my customers. Until I got my hands on VMware, I managed to dual-boot my laptop with Linux and Windows. Life got a lot easier however when VMware came around the corner. Now, many years and a lot of product releases later, I still work with VMware on my laptop. I have moved from a "Windows PC" to a MacBook Pro and from Linux to MacOS X. However, the need to run Windows occasionally still exists. I now use VMware Fusion and am a total fan of it. In work as well as for personal use, Windows is still hard to live without ( see also http://www.erikmeinders.nl/Living_without_Windows ). Professionally, I am a VMware Certified Professional as well as VMware Certified Instructor on the VI3 platform. I will use this blog to interact with the community about my experiences with several VMware products.

When I first heard about ESXi I thought : that sounds very familiar. Go to a box, inject your boot-media and turn it into a VM-player without installing anything. Forget about the host. In a way ESX relates to ESXi like Workstation to my MOA-project (Workstation from a LiveCD) Here is a short comparison: ESXi WSi hardware support very limited ok - drivers can be added easily boot-time ? 3 min boot-media USB-stick, ? USB-stick, CD, PXE, local disk OS ESX Windows filesystem for VMs vmfs fat32, ntfs, ext2 local display no yes smp yes yes max RAM ? 3 - 4 Gb remote access ssh ?, virtual Center ssh, cifs, vnc sound for VMs no possible USB for VMs no possible IDE-disks for VMs no yes WLAN ? possible VMs on USB no yes VMs on encrypted disks no yes runs on notebooks no yes got to read more about ESXi to fill the blanks in the table Ulli