New page: vSphere Client on Win7
Oct 27, 2009 Blogs
I’ve created a separate page (click the ‘vSphere Client on Win7‘ link above) to accomodate the most popular blog post on Virtual Lifestyle. No more wading through my site to get to the good stuff, just click that easy to spot, easy to use button above 
Upgrade ESX to v4 fails: /boot too small
Oct 22, 2009 Blogs
I was planning a quick upgrade of a small cluster of ESX3 hosts to the latest and greatest yesterday. After upgrading vCenter, Update Manager and the vSphere Client, I set up an upgrade baseline in VMware vCenter Update Manager, took an ESX-host out of production and tried to remediate the host. After some thirty minutes, the task failed. No decent error was displayed in the ‘events’ view within the vSphere Client.
As I was wading through log files (/esx4-upgrade/ is a great place to start, so is /var/log/vmware/), I noticed something about the /boot partition being too small. I had finally encountered this dreaded drawback in upgrading ESX3 to ESX4. Sadly, not much can be done about it, although I did try some magic to resize the /dev/sda1 partition on which /boot was residing, but to no avail. Today, the three servers in the cluster will be receiving a clean installation of ESX.
So, if you are having trouble upgrading to ESX4 using Update Manager (or the Host Upgrade Utility, for that matter), please remember that it could very well be caused by a small boot partition. Start your troubleshooting endeavours at /esx4-upgrade/. Also, make sure you read up on the vSphere Upgrade Guide, because it gives some invaluable information on the /boot partition:
The default ESX 2.5.5 installation creates a /boot partition that is too small to enable
upgrades to ESX 4.0. As an exception, if you have a non-default ESX 2.5.5 installation on which at least 100MB
of space is available on the /boot partition, you can upgrade ESX 2.5.5 to ESX 3.x and then to ESX 4.0.
APC PowerChute Network Shutdown on VMware vSphere
Oct 22, 2009 Blogs
As I was Googling for an updated version of the APC PCNS Agent for ESX, I stumbled upon this forumtopic:
PowerChute Network Shutdown for ESX and ESXi 4, part number SSPCNSV, is out and on our web site here . The downloadable version is SEPCNSV found here.
So there finally is a version specifically for VMware ESX and ESXi! Hooray! The downside is, you need to grab your checkbook to get the bits, as the software is 99 USD per physical host…
To install the PCNS on ESXi, you’ll need the following:
- VMware vMA (dedicated to the PCNS Agent);
- DRS and HA are supported;
- Manual VMotion isn’t supported;
- Every guest needs to have the VMware Tools installed.
I can only assume that having the VMware Tools as a requirement will gracefully shut down all running VM’s when the PCNS is triggered. That’s an added bonus!
Check out this page for more documentation. Please refer to VM /ETC for more documentation.
On-die hypervisor
Oct 5, 2009 Blogs
A recap on the history of virtualization
Full virtualization or binary translation allows an unmodified guest OS to run as a virtual machine. The earlier VMware products used this technique to allow for virtualization. This is the oldest of the virtualization methods, and also the slowest. Up until the arrival of hardware-assisted virtualization, full virtualization was the most versatile way to get things done.
VMware releases Site Recovery Manager 4
Oct 5, 2009 Blogs
In a recent briefing, I got the news that VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager version 4 is about to be released. As of monday, October 5th, the new version is available for order and download. This is great news for the over two thousands customers using VMware Site Recovery Manager today!
The new version is dubbed with version number 4. As with VMware vCenter Lab Manager, the version skips a couple of numbers to align with the current release of VMware vSphere, which also has version 4. This way, it’s easier for customer to recognize compatibility between different products.
Where the previous version concentrated on providing features like support for iSCSI and Fibre Channel SANs, multiple recovery plans and testing the plans (using network bubbles), the new version is extending in line with the direction chosen.
The focus of this version is to extend already existing features or present new features in line with the product’s chosen direction. The major enhancements in this version can be summed up as follows:
