Exploring Cloud Technology

Top 20 Articles for March 2010 Here is our Top 20 KB list for the past month. The list is ranked by the number of times a Technical Support case was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article Click on above link.

VMware KB: Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices

VMware KB: TCP and UDP Ports for vCenter Server, ESX hosts, and other network components management access

Maximum vSphere – a new book from Top Bloggers : " In August probably there will be a new book available which from Eric Siebert . Eric, but also Simon Seagrave and Rich Brambley who participated on the book, will bring the best how-to tips on managing, installing, administering or making backups of your virtual infrastructure running under VMware vSphere 4 . The book is entitled “ Maximum vSphere: Tips, How-Tos, and Best Practices for Working with VMware vSphere 4 ”. As Simon Seagrave already announced on his blog , he wrote 2 chapters in this book and he really enjoyed writing them. Simon is well know as an expert on HP servers and Hardware. For sure there will be some good tips on home lab desing. Rich Brambley from VMETC.com is an independent blogger and fellow vExpert . He recently launched Virtumania – a weekly podcast from his website. A real innovation which brings some big plus to his blog. There is no need to introduce Eric Siebert who is already confirmed author of ...

VMware vSphere 4 hardening guide : " vSphere Hardening Guide. A couple of months ago I reported that there had been first draft released. Yesterday the final version of vSphere 4 hardening guide had been released . The PDF is free to download. A result of collaboration effort between VMware and all the virtualization community. There is more than 100 guidelines in the document. The guide categorizes all guidelines into three security levels. Each administrator can choose the level most suited for his environment. The goal is to increase clarity and reduce ambiguity, make it easier to reference individual guidelines, and most of all, enhance the ability to automate guideline enforcement. The sections: Introduction Virtual Machines Host (both ESXi and ESX) vNetwork vCenter Console OS (for ESX only) It’s a version 1 of the guide, but there will be updates and future releases of this hardening guide reissued in the future too. The guide can be found at VMware Communities in the “ S...

Why Does Cloning A VM From Template Take A Long Time? : " Over the past few years I’ve been asked to troubleshoot and explain why cloning a virtual machine (VM) from a master template would take a longer time than expected more than once. Usually when I’m asked the virtualization admin is frustrated at the hypervisor. “This shouldn’t take this long. It needs to be fixed!” they say. “I definitely agree,” I say, “but let’s take a deeper look at what is happening here first before we flame the vendor’s help desk technician on the phone.” So, this post is about taking a deeper look at where the master template VM resides versus where the cloned template is destined. My math my be a little off or may not account for every factor involved, but my point is to be close enough to demonstrate that the disk/array/LUN design is can be the culprit more times than not. When I started this post I emailed for some help. I asked for a sanity check from some storage experts. I’ve been reasonably h...

Nice video showing VMA – The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) : " Video showing VMA. This video can be seen in HD directly on VMware Channel TV on YouTube. What is VMA? It’s basicaly a virtual machine which runs on a Linux distribution. You can see that the deployment from an OVF file takes a few seconds. Inside of the VM there are some packages to manage vSphere environement directly installed, like the vSphere command?line interface , and the vSphere SDK for Perl . You can use VMA to run scripts or agents that interact with ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems without needs for ahthentication every time. That’s pretty cool. This video gives an overview of vMA and demonstrates the fastpass feature, which allows you to pass commands to the host or run scripts on the host and only enter the credentials one time. The video also demonstrates the vi-logger feature, which periodically collects the logs from the hosts it manages. Source: VMware Channel TV You might also be intereste...

Troubleshooting Fault Tolerance in vSphere : " VMware Fault Tolerance questions. Great doc released through VMware KB I just discovered about explaining all about Fault Tolerance and also how to troubleshoot the error messages when you try to activate this feature. In this KB you’ll find how to troubleshoot, when to activate, when the option is available and when it’s grayed out… What’s needed? Fist check the matrix HCL here . Not all processors and operating systems are supported. see this KB: Processors and Guest Operating Systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance (1008027) . Then you should enable Virtualization technology (VT) in the BIOS in all hosts in the cluster. All ESX hosts used by VMware Fault Tolerance must be members of a VMware High Availability (HA) cluster. Ensure that both primary and secondary node where the FT Virtual machine reside having the latest patches, because patches have been released that contain improvements to the VMware Fault Tolerance featur...

Rename VMDKs to avoid Backup conflicts : " What if you end up with the same vmdk file name on different datastores? A simple case scenario that can happens: A single VM has several hard disk attached to it. The hard disk VMDK files are located on different datastores. When creating a new hard disk which location is on different datastore to a VM, the name given to this VMDK is the same as the first VMDK. For exemple, you VM has a disk called TS01.vmdk which is located on DATASTORE1 , and you create a second disk located on DATASTORE2 . This disk takes the same name as the first one…. This is not a problem for VMware, but it is for third party backp products like Symantec Backup Exec 2010. In fact what happens to the backup job wanting to backup a VM like this? The VMDK is marked as a corrupted and the job fails, so it’s impossible to restore either. What’s the solution? VMware KB had give me an simple answer what to do in the case like this. You’ll have to use vmkfstools via co...

VMware Patch process step by step video : " VMware KB video showing patching of ESX Host. vSphere 4 Update Manager in action. If you never used VMware vSphere 4 update manager before, this video shows you how to get started and how to successfully apply a necessary security patches to your ESX host. The GUI interface seems to be difficult to understand, but hopefully with this video you’ll be able to find your way around. A terms like schedule patches definitions download, baselines, remediation, ESX hosts, scan of ESX host, maintenance mode will be shown. It’s an easy step-by-step video you can follow if you’re new to VMware and managing Virtual Infrastructure with VMware vSphere 4 . This video details installing patches or updates to your VMware ESX host using VMware vCenter Update Manager. This video was created using ESX 4.0 and Update Manager 4.0. The same basic steps apply to other versions of ESX. This video also shows you how to determine how often your host checks for ...

vSphere Designs For Blades: IBM BladeCenter H and iSCSI : " VMware employee Hany Michael has started an incredibly useful series of design posts and diagrams titled VMware vSphere On Blade Servers. His first post VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H delivers a multi layer .PDF that provides a template design of 4 common vSphere deployments with HS22 and the HS22V Blades. I’m just highlighting the iSCSI design in this post, but be sure to get a copy of Hany’s full PDF for diagrams of FC and 10GE designs as well. Here’s an image of the BladeCenter H iSCSI design taken from the Configuration 2 layer. Click the image for a larger view. Some things to point out why I think this diagram is so useful: It illustrates a combination of hardware and vSphere design to provide complete redundancy. Although the physical network connections are shown by the red, yellow, and green clouds, the actual redundant cabling is impossible to illustrate without making this diagram too busy to understa...

New Series: VMware vSphere On Blade Servers.

Use VMware Workstation 7 for P2V : " Use P2V with VMware Workstation 7 Instead using Vmware Converter standalone client you can use VMware Workstation 7 for P2V. There might be even some advantages. For exemple you might be on the road, at the client’s site, and you want to show to your client that his server is virtualizable and directly do a P2V conversion into the Workstation installed on your laptop. Also by using P2V you might want to make sure that you can do hot clone instead cold clone. You know that cold clone is recommended for database systems or Active directory/Exchange servers. By converting them and testing them running inside Workstation you’ll be sure that a database records will not get corrupt. Or you might want to check a real specific application, how it will behave in the virtual environement etc. To do a P2V in VMware Workstation 7 is a really easy. There is handy assistant which will walk you through. And also I found a little video from VMware KB at YouT...