Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

vSphere Linkage

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There’s hardly any point in covering the announcements of today. There are so many people blogging right now that no one will have the chance to keep up with reading. That’s why I decided not to write or copy any of the announcements. Of course I just might give my thoughts on the webcast this evening but that’s probably it… Anyway, I divided it up in two major sections “News” and “Previews” and within these sections VMware and of course “Bloggers Community”. I will keep updating this post, make sure to visit it again. Here we go:

News / Coverage

VMware

Bloggers Community

Previews

VMware

  • –

Bloggers Community

Oracle to buy Sun

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What more can I say than W O W:

Source (for full aricle)
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

Storage views, exploring the next version of ….

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I was playing around with vSphere this weekend while replying to topics on the VMTN Community. One of the things often asked is storage reporting… (Snapshot info / Disk utilization etc) With ESX 3.5 / vCenter 2.5 it needs to be scripted and can be integrated into vCenter by using custom fields, but as you can imagine not everyone would like to add custom functionality to vCenter.

As of the next version of ESX/vCenter aka vSphere you can just click the storage tab on a host or VM. The following is the storage tab of a VM, click the pic for a large version:

And of course the storage view on a host:

And of course the storage view on a host:

And what about the new map functionality, drilling down to HBA level

SRM: Automatically rename your datastore back

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When doing a failover with SRM your VMFS Datastores get labeled with a “snap-xxxxxxx-name” because they’ve been resignatured. Mike Laverick gave this tip on the VMTN forum which enables you to automatically rename your datastores to it’s original name again:

Edit the vmware-dr.xml file in the C:\Program Files\Site Recovery Manager\Config directory and look for a line that reads:

  • <fixRecoveredDatastoreNames>false</fixRecoveredDatastoreNames>

Change it to:

  • <fixRecoveredDatastoreNames>true</fixRecoveredDatastoreNames>

Virtual Machines appear to be running or registered on multiple ESX Servers

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I was doing my daily round on the VMTN Forums and noticed this topic on VMs flickering between ESX hosts. I’ve personally never witnessed this and didn’t even knew it was a known issue. Luckily Troy Clavell pointed the topic starter out to a KB article related to this exact issue. Apparently it’s being caused by the fact that the VM is registered on two hosts at the same time.

Symptoms:

  • After one of the following, a Virtual Machine appears as being registered on two ESX Servers:
    • A VMotion fails to complete correctly or times out in VirtualCenter
    • A DRS issue where virtual machines are VMotioned automatically in quick succession
    • When a machine is powered on during VMware HA failover.
    • The Service Console on an ESX host is low on memory starving the vpxa process
  • In VirtualCenter, you see the virtual machine as appearing on one ESX Server for a few seconds, then it seems to be on the other.
  • The virtual machine may appear to jump back and forth among different ESX hosts.

I’m not going to copy/paste the solution cause the KB article will probably change over time, but it’s most definitely worth looking into… it does sound like something that can happen to all of us.