Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for February 2009

JeOS with Suse Studio!

· ·

I’ve been looking into creating JeOS VM’s. JeOS stands for “Just enough Operating System“. In short: a purpose build OS that only contains the bare minimum that one needs to run.

In a virtual world, where footprint matters, it can be really beneficial to use JeOS vm’s. Although JeOS sounds great one of the problems used to be creating JeOS vm’s. Of course you can download a Debian Netinstall CD and just pick the packages you think you need, but it’s a lot of work. Ubuntu also released a JeOS version of their Server OS but it’s targetted at ISV’s and not for your average sysadmin as the “howto” clearly shows. [Read more…] about JeOS with Suse Studio!

SRM and rescanning your storage twice

· ·

I just got off the phone with a former colleague. He was implementing SRM at a customer site and couldn’t get it working correctly because the VMFS volumes weren’t discovered at the recovery site. As most of you know sometimes you need to rescan your HBA’s twice before the LUNs and orVMFS volumes are discovered. When using SRM the rescan only occurs once by default. Fortunately this is a setting that can be changed in the vmware-dr.xml file:

To enable the additional rescan, edit the vmware-dr.xml file at both the protected and recovery sites to add a <hostRescanRepeatCnt> element within the <SanProvider> element. Set the value of <hostRescanRepeatCnt> to 2, as shown in the following example:
<SanProvider>
.
.
.
<hostRescanRepeatCnt>2</hostRescanRepeatCnt>
</SanProvider>

If you are doing SRM implementations it might be useful to write this one down… Especially when combined with HP EVA’s.

VIMA and the UPS initiated shutdown, the “lamw” version

· ·

I already predicted that this was bound to happen sooner or later. It only took William Lam, aka lamw, a couple of days to enhance the work that Joseph Holland did. Joseph wrote a procedure that let’s APC’s software initiate a shutdown of the VM’s and ESXi host when a power failure occurs. Joseph’s solution included a modification of ESXi which means no VMware support.

I hinted William via twitter and he came up with a perl script that uses the API to initiate the shutdown of the VM’s and the ESXi host. This script will be run on the VIMA VM. There’s no need to change the ESXi host anymore!

ghettoShutdown.pl – This script initiates the shutdown of all VM(s) within an ESX/ESXi host excluding the virtual machine that’s monitoring the UPS device and then shutdowns the host. It accepts two commandline parameters: –sleep the duration in seconds to wait after a VM has initiated the shutdown before moving onto the next VM (shutdownVM() is non-blocking function) and –ups_vm the name of the displayName of your VM that is monotiring the UPS device [more details to come later].

upsVIShutdown.pl – This script is a wrapper which will hold the configurations of the order of hosts to shutdown. It may be used inconjunction with other UPS monitoring utility, though with our example, it’ll be placed in the apccontrol script to execute upon a power interuption.

Now head over to the VMware Communities, download the script and testdrive it! Awesome work William!

Gabes VMworld teaser movie

· ·

I’ve seen a lot of cool teaser/ preview movies over the years. Especially Eric Sloof has a great reputation with teaser movies for VMworld and short video interviews. But this year Eric will have a lot of competition cause VMware gave the bloggers attending VMworld a nice gift, The Flip.

Gabe, of Gabes Virtual World, just posted an awesome teaser for VMworld Europe 2009. Especially those that spend some time on twitter will love the inside jokes. Can hardly wait to see all the videos that will published during VMworld.

I guess this years motto will be:”What happens in Cannes ends up on YouTube.”