Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

vSphere suite

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A whole new set of products have been released today. Besides Lab Manager 4.0 VMware also released Chargeback 1.0 and Appspeed 1.0. Cloud talk is hot these days, if we are talking about tools which enable cloud computing we are most definitely talking about these “new” products. Take a look at the Lab Manager page and notice that “lab manager” in the bottom diagram is already floating around in a cloud!

VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0 | release notes

Get accurate cost measurement, analysis and reporting with VMware vCenter Chargeback, part of the VMware family of management products. Create cost transparency and accountability so business owners and IT can understand the actual cost of the virtual infrastructure required to support business services.

VMware vCenter Appspeed 1.0 | release notes

Guarantee performance SLAs to the business and perform “Assured Migrations” as you measure performance both before and after virtualizing an application.  VMware vCenter AppSpeed inspects traffic flowing over the vSwitch, discovers and maps the environment, monitors performance against SLAs and enables root cause analysis.

VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4.0 | release notes

Provide on-demand access and automated management of the internal cloud for dev/test with VMware vCenter Lab Manager. Application owners, development, QA, and training teams can deploy, capture and share multi-tier application environments in seconds while IT remains in administrative control. Lab Manager saves time, simplifies administration of fast changing environments and enables project teams to get to market faster.

vSphere ESXi and the update manager

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I was playing around with vSphere ESXi 4.0 and the Update Manager. As Jason Boche already reported several patches have been released and I wanted to test Update Manager. After downloading all the patches I noticed that there was a patch regarding the Cisco Nexus 1000v.

Although I did not have the 1000v installed Update Manager did want to install the patch. Kind of weird because why install the patch when you are not using the plugin? I decided to exclude it from my baseline to make sure I did not install it.

I was lucky to notice it because according to this KB article it can and probably will cause issues. If you did install it read the KB article on how to remove the patch!

Now this made me rethink my patching strategy. Normally I just install every single patch out there to make sure I am running the latest and greatest version, but apparently this is not the best practice anymore. My recommendation: review your patches and if it doesn’t apply to you exclude them!

VMware Data Recovery 1.0.1 released!

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Although the VMware download section has not been updated VMware Data Recovery 1.0.1 has been officially released. Click on VMware Data Recovery 1.0 in the download section and you will be presented with the following:

Latest Released Version: 1.0.1 | 07/09/09 | 176771

You can find the release notes here. I want to highlight the following resolved issue as it has been discussed by several bloggers(eric sloof, scott lowe):

Large Temporary Files Removed as Expected
Data Recovery modifies virtual machines’ vmdk files’ settings so a snapshot can be created for backup purposes. In the past, after the backup has been created, the vmdk file’s settings was sometimes left configured for snapshots even after the backup was complete. This led to these virtual machines being left in snapshot mode while accumulating snapshots that were undetected by vSphere Client. This process has been redesigned so that these temporary files are no longer be left behind. In previous versions of Data Recovery, this issue can be resolved by following the process described in the knowledge base article titled “Delete ddb.delete entries and snapshots left behind by Vmware Data Recovery”.

vCenter 2.5 Update 5 released!

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VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5 – includes Converter Enterprise

Latest Version: 2.5 Update 5 | 2009/07/10

The list of resolved issues is quite short this time. But a really important issue has been resolved and that’s why I recommend everyone who’s still running vCenter 2.5 to look in to this upgrade!
Support for High Consolidation in VMware HA Clusters – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 includes significant performance and scalability improvements to VMware HA. Use VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 for environments with more than 35 virtual machines per host in an HA cluster.
For information on the ESX Server host settings required for this scalability improvement, see ESX Server host settings required for environments with up to 80 virtual machines per host in an HA Cluster (KB 1012002).
This is especially important for those with a high server consolidation rate or for instance for VDI. Make sure to read the KB article cause you will need to change several settings!

Change the default pathing policy to round robin

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I just received an email from one one of my readers, Mike Laskowski, he wanted to share the following with us:

I have over 100+ LUN’s in my environment. Round Robin is officially supported on ESX4. In the past we had a script that would manually load balance the LUN’s across FAs. ESX4 has a different way to balance the LUN’s to round robin. What you can do is build the ESX server and then in the CLI do:

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –psp VMW_PSP_RR –satp VMW_SATP_SYMM

Note: You should do this before presenting LUN’s and adding datastore. If you already have LUN’s presented and datastore added, then you do that command and then you’ll have to reboot the ESX server to take effect. This will make Round Robin the default on all LUN’s. It would take forever if you had to manually change each LUN.

THX Mike Laskowski

Please note that this example is specifically for the “SYMM” SATP. SATP stands for Storage Array Type Plugin and Symm stands for EMC DMX Symmetrix. In case you are using a different array find out what the SATP is you are using and change it accordingly.