Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

BC-DR

Leave powered on…

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On Friday I got a question about the “Leave powered on” setting for HA. This setting is used for the Isolation Response. In other words, what does HA needs to do when a network isolation is detected. The question was pretty straight forward:”What happens when a host is isolated from the network or a host dies completely?”.

This question was asked because the default setting changed in ESX 3.5 / VirtualCenter 2.5 from “Power off vm” to “Leave powered on”. The old value was simple, what ever happens the VM will be powered off and restarted on a different host. [Read more…] about Leave powered on…

What’s in a name…

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This will probably take me a couple of weeks and maybe months to get fully adjusted to the new names VMware is going to use for their products.

Most of the name changes were already announced during VMworld. And there are three major ones in the actual list:

  1. VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter
  2. VDI → VMware View
  3. VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS

So most related products also had a revamp, Lifecycle Manager became VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager and so on. Makes sense to me with the Virtual Datacenter OS coming up.

So learn this list by heart and we will do a test tomorrow 😉

Backup your ESXi vm’s

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On the VMTN forum there’s a great topic on backing up your ESXi VM’s with a free solution. After a couple of pages of discussion and several solutions VMTN user lamw created a community document called “ghettoVCBni.sh – Free alternative for backing up VM’s for ESX 3.5+ and ESXi”.

This document contains a script and a list file. The list file should contain all the VM’s that need to be backed up. You can hook your ESXi box up to an NFS share and backup your VM’s to the NFS share. (NFS share could be a Windows Server for instance) You can set several variables to adjust the script to your needs:

  • Backup location
  • Sparse files(2GB chunks)
  • Backup Rotation
  • Directory naming scheme
  • NFS mount options

I haven’t personally tested the script but looking at the feedback it should work great. I think this is definitely worth checking out. So if you need a backup solution for your ESXi host and don’t want to spend money on 3rd party tools, check this one.

SRM, it’s just too easy

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You’ve probably also noticed a whole bunch of Site Recovery Manager(SRM) related articles popping up with people installing and configuring it in their home lab:

I love these articles because they are prove of the fact that SRM is really easy to set-up. But, and this actually scares me, it might seem a bit too easy. I said “too easy” because implementing a Disaster Recovery solution isn’t about the tools you are using. The tools, which will make your life a lot easier, are not the most important piece of the puzzle. Indeed PUZZLE.

There a whole bunch of SRM projects going on globally where VMware PSO, the department I work for, is assisting. These projects typically have a duration of 3 to 9 months, while it seems that with the ease of VMware Site Recovery Manager this should be a matter of days.

People tend to forget that the most important thing about Distaster Recovery / Business Continuity is the business. You need to know the organisation and IT environment very well before you can even start:

  • SLA’s? –> RPO / RTO?
  • Which services are most important to the business?
  • Which servers are part of the service?
  • In which order need these be started?
  • Which service have the highest priority?
  • Are there any dependencies between services?
  • What about the desktops?

And these are just a couple of questions one should normally have to answer before even going down the SRM road. The fact that SRM is so easy to setup makes it really hard to actually explain to a customer why a BCDR project will take much longer then he expected. And remember that although SRM is a great tool you would still need to create a Disaster Recovery Plan, SRM will be part of the plan but it needs to be in place!

I’m not saying that you should not go down the BCDR / SRM road, but be sure to be prepared. (read this e-book, it’s good and it’s free) Get to know your “business”, and be prepared for a long engagement… cause my experience is that normally people have a hard time answering really obvious questions.

You will talk to a lot of people who don’t have a clue of what the core business services / applications actually are. And the same goes for the sys admins, dependencies? Why would you want to know about that and how would I know?

Do you know which questions to ask, do you know how to get the right answers… This is why BCDR subject matter experts are needed for SRM engagements, so before you start give VMware a call, or your local VAC partner for that matter and make sure you get the best out of the SRM product.

VM Template best practices (Linux)

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I was just reading up on my Google Reader. A lot of information been dropped over the last couple of days and more and more people are getting active on the VMware blogoshere. One of the articles that really caught my attention was the “VM Template best practices (Linux)” by Leo Raikhman.

Leo did a great job in explaining how to build up a decent Template. Leo even included a way to regularly zero out the Linux Filesystem for the purpose of VCB image level dumps with small footprints.

And although Leo’s article talks about Linux only this also applies for Windows. If you will be doing VCB then remember to zero-out your filesystem every once in a while. Linux doesn’t scrub the sectors where the files resided and neither does Windows. I wrote an article on how to do this from within Windows. Yes you can do it by hand via the “shrink disk” option in VMware Tools, but as Leo already pointed out there’s no way of scheduling that one, as far I have discovered.

So most of the stuff written about in Leo’s article applies to Windows, yeah also the partition alignment! DO IT! But the zero-out procedure won’t work, I’ve wrote one a while back and here it is:

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Dim fso, d, dc
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set dc = fso.Drives
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\EulaAccepted", 1, "REG_DWORD"
For Each d in dc
If d.DriveType = 2 Then
Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'
Return = WshShell.Run("sdelete -c " & d, 1, TRUE)
End If
Next
Set WshShell = Nothing

Be sure to download Sdelete before you start, and remember that this script also does a defrag. If you are running “thin” disks than doing a defrag might not be the smartest thing to do, if so just delete the following line from the vb script:

Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'