Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for January 2009

Patches for 3.5

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VMware just released 9 new patches for ESX 3.5:

  • ESX350-200901401-SG – PATCH – Security – KB 1006651 – Updates VMkernel VMX hostd. But most important fix that this patch containts definitely is: VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 U3 I/O failure on SAN LUNs, and LUN queue is blocked indefinitely. For a full description of this issue, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008130.
  • ESX350-200901402-SG – PATCH – Security – KB 1006652 – Security Update to ESX Scripts
  • ESX350-200901404-BG – PATCH – Critical – KB 1006654 – Updates VMware Tools
  • ESX350-200901405-BG – PATCH – General – KB 1006655 – Updates VMware-esx-lnxcfg
  • ESX350-200901406-BG – PATCH – General – KB 1006656 – Updates Kernel Source and VMNIX
  • ESX350-200901407-BG – PATCH – General – KB 1006657 – Updates Pegasus
  • ESX350-200901408-BG – PATCH – Critical – KB 1006658 – Updates SATA Drivers
  • ESX350-200901409-SG – PATCH – Security –KB 1006659 – SNMP Security Update
  • ESX350-200901410-SG – PATCH – Security – KB 1006660 – Security Update for libxml2

There’s one “patch” released for ESXi (installable and embedded) 3.5:

  • ESXe350-200901401-O-SG – PATCH – Security – KB 1006661 – KB 1006662 – KB 1007058 – Firmware Update
    If you are using SRM in combination with ESX besure to read the KB1006661 cause this patch contains several fixes related to SRM.

There’s also a whole bunch of 3.0.x patches released, so if you’re still running 3.0.x besure to look into these new patches.

EMC SRDF Storage Replication Adapter

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I was delivering a Site Recovery Manager Jumpstart today. During the configuration of the Storage Replication Adapter(SRA) the task got stuck at 23%. I’ve seen the configuration of the SRA get stuck once before at 23% so I knew it was the “DiscoverLuns” command that failed for one reason or the other.

We ran the configuration of the SRA again and it stopped after exactly five minutes. We decided to run the DiscoverLuns task again but this time manual with use of command.pl and a xml file as input. If you read the previous article on DiscoverLuns you know how to feed command.pl with the xml file and what info the file should contain.

Running the DiscoverLuns manually worked great, but it actually took little over 15 minutes to complete before the complete results were returned by the EMC DMX3. During the configuration via the GUI the task failed after exactly 5 minutes, so it seemed to time-out. Opening up vmware-dr.xml, which can be found in the Site Recovery Manager installation folder, revealed a time out of 300 seconds:

<CommandTimeout>300</CommandTimeout>

We changed the value to 1800, restarted the SRM service and reconfigured the SRA successful.

Balancing LUN paths with powershell

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Just noticed this pingback. The topic title “Balancing LUN paths on your ESX hosts with powershell” sounded promising so I headed over. Justin Emerson is the owner of the blog and he wrote a short but effective script that changes the active paths on your active/active SAN(FIXED).

After watching this video that was posted by the VI Toolkit team, I immediately thought of this script that was posted quite a while back on Yellow Bricks. I decided to try to recreate this script in PowerShell, and while I was at it expand it so it would modify all nodes in a cluster at once. As such I wrote the following script. Please feel free to give feedback or make modifications! You can download it from my Sky Drive or check it out here.

Head over to Justin’s site, pick up the script and give it a try… and most importantly give Justin feedback on the results and what could be improved!

RE: ESXTOP Drilldown (Jason Boche)

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I was working on an ESXTOP post when Jason Boche published his blog post “ESXTOP Drilldown“. My post was similar so I decided to dump the post and start over again within a few weeks or so.

Yesterday I encountered a performance issue at a customer site. One thing I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that “ESXTOP” can be very useful in pinpointing performance issues, so writing this article happened sooner than I expected. The customer measured all sorts of counters within the VM and all the symptoms made the customer conclude that the problem was related to the virtual SCSI controller and / or the virtual harddisks(vmdk’s). The symptoms were high “Physical Disk\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer” and peak “Physical Disk\Avg. Disk Writes/Sec” behaviour. In other words, transferring data to and from the disk took too long and there wasn’t a constant stream of I/O.

[Read more…] about RE: ESXTOP Drilldown (Jason Boche)

Replicate Datacenter Analyzer 1.2

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I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following:

  • inconsistent portgroup names
  • inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts
  • multiple VM’s with diskfiles on more than one datastore
  • multiple VMr’s with more than one connected NIC

RDA can do a lot more of course, so I suggest you head over to their website and download the demo and see if your VI3 environment is healthy or not. For those that already tested the previous release, 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:

New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.

Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.

Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.

Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.

Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.