rpayne1322's Posts

I've been having pretty much every issue mentioned in sevearl of the VDR threads.... Sounds like 2.0 might be better, but i'm not sure when that will be out yet. Anyway, kdc, you mention ... See more...
I've been having pretty much every issue mentioned in sevearl of the VDR threads.... Sounds like 2.0 might be better, but i'm not sure when that will be out yet. Anyway, kdc, you mention deleting the "Changes tracking file" in the VM folder and your problem of one particular VM backup hanging went away. I have the same issue with just one of my VM's right now. Would that be the 'vm_name'-ctk file?? Going to look into esXpress 3.6 possibly, or maybe Acronis. Anyone have an opinon on either of those solutions? Thanks
Hello all, I'm having an issue with VDR (1.1.0.707 Build 207380) where it backs up all or our VM's (only talking about 6 at this point) with out any problems except for one. This particul... See more...
Hello all, I'm having an issue with VDR (1.1.0.707 Build 207380) where it backs up all or our VM's (only talking about 6 at this point) with out any problems except for one. This particular VM backup gets to around 33-66% (varies) and stays there. Status Message is "Copying 'vm_name'" I've left it in this state for a couple of days at one point, but it doesnt' progress any further. The other VM's will still kick off as scheduled and run while this one is still hung. We are running IBM Blade center with ds3200 SAS storage. I can not seem to find any logs or event messages telling me what is going on. I tried using the 'Stop' link for the job, but after 4 hrs of that doing nothing either, i've been having to shutdown the VDR appliance - restart - let the snap shot roll back, then re-start the job. That worked for a several weeks, the VM in question would backup ok on the next try, sometimes even twice or three times in a row.. but would always hang up again. However - Now i've been un-successfull for four days trying to get it to backup. The other VM's are still backing up ok. My datastore is currently a mapped network share to my vCenter4 server (waiting on another ds3200 to create a vmdk datastore on the appliance itself). As we are just starting our road down the Virtulization path, I have a lot to learn yet, and we've had the luxury of all of our VM's being in the beta stage, but three of them will be going into production next month, and of course one of those is the problem VM. Any ideas on where I could possibly track down a log of what is happening? I have to say, so far i'm not to impressed with VDR other then the de-duplication. Besides the problem i've mentioned, i've seen many other wierd quirks since installing it and running backups. What is everyone elses opinion of VDR? Unfortunately our budget is not the greatest this year, but should I be looking into other solutions? I tested the Acronis product briefly but it seemed pretty robust, and the appliance used Quite a bit less system resources on the ESX host. Thank you for any ideas you can pass along! Have a great day, -Rick Anyway to move this post to the backup and recovery discussion area? -- I should of created it there, sorry. Message was edited by: rpayne1322
Not what I would consider the best, or fastest, method.. but if you had the extra hardware at your new location you could use backupexec to restore the tape to a new physical server, then use t... See more...
Not what I would consider the best, or fastest, method.. but if you had the extra hardware at your new location you could use backupexec to restore the tape to a new physical server, then use the vCenter Converter at that point once you are on your LAN. Veeam would be a quicker, and less hassle, solution. -RP
I see this is a several months old now, but I also am curious what your resolution was as I am having the same problem. Any help you could pass along would be greatly appreciated! Thank... See more...
I see this is a several months old now, but I also am curious what your resolution was as I am having the same problem. Any help you could pass along would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Have any Luck seeing your LUN's now?
Thank you to both for your quick responses. I have another license for a Windows guest, but unfortunately I do not have another datastore I could store another VM on Currently Due to the pro... See more...
Thank you to both for your quick responses. I have another license for a Windows guest, but unfortunately I do not have another datastore I could store another VM on Currently Due to the project not really being correctly configured from the start, I'm pushing our current DS3200 LUNS / datastores past the point I should be already to leave enough room for VMware files, snapshots, etc. Unless I create the new VM on the internal disks on one of the blades? The other blades couldn't see them as shared storage of course.. but would that matter in the short term? Or, I can try and configure vCenter Server on one of my workgroup servers and point the DB back to one of my SQL servers in a domain. About the only two options I have at the moment, I believe anyway. Not exactly the correct forum for the question, but since I've already brought it up, when we add another DS3200 in the future, I should be able extend my current Datastores by creating and adding the new LUNS to current system, correct? Will this only add space to the guest side or also to the VM side as well? Sorry for what might be a silly question.. Working on a project this size with no VM experience has been interesting. If it will not be possible to add more storage to the VM reserved area later, I might need to scrap one of the VM's for now and re-build the current Array. Rp
Has anyone had any problems installing vCenter Server on a machine running a web server (IIS)? Documentation advises the use of a dedicated machine, and one not running a web server. During... See more...
Has anyone had any problems installing vCenter Server on a machine running a web server (IIS)? Documentation advises the use of a dedicated machine, and one not running a web server. During setup you get the warrning that vCenter detected the web server running, vCenter Server uses common web service ports for communication, so to avoid resource conflicts, use a dedicated machine. Are we talking about slowness only or is it possible to interrupt IIS functionality totally on that machine if I proceed with the install? The machine in question really doesn't have hardly any IIS traffic.. and we don't really have a dedicated machine that ISN't running IIS at the moment. Well, I do, but its not in a domain group, the documentation says it needs to be. Can it run on a workgroup server though? I would like to eventually install vCenter Server on a Guest system running on our ESX 4.0 host, but I am currently out of storage hardware to create another VM atm. Thanks, RP
I had to update my SAS connectivity Module to 03.5A to see my storage properly, using LSI CIOv card. I also had to update firmware on AMM and some other modules also if you haven't checked all... See more...
I had to update my SAS connectivity Module to 03.5A to see my storage properly, using LSI CIOv card. I also had to update firmware on AMM and some other modules also if you haven't checked all of those, and I believe on the DS3200 firmware to version 07.35.41.02. You might not have the exact same hardware configuration of course, but firmware could be the place to start. If you think you are all set on firmware, Inside vSphere Client, you might have to go to the configuration tab of the server, then Storage Adapters from the list on the left, and then click "Rescan" Then click on Storage on the left box, and click "Add Storage" in the upper right and see if your LUN's show up. Hope this helps, RP
Great, thanks. That one had me worried for a minute, for now we are only licensed for 6 from VMware, but we are covered for our 3 Blades then till we add on others.
I figured that was going to be the Key, having all of the physical servers be able to see the same storage. I'm scrapping the idea of using the internals for anything other than booting ESX and ... See more...
I figured that was going to be the Key, having all of the physical servers be able to see the same storage. I'm scrapping the idea of using the internals for anything other than booting ESX and we'll have to just make do with what we have for space now, and add more later! Everything posted has been very helpful, thank you for helping out this novice. I was a little overwhelmed at first but I'm looking forward to learning more about this setup and contributing here in the future!
Thanks K, I didn't think it would be a good idea to have the datastore on the Internals.. I'd like everything on the ds3200, but the specs for this project pretty much have that whole device... See more...
Thanks K, I didn't think it would be a good idea to have the datastore on the Internals.. I'd like everything on the ds3200, but the specs for this project pretty much have that whole device used up I -think- what I will do is use Thin provisioning for now and leave plenty of overheard on each datastore, and get them VM's up and running for testing. The spec called for 36 GB for the Win OS and SQL install, but I could lower that one by a bit. We had planned on another Ds3200 eventually for other projects.. I could always carve more room out of that to add to these VM's later I would imagine. Thanks to you both for your quick and helpful responses. -RP
Very helpful information, thank you. To clarify - Does VMware classify a 'CPU' as one core on the processor? We have two quad core processors on each blade, so in essence I have 8 CPU's per... See more...
Very helpful information, thank you. To clarify - Does VMware classify a 'CPU' as one core on the processor? We have two quad core processors on each blade, so in essence I have 8 CPU's per blade according to VMware? Initially I was using 4 vCPU's per VM but I'll drop that down to two.. and lower the memory quite a bit, probably 4 GB
I'll probably have to look into the Licensing issue yet, but I do know that management wants the ability for migration incase of host failure. So, I can choose Thin then on creation and not ... See more...
I'll probably have to look into the Licensing issue yet, but I do know that management wants the ability for migration incase of host failure. So, I can choose Thin then on creation and not worry about FT it looks like, as we will not be having a live secondary machine. It could always be converted to thick later if need be.. I guess it might boil down to the one question though, if I make the VM datastore on the Internal drives, will VM migration to other hosts be available if all drives are on the shared storage? My guess is no.. it looks like trying to install windows on the Shared LUN still has to write some data to the 8 GB datastore I created on the internal drives to the Blade.
We have 36 GB on the Blade, during this VM creation I picked 16 GB. Thank you for that tip! I remember reading about the swap file but I don't recall it mentioning the size requirements based o... See more...
We have 36 GB on the Blade, during this VM creation I picked 16 GB. Thank you for that tip! I remember reading about the swap file but I don't recall it mentioning the size requirements based on memory, but I might of missed that. Starting to sound like our IBM resellers really didn't look over the project specs when selling us these drives.. I'm not looking forward to requesting another DS3200. -RP
Hi, I've just started at this shop and I am completely new to VMware, and, Blade configurations. We are running HS22's Blades and have a DS3200 for our SAS storage. I've install... See more...
Hi, I've just started at this shop and I am completely new to VMware, and, Blade configurations. We are running HS22's Blades and have a DS3200 for our SAS storage. I've installed ESX 4.0 on the blades. We added the two 73 GB of internal drives (Mirrored) to the blades for ESX install to boot from because at this time it is not supported on the DS3200. I'm trying to get the guest operating system installed (Windows server 2003 ENT), but when I create the new Virtual machine and map the LUN we are planning to use for the OS / SQL disk, it says I have available 135.5 GB. I'm not sure how much overheard VMware needs for its files though on the datastore.. I tried to make the datastore size 132 GB, but the VM would not start with the error "Insufficient disk space on datastore" I tried 130 (leaving 5.45 GB free), and had the same problem again. Is there a rule of thumb for how much space to leave on the LUN for VMware overhead? I read on a post here 20%? If that is the case we will probably have to order more drives in order to meet the space requirement configuration for the project we are working on. On this particular LUN they want two 36 GB Partitions and one 73 GB partition, and we are mirroring two 146 GB drives, after the Array creation (RAID 1) of the two 146 GB drives we only have 136.23, then down to 135.5 after VMware provisioned 500 some odd MB when adding the storage device to the System. Unfortunately, the project already has the 12 drive slots filled for the creation of the three VM's, so we would have to buy another DS3200 to add-on. As I said, I'm completely new at this though..Maybe I'm creating the VM wrong? We have some training material on the way.. but this project is behind already. During the creation process, for the location of the datastore I'm using the LUN on the DS3200, I enter Datastore size of 130 GB (Available space says 135.5), and I click the radial for Support clustering features (FT). I was under the impression that this was needed in order for VMotion to be able to migrate VM's as needed? I do not have our vCenter Server running yet, waiting on some hardware to come in a couple days... not sure if having that up would help some of this setup or not? When I mapped the storage to the system in vSphere client I used the option of 256 GB max file size, and 1 MB block size, and leave the radial for maximize capacity clicked. None of our LUNs are over 146 GB. When creating the VM, can I use the Internal disk to the blade to store the VM files, and then just map the SAS storage to the VM and install windows on those? But if I do that... will vCenter server be able to migrate the VM off of that host onto another blade? If so then this really isn't an issue. I'm a little worried even if I pick 125 or 120 GB size for the datastore and it works to get the system up and running, is there really enough space for VMware files even though the system IS running now. I ask this because while I was waiting for some more hardware to come in on the blades, I did a test install and VM setup, using Thin format that time on the datastore. After I had the VM running.. i was testing some file copies to the system disk and as I got it down to around 4 GB free, the VM would crash.. I'd hate to run into that in production. Thank you for any help you can pass along. I've learned a lot in the past few days, but I have a long ways to go.. -RP