My post about reverting your HAL triggered Alanrenouf to create a short, but very cool script that compares the amount of cpu’s to the windows HAL you’ve chosen. This way you will know within a second if you need to change the HAL of any of your vm’s! Cool stuff:

connect-viserver MYVISERVER
$myCol = @()
ForEach ($VM in (Get-VM))
{
$MyDetails = “” | select-Object Name, HAL, NumvCPU
$MYDetails.Name = $VM.Name
$Hal = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $VM.Name -Query “SELECT * FROM Win32_PnPEntity where ClassGuid = ‘{4D36E966-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}’” | Select Name
$MYDetails.HAL = $Hal.Name
$MYDetails.NumvCPU = $VM.NumCPU
$myCol += $MYDetails
}
$myCol

Some of you have already noticed that I’ve added some Google Adsense blocks to my site. I’ve never been a huge fan of advertising blocks but with the amount of traffic these days it would be nice to be able to pay my hosting bill with Adsense blocks. I just had to upgrade my hosting account for the second time within a year, which is a good thing cause people are reading my website and visiting on a regular base.

Anyway, I will also be looking into changing my wordpress theme, so if anyone got some good tips or is missing something at the moment let me know and I’ll add it to my “under consideration” list.

A couple of weeks ago I did a design review. During this review we discussed the process of reverting your “HAL”, on a Microsoft machine, from multi cpu to single cpu. The customer just emailed me a script that can automate this for you. After some googling I noticed that Mike Laverick already wrote an article on this well over two years ago, which also contains this script. (more or less the same) Still I would like to share this with you guys:

@echo off

RIVER_HAL_UPDATE
SET HAL=

IF %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%==1 (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_UP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_UP
) ELSE (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_MP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_MP
)

IF NOT “%HAL%”==”" (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Installing %HAL% HAL
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.

devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe update %windir%\inf\hal.inf %HAL%
devcon.exe ReScan

ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Rebooting
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
devcon.exe Reboot
) ELSE (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Correct HAL Detected
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
)
GOTO :EOF

There’s a topic on VMTN about this, read it. You need the Microsoft DevCon util, which is part of the support tools, for more info on devcon click here. Mike Laverick’s paper can be found here. Thanks for pointing this out Xing.

VMware Wolf is generating some awesome blogposts lately:

• Common system management issues in VMware Infrastructure
• Common Network issues in VMware Infrastructure
• Common Licensing issues in VMware Infrastructure

All the blog posts contain a downloadable html file with a grid. The grid contains problems followed by possible resolutions.

Great blog posts and very useful information, visit VMware Wolfs blog and download the files! Great stuff for your troubleshooting toolkit!

I wrote about RVTools 2.0 a month ago and suggested a couple of additions. Rob picked these suggestions by me and a couple of my readers up and started implementing them in his tool. Here’s the release notes for this new version:

Version 2.1 (November 2008)

• Overall performance improvements.
• New vInfo tab. The “vInfo” tab displays for each virtual machine the hostname of the guest, power state, power on date / time, number of cpu’s, amount of memory, number of nics, configuration path, annotation, ESX host name, operating system name and VI SDK object id.
• New CPU tab. The “vCpu” tab displays for each virtual machine number of cpu’s, max cpu, overall cpu usage, shares, reservations, limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
• New Memory tab. The “vMemory” tab displays for each virtual machine the memory size, max memory usage, memory overhead, guest memory, host memory, shares, reservations , limits, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name
• New snapshot tab. The “vSnapshot” tab displays for each snapshot the name, description, date / time of the snapshot, quiesced value, state value, annotations, ESX host name and operating system name.
• The header text is automatically included after a copy and past action. This version 1.1 functionality was “lost” in version 2.0.

I don’t know about you guys but for just one guy writing this FREE tool this is pretty impressive. Pick it up and be sure to have it in your VI Toolkit!

For a 32bit OS you can theoretically address 4GB of memory, but when running a 4GB system with a 32bit OS hit you’ll probably hit a barrier around roughly 3GB. For Windows XP there’s no way of solving this unfortunately as far as I know, which is a shame cause 800MB was not being utilised. For Ubuntu there is, my former colleague Patrick pointed me out to this and it works great, thanks again for me helping me:

sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-headers-server

So what it does is installing the Ubuntu server kernel which includes PAE support. PAE stands for Physical Address Extension and it increases the address size from 32bits to 36bits which means you can address up til 64GB. For more info on PAE read this wiki.

I just noticed this new KB article that deals about not being able to upgrade ESXi on a Dell box because of the fact that the virtual media is attached:

Upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
If you cannot upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2, use the following workaround:

1. Connect to the DRAC through ILO, as follows:
   1. Open the Media tab.
   2. Open the Configuration tab.
   3. Deselect the Attach virtual media check box.
2. Boot the ESXi system from the recovery CD.

To use DRAC virtual media to perform the recovery, follow these steps:

1. Attach the virtual media
2. Using the virtual media, boot the machine.
3. When the recovery CD is fully loaded, disconnect the virtual media and proceed with the recovery.

Which reminded of the nice I/O errors this Dell DRAC virtual media produces when attached. So be sure to detach the virtual media before you actually run ESX(i). Same goes for Fujitsu blades by the way, when a virtual media has been present it also produces these nice I/O errors:

Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: SCSI device sdc: 2097151 512-byte hdwr sectors (1074 MB)
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: sdc: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: unable to read partition table

Which isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s just not able to read the partition. For Fujitsu blades the only workaround I’ve seen so far was to completely disable USB before booting.