tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-362697902009-09-17T15:37:01.998-07:00Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-44374983978724893572009-07-01T10:49:00.001-07:002009-07-01T10:58:19.012-07:00

I've run into a problem on ESXi 3.5.0 Update 4 where the ESX host will disconnect, and then shortly after the VMs will stop responding on the network. If you catch the ESXi host fast enough and get to the unsupported console this command can get you back up and running quickly:#> /sbin/services.sh restartIt appears that this problem is caused by the CIM providers ( they show the health status for

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-29113545729789559502009-06-23T14:12:00.000-07:002009-06-24T07:49:29.758-07:00

One of my favorite features of ESX 3.5.0 is the inclusion of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), from an administrative perspective, it allows me to click on a bubble next to my network ports and get the switch name, switch ip, switch blade and port that the vmnic is connected to. Since documentation isn't always 100% reliable it's nice to be able to verify it with the CDP information that you

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-56912648634445481712009-06-22T14:30:00.000-07:002009-06-23T07:18:30.106-07:00

If you've spent much time converting systems from physical to virtual, you've inevitably run into some application that has been licensed and keyed off of the MAC address of the physical system. When you're moving that system from physical to virtual, you've got a decision to make: You can either contact the software vendor and get a new license; or you can clone the MAC address from the physical

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-68467080338598526302009-06-19T14:29:00.000-07:002009-06-22T07:10:14.456-07:00

When you're installing a new ESX host, it's important to take precautions to make sure that you're not overwriting a SAN LUN where your precious VMs reside. To keep those LUNs safe, you have a few options which I'm going to list from most cautious to least cautious. Physically disconnect the fibre that runs into the server Unpresent the LUNs from the ESX host through zoning on your SP/Switches

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-70200796521246883512009-06-17T15:34:00.001-07:002009-06-17T22:27:01.479-07:00

On a couple occasions, I've run into ESX hosts that have died and haven't either had HA enabled, or HA working. So while I could see all of the guests on the ESX host through vCenter ( they show as disconnected ). I still had to go and manually register those VMs ( using the VIC datastore browser, or the vmware-cmd command ). What really sucks in this situation though is locating the VMs when you

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-48248970043181131942009-06-17T13:33:00.001-07:002009-06-19T07:24:52.075-07:00

In a posting that I had a few days ago on how to export permissions and DRS affinity rules, one reader wrote and asked me if the same could be done for custom attributes. As it turns out, you can in just a few lines of powershell. You can export the attributes by selecting the virtual machines tab and deselecting all but the attributes that you want to export and then just select file->export.

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-75461854363042461652009-06-17T11:31:00.000-07:002009-06-17T11:33:14.005-07:00

It turns out that in my environment, a number of VMs were 'recycled', meaning that the group that runs them took an old SUSE 32 bit system, and then wiped the disk and then installed SLES 10 x64. An interesting artifact about that setup is that those VMs are now using the older BusLogic virtual SCSI adapter and vmxnet driver instead of the LSI Logic adapter and E1000 driver that would be

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-74351251784716601112009-06-11T14:59:00.000-07:002009-06-11T15:02:45.436-07:00

Should you ever need to rebuild your vCenter server... perhaps you want to go with a clean install vs. an upgrade for vSphere 4.0, there are a couple of bits of information that you'll want to keep. Namely: your DRS rules; the permissions that you've set up; cluster properties such as DRS automation level, HA, advanced prperties etc; and any custom attributes that you've populated. VMTN forum

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-61655287819837190362009-06-10T19:02:00.000-07:002009-06-10T19:58:19.947-07:00

An anti-affinity DRS rule is used when you want to keep 2 virtual machines on seperate hosts, usually because they provide a redundant service and locating them on the same host would eliminate that redundancy. Unfortunately an anti-affinity DRS rule can only be created for exactly 2 VMs. As you can see from the table below, once you get to creating anti-affinity rules for sets of VMs larger than

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-50230186972996396082009-03-10T20:54:00.001-07:002009-03-10T21:03:53.143-07:00

I recently had a chance to fire up VMware's SRM for the first time. I used the latest SRM 1.01 patch2 with ESX 3.5U3 hosts patched to the latest. The storage was configured on a NetApp 2020C using iSCSI and replicating with SnapMirror from one head to the other for testing. I have to say that in a simple test configuration it only took a couple hours to get it working once I wrapped my head

Jae Ellersnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-32560938294158485402008-10-18T07:38:00.000-07:002008-10-18T07:41:58.193-07:00

It took me a while, but I finally figured out why vmpmotion.pl stopped working on the RCLI that coincides with VMware ESX 3.5.0 Update 2. It turns out that a regular expression that I was passing was no longer valid. In any case if you go download the script now to perform command line storage vmotions it should work just as it did in the older versions of the RCLI.

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-48310910495368033642008-09-24T11:37:00.000-07:002008-09-24T11:46:31.320-07:00

Many things were announced at or before VMworld, Backup Tools were no different. Each major vendor has new versions of their software and this update to the backup guide looks at these new versions. Specifically version 2.0 from Veeam, 3.1.18 from PHD, and 3.4.2 from VizionCore.Look for more updates to this guide as new tools and versions of the products are released.Visit: http://

Texiwillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11446189501602364014noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-87645497106453189032008-09-13T14:18:00.001-07:002008-09-13T14:21:07.462-07:00

A couple of readers wrote in to tell me that the new RCLI ( from Update 2 ) was incompatible with snapalert.pl. I had actually already changed how it worked ( it now scans an entire VirtualCenter vs a single Datacenter ) and the new version worked without any modifications in the new RCLI. The new version is available in the same place as the old one.Enjoy.

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-74436883945555441192008-09-13T13:58:00.001-07:002008-09-13T14:13:11.872-07:00

One of the downsides of moving from VMware ESX "Classic" to the svelte VMware ESXi Installable/Embedded is the loss of functionality of the service console, and the abiltiy to install 3rd party agents. When looking at the problem in depth, the only 3rd party software that was essential to how I worked on a day to day basis was the HP SIM agents which provided some hardware alerting that was hard

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-32342927800473944212008-08-13T14:01:00.001-07:002008-08-13T14:04:37.593-07:00

One of my co-workers made this as we ( they actually, I'm out on paternity leave ) worked on fixing the bug in ESX 3.5.0 Update 2 where the build times out on August 12th causing VMs not to power on, be VMotioned etc ( general havoc ). The cat is funny, but the problem... not so much.

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-86487036951916632022008-08-09T15:24:00.000-07:002008-08-09T15:48:26.548-07:00

With VMware ESX 3.5.0 Update 2, the VMware guys slipped in a feature named Enhanced VMotion Compatibility that will really prove to make virtual machines portable between hardware generations, potentially making hardware upgrades seamless to your end users.Enhanced VMotion Compatibility ( EVC for short ) is turned on at the cluster level, and it basically sets up a baseline ( lowest common

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-46836014679834943642008-08-09T15:15:00.000-07:002008-08-09T15:24:08.565-07:00

I have a feeling that not a lot of people have run into this issue yet, but as ESXi becomes more mainstream, this problem will crop up more and more. You see when you have an ESXi Embedded host that has no storage ( most likely a blade ) and you try to add that host to a HA cluster you get an error message similar to the following:HA agent has an error : Host in HA Cluster must have userworld

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-9623799783029704772008-06-06T13:44:00.000-07:002008-06-16T07:47:58.211-07:00

There is a new backup comparison (http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=esx3backups) that has been updated with Veeam Backup and some other odds and ends. I did add a new criteria to the list, and that is how well the software integrates with VC. While almost all can at least talk to VC, I have yet to find a tool that truly integrates into VC.My next update should be when I have time to

Texiwillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11446189501602364014noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-63022082379516113302008-06-04T20:04:00.001-07:002008-06-04T20:13:54.548-07:00

To access the ESXi console in unsupported mode do the following.1. Open the console of your ESXi host, you should see a screen that look something like the following ( altered to protect the innocent ):2. Use the key-combo Alt+F1, and you'll bounce to a virutal terminal (vtty1) with some log messages in it. Though you won't get a response to any characters that you type in here type 'unsupported'

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-46334599754804670412008-06-04T19:32:00.000-07:002008-06-04T19:40:26.780-07:00

Tripwire ConfigcheckTripwire made their move into the virtualization market today with the release of Tripwire Configcheck. Configcheck is a free utility that will audit your ESX host(s) and give recommendations on steps that you can make to ensure that your ESX host is in compliance with your security policies. Configcheck also offers detailed information on how to remediate any of items that it

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-65420970140908835072008-06-04T19:20:00.000-07:002008-06-04T19:31:32.141-07:00

VMware released their latest round of patches for VMware ESX 3.0.1/3.0.2/3.5.0 today and as promised I'm right on top of it this time. All of the patchlist.txt's have been updated for the esx-autopatch.pl utility, you can get your updated copies here.ESX 3.5.0:Security Update to VMkernel and Multiple RPMsUpdate to VMware ESX ScriptsUpdate to VMnix.Security Update to the Service Console for Cyrus

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-87015540596241504172008-06-02T21:34:00.000-07:002008-06-03T07:13:45.407-07:00

A very useful, yet very undocumented feature of the Virtual Infrastructure Client is that it can be configured to automatically pass your Active Directory credentials without you typing them in. To use: create a shortcut to the Virtual Infrastructure Client, then right-click on it and edit the shortcut properties. You'll need to pass the program two arguments when calling it like so:"C:\Program

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-69778383487432803682008-06-02T21:26:00.000-07:002008-06-02T21:29:27.224-07:00

Sorry folks, I was offline for a while as I moved from one house to another. I'm just getting caught up now. I've uploaded new patchlist.txt files for ESX 3.5.0, 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 which you can find in the usual place. Happy patching.

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-43133706199247830672008-05-14T06:45:00.000-07:002008-05-14T06:51:02.606-07:00

The VMware ESX 3.x Backup Comparison article has been updated with new information about VCB and PhD esXpress. Lastly, Edward has added information about the backup capability of thei HP Virtual Machine Manager. This document will continue to grow, eventually including all the backup tools available.In the article, we explore the backup options available to System Administrators who deal with

Texiwillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11446189501602364014noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36269790.post-47726620379250986822008-04-21T20:54:00.000-07:002008-04-21T21:10:45.116-07:00

So I was off on vacation when the latest patches hit the street, and just finally got a chance to update the patchlist.txt files with the latest and greatest. Download your patchlist.txt here.Vizioncore updated it's vCharter Pro product, and by update I mean that it threw away the old one and built a new one from scratch with a much better interface and easier management. I've actually been

Dominic Riveranoreply@blogger.com