Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for February 2009

Update: VIMA and UPS(APC) initiated shutdown of ESXi

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Joseph Holland just updated the “UPS initiated shutdown of ESXi” document I blogged about this week. This time Joseph used VIMA to get the job done. Here’s a link to the document on VI:OPS.

The procedure still requires an unsupported change on ESXi. My guess is that this will soon be fixed by using perl on VIMA. Perl enables you to use the SDK and vi-fastpass. Vi-fastpass is an authentication component which supports unattended authentication. In other words, there’s no need to store clear text passwords in script files anymore and no need to change ESXi. On twitter William Lam aka “@lamw” already hinted that he’s looking into this…

VMware vCenter Converter 4.0

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VMware vCenter Converter 4.0 has just been released. Don’t let this name fool you cause Converter is still also available as a stand alone solution for P2V’ing your servers! You can find the release notes here.

So what’s new?

  • Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu) as source
  • Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
  • Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
  • Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
  • Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
  • Target disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
  • Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

I think especially the hot cloning improvement, which copies incremental changes, and the workflow automation are really cool features. These are the kind of enhancements that will make your life a lot easier during migration projects.

Minor Update: RVTools 2.3.1

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Rob de Veij just released a minor update for RVTools, 2.3.1. Rob was notified by several users that an error occured while using RVTools. Here is the relevant section from the release notes:

Bug on vDatastore tab fixed: System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘VimApi.NasDatastoreInfo’ to type ‘VimApi.VmfsDatastoreInfo’.

If you are running RVTools, be sure to pick up the latest version here.

VMware HA or VMware SRM, what should I use?

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I was just reading up on VMTN and noticed this great topic. For some reason there are a lot of people that don’t see the difference between HA and SRM. I suggest reading the full topic and especially Jay Judkowitz’s replies and Smoggy’s reply, both are Subject Matter Experts on SRM and explained the topic starter what the differences are and when to use it. Here’s an outtake of the discussion which captures the essence of the answer in my opinion:

  • With SRM, you get a much more well defined failover.
    • The VMs start in a specified order
    • You can set some VMs to be started serially with others starting in parallel
    • You can designate VMs at the recovery site to suspend to make room for recovery VMs
    • You can have callout scripts and predefined breakpoints to make sure that critical non-VMware activity is done at the right time and place
    • You can set the resource pool at the remote site (with the same size or different as the source resource pool) so that you get a predictable and defined QOS on CPU and memory
  • Once you have that well defined failover plan, you can test it and audit the results
    • Testing will automatically snap the recovery LUNs so you can power on the recovery VMs without interrupting replication
    • You can specify a test network at the second site that SRM will automatically put the recovery VMs on during a test so that they do not interfere with the running VMs
    • You can therefore do non-disruptive DR testing any time without warning. The recovery plan executes the same as for failover, but in a “test bubble” where storage and network IO are safely segregated away from production work.
    • There is a test results page for the recovery plan which lists all test runs, how long they took and how successful they were. From this page, you can drill down to each test run and see exactly what steps succeeded and failed and how long they took to run.
    • With the history page, you can grade your organization over time. With the detailed reports, you can troubleshoot specific runs.

I suggest that if you’re looking into Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery and you’ve got questiosn on what/where/when/how with SRM you visit the VMTN forums… these guys really know what they are talking about and can really help you understanding what BC/DR is about.

VMworld Video Blogging!

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Every year Eric Sloof of NTPro.nl does a serieus of great video blogs on VMworld. It seems that this year Eric will not be the only blogger walking around with a camcorder. Viktor, or should I say vIktor, just broke the news. He received a cool gift from VMware… Flip Video! And it seems like most bloggers will receive one.

Flip is a small camcorder device which contains 2GB of onboard memory. It will enable the bloggers to shoot video coverage and upload it to youtube with a single click. I expect a lot of video showing up, not only from the VMworld floor but also the VMworld Party(and related parties). So be warned! The Flip is hip.