How cool is this video about Distributed Power Management, it demonstrates how DPM works and what the possible utility savings could be. Just watch it:
Server
VMware Communities Roundtable podcast tonight!
I’m really looking forward to the podcast tonight. We’ve got Chad Sakac from EMC joining in to elaborate on topics like:
- What VMware, EMC and Cisco are doing together around the Next Generation Datacenter
- What’s coming in vStorage
- Reference Architectures for Tier 1 applications like Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint
- What we’re seeing around Disaster Recovery for VMware
Most of you probably discovered Chad’s blog by now, if you didn’t check it out. Especially his post on vStorage gives you an idea what Chad and his team are working on. But also the more technical posts like this one on VMFS Resignaturing contain really valuable info.
Anyway join us on the podcast. Wednesdays noon PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT. You can find live Connect info here. (For those like me having trouble converting time to your time zone click here.)
NFS.LockDisable what should it be 1 or 0
There has been a lot of discussion(check Scott’s take on this) around this advanced NFS setting called “NFS.LockDisable”. In short, you can disable the locking mechanism on NFS volumes with this setting.
In the past NetApp had a best practices document which stated that it should be disabled by setting it to “1”. But, as some noticed this can and probably will result in corrupt file-systems. So this “best practice” mysteriously disappeared from the NetApp VI3 Best Practices guide and a KB Article with the VMware best practice on this setting popped up.
So if you did set “NFS.LockDisable” to 1 please change it back to “0”.
It might be beneficial to also implement the “prefvmx.ConsolidateDeleteNFSLocks” that Scott discussed along with patch ESX350-200808401-BG. This setting is to avoid long delays when deleting ESX snapshots. This can take up to 30 seconds, which is quite long compared to iSCSI or FC. So you should only implement this fix if you run NFS and do VMware snapshots at them same time and are experiencing these dalays.
I do recommend that everyone with an NFS filer takes a look at the NetApp best practices document because it does contain valuable information, but before you apply it besure that it doesn’t conflict with a VMware best practice!
Additional user account in a scripted install
When doing a scripted install it might be useful to create additional user accounts. You can easily do this with the following command:
/usr/sbin/useradd -m -p ‘\$1$ZRo.R0\$1Lk8iA0AaqVFlojm.BTmr/’ -c administrator -g users -G users -d /home/administrator -s /bin/bash administrator
The “-p” value is the encrypted password. You can create them by using the tool “grub-md5-crypt” on a linux box. Just type “grub-md5-crypt” and type your password twice and it returns a md5 encrypted password which you can use in your scripted install. Keep in mind that there can be special characters in your password, if you do a scripted install this will be misinterpreted and you these characters need a preceding “\”.
Which VM is connected to an RDM?
A friend of mine asked me if there was a way to find out which VM’s were connected to a certain RDM disk. I’ve been looking all over but couldn’t find a simple command to do this. So I ended up on the forums and found a powershell script which creates a list with all the necessary info one would like to have:
$report = @()
$vms = Get-VM | Get-View
foreach($vm in $vms){
foreach($dev in $vm.Config.Hardware.Device){
if(($dev.gettype()).Name -eq “VirtualDisk”){
if(($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq “physicalMode”) -or
($dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode -eq “virtualMode”)){
$row = “” | select VMName, HDDeviceName, HDFileName, HDMode
$row.VMName = $vm.Name
$row.HDDeviceName = $dev.Backing.DeviceName
$row.HDFileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
$row.HDMode = $dev.Backing.CompatibilityMode
$report += $row
}
}
}
}
$report
All credits for this great script go to LucD!