Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Citrix Xenserver 4.1 Beta

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Thincomputing.net just posted about a new Xenserver Beta. Looking at the new features list it seems things are finally getting up to speed, especially “bonding of NIC’s” is a must have in a enterprise environment. Hope you can also pin the live migration on a specific NIC in this release, but looking at the specs I don’t think it’s possible.

Citrix is pleased to introduce the public beta release of Citrix XenServer 4.1.Citrix XenServer 4.1 is a service pack that enhances the previous v4 release. New capabilities and improvements include:

  • Scalability and Performance
    • Increased number of simultaneous running VMs
    • Enhanced nested page table (NPT) support for modern AMD processors
    • VLAN support in Standard Edition
    • Improved Citrix Presentation Server performance and maximum number of user sessions
  • Reliability and Manageability
    • Host NIC bonding for fail-over (configured via CLI)
    • Centralized logging
    • Configuration of network management interfaces via the CLI
    • Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
    • Java bindings for XenAPI in SDK
  • Storage
    • Initial shared fibre channel storage support (via CLI only)
    • Enhanced support for NetApp filers, including snapshot and cloning
    • Windows guest Hot disk remove
    • ISCSI improvements
    • Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
  • Host System
    • Rolling pool upgrade support
    • NIC driver updates (e1000, BNX2, TG3)
    • Support several 10Gb network adapters (Mellanox/Chelsio)
    • Improved hardware support
  • Guest Support
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit and CentOS 5 32-bit install from physical CD
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x64 and CentOS 5 x64 guest support
    • Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 x86 and x64 guest support
    • Windows Vista x86 guest support

Queue depth and alike settings lost after an upgrade to ESX 3.5

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I just had a discussion about an upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5. During that conversation the new HBA drivers that VMware uses came up. After an upgrade it seems that the queue depth settings are lost. Thinking about it I can understand why. ESX 3.5 uses different driver for most HBA’s. For instance Emulex, their driver for the LP11002 used to be the “lpfcdd_732” and now is the “lpfc_740”. After an upgrade the new driver/module doesn’t get the options you provided with “esxcfg-module” because it was specified for that specific “old” module. This means that you have to set these options again!

VCB – Weird errors

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Today I encountered a weird error during an implementation of VMware Consolidated Backup. When ever I ran vcbmounter I received the following error:”Run time error – the application the application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.”

It seemed that for some reason the vcbuser did not have the role “VMware consolidated backup user” linked anymore. I would have expected an error in the line of “permission denied” or “not enough permissions to complete task” and definitely not a Runtime error…

Anyway I tested the script I blogged about yesterday and it works like a charm, check it out!

CDP, why?

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That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of strange routing / connection errors to the virtual machines. CDP was very useful because I could setup a remote connection to the customer and check which vmnic was connected to which port on the switch. So use CDP when in doubt!
Click on the blue cloud next to the vmnic name on the right:

This is the result:

(Screenshots taken from the RTFM Upgrade Guide.)

VCB – Backup all running VMs

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Today I was busy trying to find out a way to schedule VCB backups with Commvault with just 1 schedule without having to rewrite your script every time someone creates a VM. The standard procedure is to create a subclient for every VM which is very human error prone. I stumbled upon a blog on RTFM about backing up all running VM’s, the actual script was done by Andrew Neilson, thanks! [Read more…] about VCB – Backup all running VMs