Hugo Peeters has done it again. He created another very usefull script. This time Hugo created a script which adds a “custom field” within vCenter with Snapshot information, the amount of snapshots that is.
Some of you might say that this lacks the detail one would love to see within vCenter. Well knowing Hugo my guess it that this will evolve fast, and I expect some cool additions coming up.
If you don’t want to wait just check his post, download the code and start modifying / adding yourself. Hugo outlined the concept so it should be fairly easy to add new functionality to it.
And if you haven’t done it by now, add Hugo’s blog to your RSS Reader or Bookmarks!
I just had a chat with several people of VMware about the fact that the RCLI is read/write as of ESX 3.5 Update 3. As it turns out, these new APIs were opened up unintentionally. This unintentional change happened when VMware was resolving an API-related bug.
My VMware contacts tell me that this bug will be fixed shortly. So, do not get used to them because they will become restricted again. This only applies to customers who downloaded the free version of ESXi. VirtualCenter and VI (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) customers are not affected.
During the Dutch VMUG someone walked up to me and asked a question about High Availability. He read my article on Primary and Secondary nodes and was wondering who decided where and when VM would be restarted.
Let’s start with a short recap of the “primary/secondary” article: “The first five servers that join the cluster will become a primary node, and the others that will join will become a secondary node. Secondary nodes send their state info to primary nodes and also contact the primary nodes for their heartbeat notification. Primary nodes replicate their data with the other primary nodes and also send their heartbeat to other primary nodes.”
The question was, when a fail-over needs to take place cause an isolation occurred who decides on which host a specific VM will be restarted. The obvious answer is one of the primaries. One of the primaries will be selected as the “fail-over coordinator”. The fail-over coordinator coordinates the restart of virtual machines on the remaining hosts. The coordinator takes restart priorities in account. Keep in mind, when two hosts fail at the same time it will handle the restart sequentially. In other words, restart the VM’s of the first failed host(taking restart priorities in account) and then restart the VM’s of the host that failed as second(again taking restart priorities in account). If the fail-over coordinator fails one of the primaries will take over.
By the way, this is another reason why you can only account for 4 host failures. You need at least 1 primary, this primary will be the fail-over coordinator. When the last primary dies….
Today Rodney Haywood aka @rodos tweeted the following:
starting the write up of a new blog entry. Do people realise how long these things take!
Rodney was referring to the blog post he just published. I fully understand Rodney, I know it takes a lot of time to write articles like this:
What would a Enterprise, in particular one using virtualisation, take away from a Cloud computing event? What if the speakers were from Cisco, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Baker & McKenzie and Deloitte Digital? Well two weeks ago I went to such an event, took lots of notes and engaged in some interesting discussions. Here is what some of what occurred and my updated thoughts on the Cloud space.
Click here for the complete article.
Great stuff Rodney, keep up the great work!
I just had to create a couple VMFS volumes from the command-line on a local disk. It’s pretty straight forward but I needed to document it anyway, here it is:
- fdisk -l (check what the last partition is)
- fdisk /dev/sda
- n (new)
- default (start block)
- default (end block)
- t (partition type)
- 10 (partition 10, just created)
- fb (vmfs type)
- w (write config)
- reboot (Reboot the host before you format the newly created local partition)
- vmkfstools -C vmfs3 /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba0:0:0:10
- Go to VI Client, Refresh storage view and rename the newly created volume
You can align the VMFS volume as follows, before you do step 9:
- X
- b
- 1
- 128 (disk alignment, check your SAN manual for the correct value, 128 is correct in most cases…)
- W
You didn’t pay attention during Cyber Monday and forgot to order your copy of VMware Fusion and/or VMware Workstation? Well here’s your chance to pick it up with a 50% discount.
This is a special discount for “Friends and Family” from VMware. In order to receive the reduction coupon you’ll need to add me on twitter and send me a direct message, or send me a pm on the VMTN Forums.
Contact me, go to the store and pick up Fusion or Workstation, 50% off even your wife would agree that this is money well spent. 
This KB article has just been published:
Virtual Machines may unexpectedly reboot after a VMotion migration to an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host OR after a Power On operation on an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host, when VMware HA feature with Virtual Machine Monitoring is active.
There’s a work around for the problem but I will not be posting them here cause they might change somewhere in time. Just read the KB article for more info on how to fix this issue.
