Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Desktop

How to show load balancing policy in the COS?

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Kelly Olivier had a good question on the VMTN Communities. How can I check from the Service Console which network load balancing I’m using? Of course his first bet was “vmware-vim-vmd” but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an option to show which load balancing policy is being used.

As far as I know there’s another way to show this:

cat /etc/vmware/esx.conf | grep "teamPolicy\/team"

This would return the following:

/net/vswitch/child0001/teamPolicy/team = "lb_srcid"

Possible load balancing policies:
lb_srcid = Virtual port id
lb_ip = IP Hash
lb_srcmac = MAC Address

If anyone knows of any other methods of showing this info let me know and/or contribute to the topic on VMTN.

Update:

@lamw just posted that it is possible to get this info from vmware-vim-cmd:

vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/net/vswitch_info | grep -E '(policy|name)'
      name = "vSwitch0",
         policy = (vim.host.NetworkPolicy) {
               policy = "loadbalance_ip",
      name = "vSwitch1",
         policy = (vim.host.NetworkPolicy) {
               policy = "loadbalance_srcid",
      name = "vSwitch5",
         policy = (vim.host.NetworkPolicy) {
               policy = "loadbalance_srcid",

VMware View 3.1 and new hot blog “That’s My View”

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A brand new version of View has just been released. You can find the download and the release notes here: VMware View 3.1 Download, Release Notes. There are a whole bunch of enhancements which definitely make this new release worth checking out. I’m not going to post them, just read the release notes.

Another thing I wanted to let you guys know about is this great “new” blog called That’s My View. That’s My View as the name already suggests mainly deals about Desktop Virtualization. Christoph Dommermuth started this blog but since then recruited multiple co-writers. If you want to keep up to date and get the latest tips and tricks I suggest you head over and subscribe to their RSS feed or just bookmark it.

vSphere HA Isolation Response

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As of VMware vCenter 2.5 Update 2 the HA default isolation response changed from “Power Off” to “Leave powered on”. A lot of people liked this new default setting because it would lower the chances of downtime due to a “false positive”. I’ve never been a fan though, I just don’t like using degraded hardware or a degraded ESX host for that matter.

Those that did like the change should take notice of the fact that with vSphere comes a new default isolation response:

Note that this change is only for new clusters, if you upgrade(d) your vCenter the selected isolation response will remain. For those of you who never looked into the setting “Shut down”, it uses VMware Tools to initiate a guest shut down. If the shut down does not complete within five minutes the VM will be powered off. These five minutes are a configurable setting, if you want to increase or decrease it add the following advanced option das.isolationShutdownTimeout with the new value in seconds.

Change VUM download location from https to http

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One of my customers asked me if it is possible to change the download protocol for VMware Update Manager into http. Due to security regulations they are not allowed to have traffic over https on their server backbone.

To achieve this you will need to change the vci-integrity.xml file in the Update Manager directory.

The default url is: https://www.vmware.com/PatchManagementSystem/patchmanagement

When you change the https into http it works:

http://www.vmware.com/PatchManagementSystem/patchmanagement

Cheers,

Marco

Running vSphere within Workstation will take up a lot of memory…

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As some of you noticed, when you install vSphere(ESX) within a VM you will need at least 2GB to get the installer started. Even when it has finished installing you can’t reduce the memory because the following error will occur:

I couldn’t find a way of  pre-adjusting the memory requirements but there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know, not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB laptop. (That’s what I actually use to create screenshots and prepare blog articles.)

ESX:

  1. Install vSphere(ESX) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the Service Console and type the following: 
    vi /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
  3. Change the following line to the desired value: 
    RequiredMemory=2064384
  4. Shutdown the virtual machine and change the VMs memory and boot it up!

Thanks Mark for the comment on ESXi:

  1. Install vSphere(ESXi) with at least 2 GB memory
  2. Login to the console via the “unsupported” method.
  3. Edit the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf and add the following line: 
    /vmkernel/minMemoryCheck = “false”
  4. Save the file and shutdown ESXi, change the memory and boot it up!

Don’t use any other editor than “vi”, there are multiple reports of nano wrecking the layout of the file which leads to an unrecoverable error during booting.