vSphere Quick Start Guide – PowerCLI and PDF

January 10th, 2010 | 4 Comments

Alan Renouf posted an article on the vSphere Quick Start Guide we recently wrote which triggered this article. First let me quote from Alan’s article:

I was responsible for adding all the PowerCLI throughout the book, basically if something is explained and there is an easy way to do it in PowerCLI, we have added a code reference, this enables you to see how much is covered by PowerCLI and also how easy it actually is.

In writing the PowerCLI areas I didn’t actually realise how many we had put in until the book was completed and I extracted them all into a nice zip file which can be downloaded and used from here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/wp-content/uploads/quickstartguide.zip

All in all there are 67 scripts, now obviously if you want to know more information about these scripts and exactly where they fit in you will need to buy the book.

Download these scripts as they will definitely help you manage your environment better and more consistent. Secondly they will help you learn Powershell/PowerCLI faster, especially if you also own the book. Which is the second part of this post, the book… it’s available in print via Amazon and Lulu. But also available as a PDF via Lulu. You can find the links below, but keep in mind that depending on shipping costs sometimes the US one might be cheaper. Let me also be crystal clear about the PDF, it’s a separate item. If you want the PDF you will need to order it. We do however have added it to our “must haves” for the next book, we hope we will be able to offer a printed and pdf version in one package by then.

Anyway, close to 2000 copies have been sold by now. Amazon has books on stock which should make a fast delivery possible.

Amazon – US $15.99
Lulu – Europe: € 14.29
Lulu – PDF: €7.14 / $9.99

vSphere ESXi 4.0 on a USB memory stick

January 10th, 2010 | 12 Comments

One of the articles which has always been in my top 10 most read(with most hits coming from google) is “ESXi 3.5 Update 2 on a USB memory key“. I have always used win image and 7-zip to get the job done. Basically you are cloning the image to a USB drive, which is fairly easy but we could use less tools and use a fully supported method:


  1. Download VMware Player (it’s free and it rocks!)
    Of course VMware Workstation also works.
  2. Download ESXi from VMware here
  3. Install VMware Player (next / next / finish)
  4. Create new VM and connect to ESXi iso
  5. Insert a USB flash drive
  6. Boot from the ESXi ISO image
  7. Connect the USB device to the VM and select “mass storage device”
  8. Select the USB drive when the “Select a Disk” screen is shown
  9. Next, Next, Finish
  10. Now your USB drive is ready to go

Keep in mind, although you install ESXi there’s no server name or IP-address assigned to the installation. This is a generic USB install which can be used in any server or easily be cloned. But then again why would you clone it when you can install it in less time.

ESXi – lessons learned part 4

January 9th, 2010 | No Comments

I was just figuring something out from the command line on an ESXi 4.0 host. I needed to mount a partition but a regular “mount” did not work so it took me a couple of seconds to realize why. The solution was simple and similar to the regular mount command:

/usr/bin/busybox mount

also might come in handy:

/usr/bin/busybox fdisk -l

Busybox… indeed, that’s what is being used under the hood and that’s what needs to be used for specific commands. Just run /usr/bin/busybox and you will see which commands you will have to your disposal. Another command I often use when working on the ESXi console is “vim-cmd”. Remember these…

FC vs NFS vs iSCSI

January 7th, 2010 | 8 Comments

I was just reading the excellent whitepaper that NetApp just published. The paper is titled “VMware vSphere multiprotocol performance comparison using FC, iSCSI and NFS“. I guess the title says enough and I don’t need to explain why it is important to read this one.

I read the paper twice so far. Something that stood out for me is the following graph:

I would have expected better performance from iSCSI+Jumbo Frames, and most certainly not less performance than iSCSI without Jumbo Frames. Although it is a minimal decrease it is something that you will need to be aware off. I do however feel that the decrease in CPU overhead is more than enough to justify the small decrease in performance.

Read the report, it is worth your time.

vSphere ESX(i) 4.0 Patches released

January 7th, 2010 | 3 Comments

VMware just released several new patches of which security and critical patches. You can find the KB articles which describe the fixes here:

ESX:

ESXi:

esxtop values/thresholds!

January 5th, 2010 | 18 Comments

I am a huge fan of esxtop! I read a couple of pages of the esxtop bible every day before I go to bed. Something I however am always struggling with is the “thresholds” of specific metrics. I fully understand that it is not black/white, performance is the perception of a user.

There must be a certain threshold however. For instance it must be safe to say that when %RDY constantly exceeds the value of 20 it is very likely that the VM responds sluggish. I want to use this article to “define” these thresholds, but I need your help. There are many people reading these articles, together we must know at least a dozen metrics lets collect and document them with possible causes if known.

Please keep in mind that these should only be used as a guideline when doing performance troubleshooting! Also be aware that some metrics are not part of the default view, I’ve added the character you need to add to the default view for your convenience. You can add fields to an esxtop view by clicking “f” on followed by the corresponding character.

I used VMworld presentations, VMware whitepapers, VMware documentation, VMTN Topics and of course my own experience as a source and these are the metrics and thresholds I came up with so far. Please comment and help build the main source for esxtop thresholds:

Display Metric Threshold Explanation
CPU %RDY 10 Overprovisioning of vCPUs, excessive usage of vSMP or a limit(check %MLMTD) has been set. See Jason’s explanation for vSMP VMs
CPU %CSTP 100 Excessive usage of vSMP. Decrease amount of vCPUs for this particular VM. This should lead to increased scheduling opportunities.
CPU %MLMTD 0 If larger than 0 the world is being throttled. Possible cause: Limit on CPU.
CPU %SWPWT 1 VM waiting on swapped pages to be read from disk. Possible cause: Memory overcommitment.
MEM MCTLSZ (I) 1 If larger than 0 host is forcing VMs to inflate balloon driver to reclaim memory as host is overcommited.
MEM SWCUR (J) 1 If larger than 0 host has swapped memory pages in the past. Possible cause: Overcommitment.
MEM SWR/s (J) 1 If larger than 0 host is actively reading from swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.
MEM SWW/s (J) 1 If larger than 0 host is actively writing to swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.
NETWORK %DRPTX 1 Dropped packages transmitted, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization
NETWORK %DRPRX 1 Dropped packages received, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization
DISK GAVG (H) 25 Look at “DAVG” and “KAVG” as the sum of both is GAVG.
DISK DAVG (H) 25 Disk latency most likely to be caused by array.
DISK KAVG (H) 5 Disk latency caused by the VMkernel, high KAVG usually means queuing. Check “QUED”.
DISK QUED (F) 1 Queue maxed out. Possibly queue depth set to low. Check with array vendor for optimal queue depth value.
DISK ABRTS/s (K) 1 Aborts issued by guest(VM) because storage is not responding. For Windows VMs this happens after 60 seconds by default. Can be caused for instance when paths failed or array is not accepting any IO for whatever reason.
DISK RESETS/s (K) 1 The number of commands reset per second.

Change log:
07-01-2010 | decreased %RDY from 20 to a value of 10

Vote Now!

January 4th, 2010 | No Comments

Eric Siebert has created a new poll to update his top 20 bloggers list. As many of you know I had the honor to be on the number one spot for the last three updates. Hopefully I will be part of the top 3 again, but the competition is huge. People like Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Scott Drummonds, Alan Renouf and Jason Boche(just to name a few) have a great reputation and have published amazing articles over the last 6 months or longer.  Looking back at the past 6 months(since the last voting) my top articles in terms of unique views were:

Let the games begin, Start the voting now!

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