by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
So it’s back to business again after a couple of crazy days during VMworld. All the blogs can return to their normal “technical” writing.
VMware just released a whole bunch of patches for ESX(i) 3.5, so for you SysAdmins it’s also back to work again. You can find them here.
There’s also a new release for VMware’s Lab Manager available, version 3.0 Patch 1. There’s a KB article about this patch release, read it before you run it.
Duncan Epping · ·
I was just catching up and read this blog from Scott about managing ESXin a COS-less environment. The most interesting part of this blog is the following:
The subject of deployment is a key issue when we think about losing the Service Console. One approach to handling these issues is deploying physical machines; another would be to deploy virtual machines to handle these tasks. Partners could wrap up the agents that would typically be deployed in the Service Console as a virtual appliance, but then users could end up with numerous virtual appliances. What if VMware were to provide a virtual infrastructure management appliance? That’s what VIMA (Virtual Infrastructure Management Assistant) is.
VIMA is a virtual appliance packaged as OVF and is distributed, maintained, and supported by VMware. This is downloaded and installed by the customer according to their management procedures. This will be a well-known deployment environment that partners can rely upon being present. This will be a 64-bit Linux distribution with VMware Tools, VI Perl Toolkit, the Remote CLI (now known as the VI CLI), and a JRE already present. VIMA can be patched for updates, and it allows you to manage one or more VMware ESX hosts directly or through VirtualCenter. VIMA can enable agents to authenticate themselves, and VIMA will rotate its passwords on the hosts. Additionally, sample code and documentation will be available for programming applications to work in VIMA.
Anyone interested in VIMA can e-mail vima_request@vmware.com and request access to pre-GA versions of VIMA. VIMA is expected for general release in the fourth quarter of this year. All VIMA releases will work with both ESX and ESXi
Read the full article for more info, but this is again an exciting addition to the portfolio. Having an virtual appliance which can contain agents and communicate with your vCenter Server and your ESX(i) host is a real benefit. You can keep the number of agents down to a minimum with the same flexibility and usability.
Duncan Epping · ·
A couple of days ago an ex-colleague phoned me about a weird problem with enabling HA in a ESXi cluster. The following errors occurred:
So the first error(1.) was reported by esxhost01 and the second(2.) by esxhost02.
Let’s start with esxhost01.
So this customer had a VMotion and Management portgroup on two seperate vSwitches. This error seems to indicate that during the configuration HA is using the VMotion portgroup. These hosts have been added to VC with the management portgroup IP(IP+Name also in dns). So how do I make sure that HA isn’t using the VMotion network for HA, it’s easy go to your cluster and open up the advanced options for HA and add the following key with the value false:
In other words, don’t use the VMotion network for the HA heartbeat. The weird thing in this case is that it shouldn’t use the VMotion network by default so there seems to be a glitch here…
So now for the second problem.
The HA(AAM) agent could not start. So just to make sure that the USB key wasn’t corrupt the key was recreated. But still this error occurred. As some of you might now, that if you want to use HA with a disk less server you will need to create a userworld swap on the SAN. (Read this KB for more info on that one…) So just to make sure that the swap wasn’t causing this problem the directory was cleaned out and and HA was reconfigured. When the directory was emptied the HA agent installed without any problem at all…
Thanks goes out to Remco for providing me with the additional details!
Duncan Epping · ·
And more cool stuff announced. I know I have to stay objective and try not to sound like a cheerleader… but man did you see the latest announcements? It’s hard not to get excited, it’s hard not to be enthusiastic, the hell with it I’m not even gonna try it.
And why not one might ask? Well because VMware just announced the fact that vCenter Server will be released as a linux virtual appliance in the future and the vCenter client will be cross platform available. So all you linux minded or mac minded sysadmins out there, keep an eye out for the beta program. This is also a great reason for me to ditch XP on my laptop and start installing Ubuntu, well as soon as it’s available that is! But is definitely one of the best announcements this week in my opinion. I’ve been asked this question, when will VC (client) be available for linux, very very often. Well I still can’t give an answer but it’s on the roadmap! Getting the MS requirement out of the Virtual Environment or should I say vCloud is important for a lot of customers and (most important) SysAdmins.
But that’s not it, the new “limitations” that Dr. Stephen Herrod announced today are overwhelming, 64 nodes in a cluster, 4096 processor cores and 64 TB of RAM. So my question is … what about the current 2TB limitation for LUN’s. Let’s hope that one will be gone soon… And let’s hope VMFS also get’s a make over, no that it’s not functioning at the moment but a VMFS resize option would be nice for instance. Well we will just have to wait and see I guess. But it would fit into the new vStorage initiative. Which, as Chad explained, is also an API where hardware vendors can take advantage off! Like for instance the vCenter SAN Snapshot integration that NetApp, Dell/EQL and EMC announced yesterday.
Well I can rewrite Scott’s entire blog but that just isn’t very useful… So click here and read one of the most extensive live blogs on the VMworld Day 2 Keynote. These were just some random thoughts, I’m going for a walk, just to clear up my mind… a lot of information in a short amount of time.
Duncan Epping · ·
I just hit an all time high of 4000 unique visitors on one day…. Man this is going insane. Thanks everybody for visiting my website, it makes it worth it. I hope I can be at VMworld next time and do a better job at feeding you with information.