Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

The dawn of a new era

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While most virtualization vendors are still catching up on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, VMware prepares for the official unveiling of the next generation of virtualization software! April 21 – 2009, mark that date! It’s the dawn of a new era! I know that it’s way over the top, but you can’t half imagine how excited I am about this upcoming announcement!

Click the picture for more details, and be sure to sign up!
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Just some highlights of what VMware is launching.

  • Saves enough energy to power Denmark for 10 days
  • Frees up enough storage to host 50 times the current volume of photos on Facebook
  • Offers 4 times more memory per virtual machine
  • Handles 8,900 transactions per second in a virtual machine
  • Handles 3 times eBay’s daily traffic on a single server
  • Supports 4 times more operating systems than the competition

April 21, 2009 – 9:00 – 10:30 AM, PDT – Via live Simulcast – Register NOW!
(thanks Mike for letting me borrow your pic and bullet points!)

Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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I was exploring the next version of ESX / vCenter again today and did a Storage VMotion via the vSphere client. I decided to take a couple of screenshots to  get you guys acquainted with the new look/layout.

Doing a Storage VMotion via the GUI is nothing spectacular cause we all have used the 3rd party plugins. But changing the disk from thick to thin is. With vSphere it will be possible to migrate to thin provisioned disks, which can and will save disk space and might me desirable for servers that have low disk utilization and disk changes. [Read more…] about Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

Pre-installing the vCenter agent?!

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You might wonder why you would want to pre-install the vCenter agent on an ESX box? Well if you have several remote offices which need to be connected to a central vCenter Server it will take a while before these agents are pushed and installed. Especially if the connection between these sites isn’t as fast as most of us are used to at home. (I’m talking 128KB here for instance…) One of my colleagues, as mentioned in a previous article, is doing a major roll out of ESX. With their current bandwidth adding an ESX server to the central vCenter Server took over 20 minutes. With the vCenter agent pre-installed this was cut down to only 2 minutes. That will save you a lot of time when you need to do over 200 hosts…

  • On the vCenter Server, look for the following files in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\upgrade 
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215.sig
  • copy the files to the ESX host and run the following commands: 
    sh vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    service mgmt-vmware restart
  • wait 5 min…

Protecting VMFS Datastores

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A couple of months ago Mike La Spina wrote a cool article titled “Understanding VMFS volumes“. This articles explained the concept of UUID’s and even explained how you could create a backup of your VMFS metadata. I haven’t personally ever encountered VMFS metadata corruption but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Today Mike wrote a follow up which contains a script that can backup your metadata on a regular base by using cron. The script does a DD of each VMFS volume header and copies the vh.sf file of the VMFS volume to local disk. If you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about I suggest Head over to Mike’s blog and read the articles!

It can’t be a coincidence that the script has been released shortly after VMware released the VMware VMFS Volume Management PDF… And is it a coincidence that Eric Sloof wrote about VMFS metadate files yesterday? Eric’s also posted a link to Mostafa Khalil’s VMworld 2007 presentation on VMFS volumes and how to backup metadata by the way.

All very useful documents/articles if you want to know the ins and out of the VMFS filesystem.

Update: VMware Health Check Report 0.94

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William Lam posted an update of his Health Check script on the VMTN Communities. I’ve been using this script extensively at several customer sites together with VIMA. Here are the release notes:

03-24-2009 – v0.9.4
Fixes:
-There was a bug reported by Duncan Epping and others regarding hosts that were appearing in the wrong cluster with respect to the portgroup listings, this should be fixed.

Enhancements:
-Detail Hardware Health sensor readings provided by CIM
-CDP Summary (individual cdp.pl available)