This week I implemented a couple of Dell 2950 Servers which contained an Intel quad-port nic. The physical switch ports were setup as a trunk so I used VST(Virtual Switch Tagging). I combined the onboard Broadcom ports with the Intel quad-port nics to have the most redundant setup. When I started testing the HA and DRS functionality I noticed that not everything worked like expected. After some basic troubleshooting it seemed that about half of the packets going via the Intel quad-port nics got dropped. [Read more…] about Intel quad-port nic and VST
Thinstalled VirtualCenter client
My colleague Edwin had some spare time on his hands and decided to Thinstall the VirtualCenter client. I just tested the client and it works great. Starting the client is as fast, and maybe even faster, as a normal install. Check his article on Thinstallguru.com. Let’s hope VMware will also provide a Thinstalled version soon of the client, fully supported and compatible with Wine for the Linux users. I also heard that Thinstall is busy including Wine code into the Thinstall kernel for compatibility reasons. Hope they will fix this soon.
Introduction training Application Delivery: Installation, Isolation and Virtualization
For the readers of my blog in the Benelux area:
Nowadays Application Delivery is a hot item to talk about! On monday 28 january 2008 Ictivity Training starts with the first introduction training: “The facts about Application Delivery”.In this training different products like Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid), Citrix Application Streaming Feature and Thinstall VS will be compared to each other.
The subjects are:Overview Application Delivery:
- Application Installation
- Application Isolation
- Application Virtualization
Application Installation: The way we work now!
New technologies like Isolation/Virtualization
Demonstration of Microsoft SoftGrid and Thinstall
If you want to know more about this training you can look at the Ictivity Training website, Edwin Friesen of Thinstallguru.com is the instructor for this course.
Rescan all vmhba’s at once with the esxcfg-rescan command
Using the console it’s very easy to rescan a specific vmhba which can be useful when you are troubleshooting. For lazy people like me it’s disturbing that you have to type the command twice if you want to rescan both HBA’s. Well, as of version 3.5 VMware introduced a new setting in Advanced configuration section in the VirtualCenter Client:
Go to “Configuration” of the ESX Host
Click on “Advanced”
Click on “Scsi”
Set “Scsi.ScsiRescanAllHbas” to 1
This can also be done from the command line:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Scsi/ScsiRescanAllHbas
Now you don’t need to type “esxcfg-rescan vmhba1” and “esxcfg-rescan vmhba2” anymore, when rescanning an HBA all cards will be rescanned.
Clone and roll out template fail with “failed to connect to host”
Recently I implemented ESX 3.5 with VirtualCenter 2.5. After I installed the ESX Hosts and the VirtualCenter server the customer told me that I had to change the ip-addresses of the service console. I removed the ESX hosts from the VirtualCenter server, removed the vswif of both hosts with “esxcfg-vswif -d” and created it again with the correct ip-address and subnet. I added both hosts to the cluster again and every thing seemed to work again… until I decided to rollout a template. It took over 10 minutes before the error “failed to connect to host” appeared. [Read more…] about Clone and roll out template fail with “failed to connect to host”