Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

Update: Meet the VMTN Experts

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As Steve just posted, the full list of VMTN Experts that will join the VMTN Experts Panel / Meet and greet at VMworld Europe has just been announced:

Jason Boche – Boche.net + VMTN Moderator
Thomas Bryant – VMTN Moderator
Steve Beaver – thevirtualblackhole.com + VMTN Moderator
Eric Sloof – NTPro.nl + VMTN/VMUG Contributor
Scott Herold – VMGuru.com + VMTN Contributor and author of VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide
Wil van Antwerpen – vi-toolkit.com + VMTN Contributor
Gabrie van Zanten – gabesvirtualworld.com + VMTN Contributor
Alan Renouf – teckinfo.blogspot.com + VMTN Contributor
Tom Howarth – PlanetVM.net + VMTN Moderator
Duncan Epping – Yellow-Bricks.com + VMTN Moderator

You will have the chance to ask questions to specific individuals on specific topics. Discuss your current or future design. Maybe you’ve got some weird problem that you just can’t seem to fix. Or well maybe you just want to shake hands… All is possible. Don’t be scared, come over and introduce yourselves!

The dates/times will be announced soon, the location already has been announced: The Community Lounge. We will try to have two sessions so everyone will be able to make it!

vCenter tasks time-out or ESX disconnects?

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I just received an email from a fellow consultant about a customer which had vCenter tasks time-out every once in a while. At times also ESX hosts got disconnected for no apparent reason at all. He discovered the following article by Richard Blythe aka VMware Wolf: ESX disconnects randomly or when doing VI client tasks from VC, task randomly timeout after a long idle time. Richard created a list of issues/errors that might be related to this issue:

  • ESX disconnects randomly from VirtualCenter
  • ESX disconnects when performing VI Client tasks from VirtualCenter.
  • Tasks randomly timeout after a long idle time
  • “An error occurred communicating to the remote host” pops up.

The article refers to an issue with vCenter Update 3 in combination with firewalls using state-ful inspection. The problem occurs because of SOAP timeouts, and this behavior did not exist in VC 2.0.x or 2.5 GA, as they used a different mechanism to communicate with ESX. The official KB article hasn’t been released yet but a temporary workaround has been published by Richard. If you run into any of the before mentioned issues head over to Richard’s website and try out the workaround until the fix or official KB article is released.

VMworld Sessions, which should I attend?

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With the enormous amount of sessions scheduled at VMworld Europe you are bound to miss out on some of the excellent ones. I browsed through the schedule and decided to write down 6 sessions which you should attend in my opinion, and which I will attend if I can escape the labs:

  • Chad Sakac – Sr Director VMware Strategic Alliance EMC  – Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware
  • Adam Young – Senior Member Technical Staff – DC08 – vCenter Server for Linux
  • Carter Shanklin – Product Manager – TA01 – Managing VMware With PowerShell
  • Kit Colbert – Senior Staff Engineer – TA07 – Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage and Other Memory Management Concepts
  • David Friedlander – Senior Product Manager – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability(vCenter Server Heartbeat!)
  • Scott Baker – vStorage integrations – TA17 – End-to-End Disaster Recovery Approach with Automated SRM Failback

Three of these six sessions contain information on yet to be released products, vCenter on Linux, vCenter Server Availability and vStorage integration and possibly SRM Failback(Just a rumor). The other three sessions are hosted by subject matter experts which I highly respect for their level of expertise and of which I’m certain that it will be mind blowing!

Write them down and don’t miss out on them!

SRM Failback?

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I get this question a lot:Does SRM have Failback capabilities? The answer is short but not simple, yes it does. Keep in mind that there’s no big red button labeled “Failback” which is the “not simple” part of the answer. Luckily for us the VMware Uptime Blog Team wrote an extensive article on how to do a failback with the current version of Site Recovery Manager. In short this is what one needs to do to failback:

  1. Reverse the replication direction in the storage layer to be from Site B to Site A
  2. Clean up the shadow virtual machines and protection groups on Site A
  3. Clean up the Recovery Plans configured on Site B
  4. Configure the protection group(s) on Site B
  5. Configure the Recovery Plans on Site A
  6. Test recovery from Site B to Site A
  7. Perform the recovery from Site B to Site A

Read the complete article on the Uptime Blog for all the details and show the article to your manager. It includes a table with an the estimated amount of time a failback would normally take manual vs SRM.

VMware View Open Client, test it!

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I think by now most of you have read Mike D’s scoop on the “VMware View Open Client“. If not here’s  a outtake from the press release:

VMware View Open Client is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (LGPL v 2.1) and is accessible from http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/. Some of the features included in this release support secure tunneling using SSL, two factor authentication with RSA SecurID, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client Add-On RPM package and a full command line interface. Support for the source code distribution is available through the VMware View Open Client community at: http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/.

I’ve just downloaded the PRM and installed it on OpenSuse 11.1 without a problem:

Now I would need to request a virtual desktop so I can actually use the client. 🙂