Exploring Cloud Technology

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 5/1/2010 : " Desktop The SandboxNetworkDrives Parameter in Package.ini in ThinApp (1021149) Date Published: 5/1/2010 VMware Consolidated Backup VMware Consolidated Backup fails with the error: Exit code:16 (1012296) Date Published: 4/28/2010 VMware ESX Unable to upgrade an ESX/ESXi host using the Host Update Utility (1019133) Date Published: 4/30/2010 Unable to install Windows 2008 R2 64bit as a virtual machine (1019787) Date Published: 4/30/2010 Connecting to an ESX host using a SSH client (1019852) Date Published: 4/28/2010 The iSCSI target name appears blank in the path view of the Storage Adapters panel (1020775) Date Published: 4/26/2010 Recommended configuration maximums for NIC ports on ESX/ESXi 4.0 and 4.0 U1 (1020808) Date Published: 4/29/2010 vMotion without EVC enabled fails on Opteron 61xx processors (1020958) Date Published: 4/29/2010 Migrating an ESX 3.x virtual machine with snapshots in powe...

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: Top 20 Articles for April 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. Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039) FAQ: Supported/Unsupported Devices and Configurations (1184) FAQ: VMware Product Features and Functionality (1168) Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESX host (1004340) Troubleshooting Email Issues (1001628) Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212) Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466) Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA) (1001596) Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) header/descriptor file (1002511) Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490) Virtual machine does not power on because of missing or locked files (10051) Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x a...

Use NIC teaming feature to share load and get passive failover : " NIC teaming with VMware vSphere 4 With VMware vSphere 4 you have the possibility to team your NICs and benefit redundancy and share the network load of traffic between physical and virtual networks among the members of the network. The configuration is easy via GUI even if its possible use CLI (command line interface) for doing it. To be able to use NIC teaming you’ll need at least 2 physical nics configured as an uplinks to your vswitch. I found video on VMware KB to show you that configure NIC team is very easy. The association of multiple NICs with a single virtual switch to form a team. Such teams can provide passive failover and share traffic loads between members of physical and virtual networks. Some reads: Configure the virtual port group NIC teaming and fail-over policy (p. 41) Simplify VMware vSphere * 4 Networking with Intel® Ethernet 10 … (doc from Intel about 10Giga LAN cards) And a great post I ...

Backup and DR with Acronis True Image Home 2010 : " Easy setup of Acronis 2010 home. Acronis is one of my preferred products when it comes to backup and disaster recovery for physical PCs or Servers. I tested recently the new Acronis 2010 home edition called Acronis True Image Home 2010 . You can get free trial if you follow this link to test this nice piece of software. There has been quite a few changes in this new version of Acronis. I’ve been using Acronis since several years for internal usage and also for some of our clients. The new Acronis True image Home 2010 is much more intuitive. This version is destined for the home user which only wants to protect his PC or laptop. I haven’t tested a server version. There is quite a few versions and it depends of your needs…. I made a short video showing the first necessary steps you must do after the installation to backup your PC with Acronis. Those steps are very easy and after your first full backup you are protected. Not to w...

Free vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Utility To Help Check Patch Readiness For vSphere : " VMware made upgrading to vSphere 4 easy enough, but there are still a few things that can go wrong. One example is that admins must consider the patch and version levels of VirtualCenter and ESX to begin. After the vCenter upgrade specific compatibilities between vCenter 4 and ESX 3.x must be understood if a mixed mode environment will exist during the span of the upgrade. vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Check Although the Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Utility was introduced last Fall when VMware released vCenter 4 Update 1, I had not come across a situation where using the tool identified problems with ESX upgrades. Judging by several other blog posts that demonstrated the utility on the web already, most all of these bloggers showed “pass” scenarios as well. For me that was the same result until this week. In fact, the vCenter Pre-Upgrade Check proved it’s worth to me in a huge way. For those not familiar h...

What’s faster E1000 or VMXNET3 – let’s see what PassMark’s PerformanceTest says : " PerformanceTest is a fast, easy to use software benchmarking tool which allows everybody to quickly assess the performance of their PC and compare it to a number of standard 'baseline' computer systems. But what if we are going to use PassMark’s PerformanceTest in a virtual machine and try to find out if it is performing at its best. This way it’s easy to compare the performance of one virtual machine to other virtual machines hosted on the same or a different ESX server. You can use it to identify and measure the effect of virtual hardware configuration changes and upgrades. I’ve installed the PerformanceTest in two Windows 2003 (32) virtual machines located on the different ESX4 hosts, besides some basic memory and CPU testing I was really interested in the performance difference between the E1000 and the VMXNET Generation 3 virtual network adapter. The virtual machines are both connecte...

The vmClient beta 4.1 offers auto logon : " Auto logon enables you to easily configure the vmClient’s built-in auto logon mechanism, besides that the current 4.1 beta version offers some additional features like the favourites menu. It’s also using timers to check on the virtual machine status instead of menu actions so it should perform a bit quicker. Configuring auto logon is really easy, just open the registry editor an fill in the right value at the following entries. Key Name: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\vmClient Autologon : True Host : vcenter.ntpro.local Username : Administrator Password : vmware http://vmclient.nl/ "

Total Network Monitor 1.1.3 is released. Now the program is absolutely free! : " Total Network Monitor is a software for the continuous control over the efficiency of your network, separate computers, network and system utilities that make the essence of your network place and need to be thoroughly monitored. Total Network Monitor will alert you in case of failures and unpredictable errors by many ways before situation becomes threatening to your work. It will build a detailed report on the type and time of the error or failure. You always have an opportunity to check any aspect of this or that utility, server or file system: HTTP, FTP, SMTP/POP3, IMAP, Event Log, Service State, Registry and many other. To all these benefits network map and user-friendly interface make your work with the software the most demonstrable. Map allows to build a demonstrative diagram of your network, to group the computers not only into groups but also to arrange them topographically, to show all the...

Using Wake-on-LAN (WOL) to power on your ESX hosts : " Wake-on-LAN (WOL) for the VMware DPM feature is fully supported but what if all your ESX hosts are powered off and there’s no vCenter server available to send the WOL packet to exit the standby or powered off mode. In my case I’m using two Asus barebones for my home lab, most of the time they are powered off but when I want to do some magic and power on my home lab I have to go to my “server room” and hit the power switch manually because the barebones aren’t supporting ILO or IPMI. So is there a possibility to power on your ESX host with WOL? Yes there is! I’ve used the Free Wake-On-LAN from Solarwinds, it magically powers up your ESX host. When the remote network adapter hears a "Magic Packet" created for its unique Kernel Port MAC and IP address, the network adapter alerts the ESX host to power up. If Wake-On-LAN is enabled in the computer's BIOS settings, then the system will start up just as if the power bu...

RVTools version 2.9 has been released : " Rob de Veij over at Robware.net has released version 2.9 of the most awesome utility I know, well if you don’t count in the vmClient You better check out the newest release of RVTools . I already did, and recorded a walkthrough which can be watched here in HD quality . You can also take a peek at Vimeo. RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX 3.5, ESX3i, ESX4i and vSphere 4 RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, nics, datastores, switches, ports and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine and update them to the latest version. Version 2.9 (April 2010) • On v...

Whitepaper - Best Practices for Running VMware vSphere on NFS : " This paper provides an overview of the considerations and best practices for deployment of VMware vSphere on NFS based storage. It also examines the myths that exist and will attempt to dispel confusion as to when NFS should and should not be used with vSphere. It will also provide some troubleshooting tips and tricks. It’s written by Paul Manning, a Storage Architect in the technical marketing group at VMware and is focused on virtual storage management. The significant presence of Network Filesystem Storage (NFS) in the datacenter today, as well as the lower cost-per-port for IP based Storage, has lead to many people wanting to deploy virtualization environments with Network Attached Storage (NAS) shared storage resources. As virtualization increases adoption, so does the deployment of VMware ESX servers that leverage NAS. For the purpose of clarity, both NFS and NAS refer to the same type of storage protocol and...

Download VMware Player 3.1 RC : " The VMware Player 3.1 Release Candidate includes most of the same great features added to VMware Workstation including all of the graphics, performance and virtual hardware improvements. Some release highlights include: OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines. Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well! 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications. OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Too...