Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

Running vSphere within Workstation will take up a lot of memory…

· ·

As some of you noticed, when you install vSphere(ESX) within a VM you will need at least 2GB to get the installer started. Even when it has finished installing you can’t reduce the memory because the following error will occur:

I couldn’t find a way of  pre-adjusting the memory requirements but there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know, not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB laptop. (That’s what I actually use to create screenshots and prepare blog articles.)

ESX:

  1. Install vSphere(ESX) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the Service Console and type the following: 
    vi /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
  3. Change the following line to the desired value: 
    RequiredMemory=2064384
  4. Shutdown the virtual machine and change the VMs memory and boot it up!

Thanks Mark for the comment on ESXi:

  1. Install vSphere(ESXi) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the console via the “unsupported” method.
  3. Edit the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf and add the following line: 
    /vmkernel/minMemoryCheck = “false”
  4. Save the file and shutdown ESXi, change the memory and boot it up!

Don’t use any other editor than “vi”, there are multiple reports of nano wrecking the layout of the file which leads to an unrecoverable error during booting.

VCDX007

· ·

It’s almost 01:00 so I’m keeping it short. The news was already published on twitter by my friend @stevie_chambers anyway so half of you already know… During the VMware vSummit award dinner I was awarded the VCDX certification. I’m officially a VCDX and I’m number 007!

I will probably have a picture up here tomorrow…. I’m really excited about this as you can imagine!

HyTrust Appliance, the community release

· ·

I wrote about HyTrust a month ago. Today HyTrust announced a community version. In short, for up to three host you can use a fully featured version of the Hytrust Appliance for free…

HyTrust Appliance, Community Edition is now available for download now as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community. To join the community free of charge, go to http://www.hytrust.com/community/register. Support for Community Edition is provided by the Community via online forum participation and direct community member interaction.

You can find the full press release here.

Now, back to the VMware vSummit again… and I hope to do some technical blogging again soon.

Unique LUN IDs?

· ·

I posted an article on LUN IDs and VCB in November 2008. It still seems to be a misconception that ESX uses LUN IDs to uniquely identify a LUN. As of 3.5 this isn’t the case anymore. When an array has “NAA Identifier” capabilities these will be used for uniquely identifying LUNs. And yes most arrays, currently, have these capabilities.

The NAA ID is also what’s being used to identify SAN LUN snapshot/clones by the way. ESX 3.5 compares the LUN ID to the metadata of the VMFS header, if it’s a different ID ESX knows it can’t be the same LUN that’s being presented and ignores it. If you do want to use the LUN you would either have to resignature it or set “disallowsnapshotlun” to “0” of course…

Keep in mind, it’s still a best practice to use consistent LUN IDs throughout your environment. ESX doesn’t care anymore, but your life is a Sys Admin will be a lot easier if you use unique and consistent LUN numbering.