I finally received the confirmation I was really waiting for “VMworld Europe 2009: You are approved to attend“. It seems that I will be helping out at the SRM Lab. Check this “hands on lab” promotion video by the way. For those that attended the labs during VMworld Europe 2008, it’s not the same format as last year, the format has been changed completely to self-paced labs. Schedule your own lab sessions so you don’t miss out on the Deep Dive sessions, which I personally recommend. Some will really make your brain hurt! That’s the way we like it,
Archives for 2009
Windows 7 on a Mac!
Most people will agree that Apple products have certain kind of coolness. Most people will also agree that VMware Fusion has a certain kind of coolness, especially the Unity feature. Combine this coolness with the Windows 7 beta and you’ve got one hell of a combo.
I can imagine you don’t want to spent a lot of time on figuring out how to install Windows 7 within a Fusion VM, lucky you…. Team Fusion wrote an extensive blog article on how to install Windows 7 within a VM, and not only text and screenshots but also a video. Team Fusion is definitely one of the most active bloggers Team within VMware, keep up the excellent work guys! Now, check out the full article, even if you don’t own a Mac! And while you’re there Digg It!
No excuse anymore…
There’s no excuse anymore to wait with getting your VMworld Europe tickets. VMworld Europe just announced the first bunch of of sessions! Be sure to check it out here and pick up your ticket now so you don’t miss out on the good stuff!
FastSCP vs WinSCP
The last couple of days I’ve read a whole bunch of tweets and blogs on Veeam’s FastSCP. Everyone highly praises FastSCP because it is really really fast compared to WinSCP. I’ve been testing it myself in the past and indeed it is. With the release of 3.0 Beta that probably hasn’t changed a bit.
Keep in mind though that FastSCP is faster than WinSCP because FastSCP doesn’t encrypt the data that is being copied. WinSCP does encrypt the data and I consider WinSCP to be more secure than FastSCP. FastSCP does use an SSH control channel though. An SSH control channel can best be described as a secure channel which is used to pass user/password/port information. In addition to the ports used for SSH other ports need to be opened up for FastSCP to work, which increases the attack surface of the ESX host. Some of you might have security policies in place, this might be the time to start reading it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m telling you not to use FastSCP cause it’s a wonderful tool, but it might not be what you are looking for. If you do require an encrypted file transfer WinSCP would be the way to go. WinSCP even gives you the option to pick between the different encryption types. In other words, think before you use…
Storage Replication Adapter: discoverLuns…
Today I was implementing Site Recovery Manager with a colleague(Thanks Andy!!). During the configuration of the HP EVA SRA(Storage Replication Adapter) we received the following error:
discoverLuns script failed to execute properly
The error indicates that that the first part of the SRA configuration “discoverArrays” worked but when discovering the LUN’s and it’s replica’s it bailed out(23%). So after checking the config files and log files we decided to run the scriptfile, that the SRA uses, manually and see what happens.
First we created an XML file which feeds the script. The XML file contained the following, which can be copied from the SRM Log files:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>
<Command>
<Name>discoverLuns</Name>
<ConnectSpec>
<Name>HP StorageWorks EVA Virtualization Adapter</Name>
<Address>san.yellow-bricks.com</Address>
<Username>user</Username>
<Password>password</Password>
</ConnectSpec>
<ArrayId>YB-SAN-01</ArrayId>
<OutputFile>C:\TEMP\SAN.Log</OutputFile>
<LogLevel>trivia</LogLevel>
</Command>
Now we were able to run the script with the XML file as input:
perl command.pl < file.xml
In our case running the script manually with the XML file as input didn’t return an error. This gave us the idea that it might be account or permissions related. During the configuration of the SRA we entered domain credentials, which were the same as the account being used during the manual run of the script. So it wasn’t the SRA account that was causing these problems.
After diving into the configuration we stumbled upon the SRM Service. The SRM service was started with a Local System account. We decided to change the account used for the Service from “Local” to a domain account… and indeed problem solved.
One would expect this to be part of the SRA documentation, but it isn’t. We contacted VMware Support and they had the same configuration running in their test environment except for the fact that they weren’t using AD authentication. In their case the Local System account just worked fine.
I’ve emailed Support all the log files and according to them our suspicion was correct. It seems to be related to the HP EVA SRA. The HP SRA seems to use the wrong account for authentication at one point during the script. Next up: Contact HP Support and let’s see if they can a) fix this or b) update their documentation.