Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

VMware ESX(i) 3.5 U4 released!

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VMware has just released ESX Update 4. You can find the release notes here. I’ve picked a couple of bullets which I think are important, please read the release notes for the other improvements and known issues!

Be sure to also read the compatability matrix, ESX(i) 3.5 U4 requires vCenter 2.5 U2 or higher, and be sure to check if your Hardware Management Agent is still supported.

Newly supported features:

Newly supported Guest Operating Systems:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Server Edition (32-bit and 64-bit).
  • Windows Preinstallation Environment 2.0 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Newly supported SAS/SATA controllers:

  • PMC 8011 (for SAS and SATA drives)
  • Intel ICH9
  • Intel ICH10
  • CERC 6/I SATA/SAS Integrated RAID Controller (for SAS and SATA drivers)
  • HP Smart Array P700m Controller

Newly supported Storage Arrays:

  • Sun StorageTek 2530 SAS Array
  • Sun Storage 6580 Array
  • Sun Storage 6780 Array

Expanded support for the Enhanced VMXNET driver :

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (64-bit)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Web Edition
  • Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional (32-bit)

SRM: Running a script from a Recovery Plan

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I got a question today from one of my customers on how to run a script from an SRM Recovery Plan. They tried everything but never got it working. It’s fairly easy, although you would need to take a couple of things in consideration. And reading the SRM Admin Guide page 52 and 53 wouldn’t harm you as well. But then again we’re talking technical people here, who reads the manual? (Besides Mike Laverick aka Mr RTFM of course. Mike, btw, also recently released the third chapter of his SRM book for free, which is most definitely worth reading!!)

I guess the most important things to remember if you want to run commands/batch files from SRM are:

  • SRM can only execute .exe or .com files, if you need to run a batch file do the following: 
    c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c c:\yellow-bricks.bat
  • Scripts must reside on the host where the SRM server is installed.
  • SRM callouts to batch files or commands run as the local administrator of the SRM server host, and not as the user logged into the VI Client.
  • A recovery terminates if a command or script exits with a non‐zero status.
  • If the script call out takes longer than 300 seconds to complete it will be terminated. You can increase this by changing/adding the following line in vmware-dr.xml with the desired value: 
    <calloutCommandLineTimeout>600</calloutCommandLineTimeout>

Managing iSCSI startup with Lefthand and their VSA

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Do you have a LeftHand Networks VSA or are you using LeftHand’s VSA for demoing purposes?  Would you like your ESX to shutdown faster, and in fact when it starts up to have the VSA started, and then have the VM’s held on the VSA to be automatically started?

If you have a VSA now, while it may auto start, the VM’s on it will not.  Plus, your ESX host shutdown will take longer than normal.  All of this can be addressed by a great script that LeftHand’s Product Manager Adam C. has posted on the LeftHand Community forums.  Find out more at  http://vsaforum.lefthandnetworks.com/Topic244-9-1.aspx .

Source: Email newsletter, Michael White – Specialist SE.

Protecting VMFS Datastores

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A couple of months ago Mike La Spina wrote a cool article titled “Understanding VMFS volumes“. This articles explained the concept of UUID’s and even explained how you could create a backup of your VMFS metadata. I haven’t personally ever encountered VMFS metadata corruption but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Today Mike wrote a follow up which contains a script that can backup your metadata on a regular base by using cron. The script does a DD of each VMFS volume header and copies the vh.sf file of the VMFS volume to local disk. If you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about I suggest Head over to Mike’s blog and read the articles!

It can’t be a coincidence that the script has been released shortly after VMware released the VMware VMFS Volume Management PDF… And is it a coincidence that Eric Sloof wrote about VMFS metadate files yesterday? Eric’s also posted a link to Mostafa Khalil’s VMworld 2007 presentation on VMFS volumes and how to backup metadata by the way.

All very useful documents/articles if you want to know the ins and out of the VMFS filesystem.

Update: VMware Health Check Report 0.94

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William Lam posted an update of his Health Check script on the VMTN Communities. I’ve been using this script extensively at several customer sites together with VIMA. Here are the release notes:

03-24-2009 – v0.9.4
Fixes:
-There was a bug reported by Duncan Epping and others regarding hosts that were appearing in the wrong cluster with respect to the portgroup listings, this should be fixed.

Enhancements:
-Detail Hardware Health sensor readings provided by CIM
-CDP Summary (individual cdp.pl available)