Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

BC-DR

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>

SRM: Changing the admin email address after installation

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One of my customers asked me how they could change the administrator email address after the installation of SRM. He turned the GUI upside down but couldn’t find it anywhere. Extension.xml is the configuration xml file where you can change the Administrator Email:

<adminEmail>admin@yellow-bricks.com</adminEmail>

VCB Management Console 1.0.6 Beta

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@lamw pointed me out via twitter to the “diy” VCB Management Console. The “vcbMC” is a front end  for scheduling and creating backup jobs based on VMware Consolidated Backup. As “athlon_crazy” points out you don’t need to remember all the VCB commands and parameters. You can use vcbMC to browse all your VM’s and back them up according to the schedule you created:

I haven’t tested it myself so far unfortunately, make sure to test the results of the backup.

HA enhancements, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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Let’s start with a screenshot:

These are the properties of an HA cluster, as you can see there are two sections that changed:

  1. “Enable Host Monitoring” is a brand new feature. Anyone who did network maintenance while HA was enabled knows why this feature will come in handy. Those that didn’t: Isolation response! If ESX is unable to send or receive it’s heartbeat and can’t ping it’s default isolation response address it will shutdown all VM’s. To avoid this behavior you can switch of HA for a specific host with this new feature. In just four words: Maintenance mode for HA.
  2. Besides the amount of host failures a cluster can tolerate you can also specify a percentage. With the “host failures” option VMware uses the highest values of CPU and Memory reservations to calculate the amount of slots. (For more on slot / slot size read the Resource Management Guide for ESX 3.5) With the new option “Percentage of cluster resources” this isn’t the case. This new option uses the actual reservation of the VM and calculates the total percentage of resources used based on these calculations. If no reservation have been made it uses the default 256Mhz / 256MB reservation. In other words, you will be more flexible and will get a higher consolidation ratio. If the default reservation values are to low you can always use the advanced options to increase it. Another new option is “specify a failover host”. This option can be compared to “das.defaultfailoverhost”. The good thing about this option is that the designated host will be used for fail-over only. DRS will not migrate VM’s to this host, and it’s not possible to start VM’s on this host.

Update to several SRM SRA’s

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Just noticed that several Storage Replication Adapter’s(SRA) have been updated over the last couple of weeks. For those using one of these specific SRA’s it might be beneficial to update:

  1. EMC RecoverPoint 3.1 Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.2.1 | Released 03/17/2009
  2. Storage Array Adapter for IBM N-Series
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 03/18/2009
  3. IBM DS4000 / DS5000 Series Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 01.00.35.12 | Released 03/06/2009
  4. NetApp Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 03/06/2009
  5. HP EVA Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 02/11/2009
  6. IBM DS8000 Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.0 | Released 02/13/2009
  7. IBM SVC Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0 | Released 02/13/2009
  8. XP XP Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.00.05 | Released 02/02/2009