Yesterday I received an email from someone. He wanted to know why he was limited to using either the “fixed” or “MRU” pathing policy for the LUNs attached to his MSCS cluster. In his environment they used round-robin for everything and not being able to configure all of them with the same policy was against their internal policy. The thing is that if round-robin would be used and the path would switch (by default every 1000 I/Os) the SCSI-2 reservation would need to be re-acquired on this LUN. (MSCS uses SCSI-2 reservations for their cluster devices) As you can imagine that could cause a lot of stress on your array and could lead to all sorts of problems. So please do not ignore this recommendation! Some extra details can be found in the following KB articles:
Just a second ago the GSS/KB team republished the KB article that explain the vSphere 5.0 problem around SvMotion / vDS / HA. I wrote about this problem various times and would like to refer to that for more details. What I want to point out here though is that the KB article now has a script attached which will help preventing problems until a full fixed is released. This script is basically the script that William Lam wrote, but it has been fully tested and vetted by VMware. For those running vSphere 5.0 and using SvMotion on VMs attached to distributed switches I urge you to use the script. I expect that the PowerCLI version will also be attached soon.
I was deploying vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) in my lab today and the following error came up after I wanted to check dependencies for a virtual machine:
Access failed, an unknown discovery error has occurred
I rebooted several services but nothing seemed to solve it. Internally I bumped on a thread which had the fix for this problem: DNS. Yes I know always DNS right. Anyway, I used “DHCP” for my VIN appliance and this DHCP server pointed to a DNS server which did not have the IP/name of my ESXi hosts listed. Because of this the discovery didn’t work as VIN tries to resolve the names of the hosts as they were added to vCenter Server. I configured VIN with a fixed IP and pointed the VIN appliance to the right DNS server. Problem solved.
I was on a holiday the last two weeks and slowly catching up on everything that happened. Some of you might think it wasn’t a lot, but in the world of cloud and virtualization it was. Not only was there a huge EUC launch event but also a new version of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator was released. Somehow it has been amazingly quiet around this product. Something I didn’t really understand, especially not after reading the release notes of version 1.1 of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator. Two things stood out:
- vCloud Director support
- Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.
For those who don’t know, Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plugin for vCenter Server. This enables you to get a better understanding of what is running on top of your virtual infrastructure. A lot of you may say, well why would I care? Think about DR for a second. What is the most challenging part of creating a DR Plan? Indeed, figuring out all dependencies. That is exactly where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator comes in to play as shown in the screenshot below, which I stole from Ben Scheerer. Ben wrote an excellent blog about some of the cool new features in vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, I am not going to repeat those just read his. It is worth it if you are serious about providing the best service to your (internal) customers!
I was doing some upgrades in my lab and ran in to an issue. Whenever I started the vCenter Web Client I got a message that the vCenter Inventory Service wasn’t running. I looked at my Services section in Windows 2008 and found that it wasn’t started. Starting it gave me a new error: 1067. This is very generic but I figured I would google it anyway. That actually brought me to our own documentation, yes I should check that first next time, and it mentioned I could reset the inventory service as follows:
- Stop the service (was already stopped)
- Delete the entire contents of the Inventory_Service_Directory/data directory
- Change directory to Inventory_Service_directory/scripts
- Run the createDB.bat command, with no arguments, to reset the vCenter Inventory Service database
- Run the register.bat command to update the stored configuration information of the Inventory Service
register.bat vcenter-tm01.testlab.local 443 - Restart the vCenter Inventory Service
I also had to re-register the Web Client to vCenter Server. This is what I had to do:
- admin-cmd.bat register https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local:9443/vsphere-client https://vcenter-tm01.testlab.local administrator password
I’ve been asked by many to share this but never got around to it, I have it as my wallpaper for months and still love it! Today, last day of my two week holiday, I figured I would make some time and share it with the world… Just click the pic below to get the 1920×1200 version. Definitely the best VMware logo ever!
I’ve been using Octopus for months internally already as I already discussed in my enterprise social collaboration post and I think it is an awesome tool! I would recommend everyone who is interested in an enterprise level file sharing solution, not unlike dropbox, to sign up for the beta as Octopus is the way to go!
Project Octopus is the successful marriage of Zimbra and Mozy technologies, with some additional code jointly developed by the two teams. Prior to GA release, it will be folded into Horizon, providing a centralized policy and entitlement engine that will broker user access to applications, virtual desktops and data resources. The result will be a simple, seamless end-user experience when accessing work resources across private and public clouds on whatever device the user chooses.
The beta is open to all and will last through VMworld. Due to limited support resources, priority will be placed on customers with active engagements.
