Recent Articles
Virtualizing vCenter with vDS: Another Catch-22
Dec 7, 2009 Blogs 3 Comments
You’ll know when you’ve come up with a good title when other people start copying it. Thanks Jason!
I’m setting up a VMware vSphere environment for a demo and presentation I’m giving later this week on VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 at the Dutch VMUG Event. I prepared a couple of VM’s on my laptop running VMware Workstation, among wich a vCenter Server installation. I installed two physical servers with ESX4, attached them to vCenter and configured a dvSwitch on both. As these hosts are really simple desktops with just a single NIC, I had to configure the dvUplinks group with one uplink per host. I migrated the Service Console Port (vswif0), created a couple of port groups for Virtual Machine networking and created a VMKernel port for NFS and VMotion. Since there was no need for the standard vSwitch anymore, I simply deleted the associated Port Groups and the vSwitch itself:
Cannot add ESXi host to vCenter due to a lack of memory
I’ve been experiencing a problem with a very small VMware ESXi 4 host on which I run two VM’s for VMware vCenter Lab Manager management (a vCenter VM and a LM VM). I was rebuilding the environment, so I had both VM’s running on this host with (at that time) 3GB of RAM. When adding this host to vCenter, I got weird and cryptic error messages:
Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Unknown installer error.
I Googled my ass off, but never found an explanation or workaround. Finally, I decided to move the VM’s to another host, put it in maintenance mode, reboot it, and tried to add it to vCenter once more. For some reason or another, this worked!
Jij komt toch ook naar het Dutch VMUG Event 2009?
Nov 13, 2009 Blogs Leave a comment
Zoals Arne, Bouke en Viktor, Ivo, Eric, Arnim, Duncan en Gerben al besproken hebben vindt op 11 december 2009 het jaarlijkse Dutch VMUG Event 2009 plaats! Dit jaar is het extra feest, want het evenement wordt voor de vijfde keer georganiseerd!
Het evenement staat dit jaar uiteraard in het teken van de release van vele versie 4 producten, allen onder de vSphere vlag. Zo gaat Eric Sloof een sessie verzorgen over het beheren van een vSphere 4 omgeving met behulp van de Virtualization EcoShell en Luc over PowerCLI, Verron over de integratie van NetApp systemen met de vStorage API, Viktor over de vNetwork Distributed vSwitches, ikzelf over vCenter Lab Manager 4, Willem over Citrix XenApp op vSphere en tenslotte Gabrie over de best practices bij het ontwerpen van een vSphere omgeving.
De volledige agenda is hier te bekijken, en de diverse sprekers hier. Naast deze parallelle sessies is er dit jaar ook ruimte voor een workshop over vCenter Hearbeat. Check ook de sponsors, die ook op de beursvloer aanwezig zullen zijn. Voor de locatie en andere praktische informatie ga je hierheen.
Zoals gezegd, ik zal zelf ook een sessie verzorgen. Ik ga jullie wegwijs maken in de wereld van VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. Lab Manager biedt de gebruiker de mogelijkheid om de interne test- en ontwikkelomgeving te automatiseren.
Net zoals de laatste paar jaar is er ruimte voor rond de 600 deelnemers. Zoals een concert van Foreigner is dit congres meestal snel helemaal volgeboekt. Schrijf je dus snel in op de site van de VMUG: http://www.vmug.nl/modules.php?name=Inschrijven
Video of bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1
Nov 5, 2009 Blogs Leave a comment
I’ve created a small video on how to reproduce the hostsfile bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1:
Bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1?
Nov 4, 2009 Blogs 3 Comments
While tinkering around with the new NetApp System Manager 1.0.1, I found something that could be considered a bug. I’m connecting the manager to a FAS2020 with the most recent ONTAP version (7.3.2), and needed to set up some (temporary) virtual IP’s and DNS-names. For this last item, I edited the filer’s hostfile using NetApp System Manager:
NetApp FAS2020 failed to boot
Nov 4, 2009 Blogs 4 Comments
I went to a customer today to configure a NetApp FAS2020 for SnapMirror replication. For sake of argument, let’s call this filer FLR2. After hooking up the fibre channel interconnect to a second diskshelf (containing SATA-disks), I noticed that all disks from the onboard shelf were missing. They were added to a second FAS2020 (FLR1), which is running all the production VM’s and thus has more benefit from the 300GB 10K SAS disks than FLR2, which was going to do only SnapMirror replication from FLR1 over a 20 Mbit internet connection. Without the SAS-disks in place, which hold aggr0 and the root volume (vol0), there wasn’t much to boot from. Hence, I had myself a very expensive piece of useless storage.
Because my experience with NetApp filers has been relatively minimal up until this point, I needed to dive into it deeply to figure out how the root volume works, why NetApp has placed it onto the ‘data’ disks (and not onto the CompactFlash storage), and most important, how to fix this mess.
New page: vSphere Client on Win7
Oct 27, 2009 Blogs Leave a comment
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 Leave a comment
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 Leave a comment
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
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.
