Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for February 2009

New vCenter add-on announced: vCenter Heartbeat

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VMware just announced a new add-on for vCenter:

Source
As customers expand their use of VMware, maintaining a highly available management infrastructure is quickly becoming a key requirement. Learn about VMware’s new availability solution for vCenter Server and how it expands infrastructure and services sales opportunities.

The title of the webex is “Introducing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat”

In other words, there’s an add on coming up that provides high availability for your vCenter Server. We will have to wait until tomorrow before more details are announced!

I just also noticed that there will be a session at VMworld Europe on vCenter Server Heartbeat:

DC10 – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability (by David Friedlander VMware Product Manager)

Blades and HA / Cluster design

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After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.

The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.

Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time.  [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design

UPS(APC) initiated shutdown of ESXi

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I’ve been waiting for APC to create a VIMA ready package of their PowerChute Network Shutdown software for a while now. It’s supposed to be released soon but I haven’t heard a release date yet.

For everyone that can’t wait VMTN User “jholland” created this PDF “How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS“. It’s a great creative solution that shuts down your vm’s and host when a power failure occurs keep in mind you need a UPS with network management capabilities. In short:

  1. add a script to your ESXi box and enable ssh with public key authentication
  2. add a debian VM
  3. install APC UPS daemon
  4. edit the APC UPS daemon config file which calls the script(1.) via ssh/public key

I guess the APC solution will work in a similar way by the way, but the APC solution will be full supported and this solution clearly isn’t cause you would need to alter ESXi. (The APC solution will use the RCLI/Perl toolkit probably)

I can imagine you would want to use it anyway. Thanks to jholland for creating this PDF, it’s his first post I hope there’s more to come! (By the way, it isn’t that difficult to apply this information on VIMA. I might test it out this week and update you guys)

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.3

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RVTools is getting more and more the attention and appreciation it deserves. This also means that more and more people are emailing Rob with all kinds of feature requests. Version 2.3 contains a couple bug fixes and a couple of cool new additions:

  • New vHost tab. The “vHost” tab displays for each host the name, datacenter name, cluster name, CPU model, CPU speed, number of CPU’s, CPU usage %, total amount of memory, memory usage %, memory reserved for the service console, number of NIC’s, number of HBA’s, number of VM’s running on this host and the ESX version of this host.
  • All tab pages (except the datastore tab) now also display the datacenter name and cluster name.
  • New VMFS “Block size”, “Max Blocks”, “Number of extents”, “Major Version number”, “Version string” and “VMFS upgradeable” fields on the vStorage tab.
  • New “Virtual machine version string” field on the vInfo tab page.
  • Divide by zero bug on vDatastore tab is now fixed.
  • The vInfo fields “upgrade policy” and “Sync.time with host” which where introduced in version 2.2 caused some problems in combination with the 2.0 version of the VI API. This is now fixed!

Now head over to Rob’s website and download the new version. Don’t forget to give Rob feedback!

vExpert, last chance…

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Today is your last chance to nominate your favorite VMTN Moderators or Virtualization Bloggers(PlanetV12n or not) for the vExpert award:

VMware vExperts are recognized for their service to the greater virtualization community. We’ve gotten a number of applications and nominations from both inside and outside of VMware. If you would like to apply yourself or nomination someone for consideration, the deadline for applications is midnight California time, Friday, February 6, 2009. We plan to announce the award winners later this month. Good luck!

[Update: just to be perfectly crystal clear, Friday night 23:59:59 PST, which is UTC – 8 hours. We might not pull the form down right away, because I’m not sure our web team will appreciate having to pull it at midnight Friday after a hard week of work. If the form is still there, I’ll probably still accept your application, but I wouldn’t be counting on that. It’s an easy application, so I’d stop procrastinating at this point if I were you.]

Head over to the vExpert website and make sure your favorite bloggers has at least one nomination.