Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Use ZFS and Solaris as NFS target for your ESX hosts

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For some reason Thomas Weyell’s blog doesn’t get as much attention as it should! Thomas posted a cool article about using Solaris with ZFS as an NFS target for your ESX hosts:

Today I will write about a great subject which means a lot to me.
I read so often that people will use NFS as a cheap and easy shared storage for VMware ESX.
Conceptional! If you want to test something in a test environment, you need cheap storage or what ever you can use NFS. But why so much pepole will use NFS on Linux? There is not one benefit against NFS on ZFS with Solaris 10/Nevada. So lets use a great protocol from the same vendor who develop a very great filesystem and operating system. Lets checkout NFS and ZFS with Solaris…

So check out the complete article here download Solaris(it’s free you guys!!!) and test it out! Did I say it’s free?!! Cool stuff Thomas,

Linux VirtualCenter client?

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Scott already wrote about this one yesterday… A lot of people have been asking for a Linux VirtualCenter client for a long time. I’m sorry this is not the announcement for the official client. But there might be a decent Linux, Mac and Windows client coming up. There’s a beta going around of a product named Kodiak, by a company called Bluebear:

Welcome to the next generation of unified systems management! Kodiak, from BlueBear, enables unprecedented visibility into and control over virtualized infrastructures, regardless of size or composition. As the industry’s only application that’s both hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform, Kodiak sets a new standard in versatility, pushing virtualization out of the datacenter and catalyzing it’s widespread adoption throughout the information technology landscape. BlueBear believes useful software should be available to anybody who needs it, and at no cost; hence Kodiak’s price, totally free!

In other words, expect a client which can manage ESX, Hyper-V and Xenserver at the same time! Unfortunately there’s not much info available at the moment. I’ve send these guys an email to see if I can get a Beta to test it out! Check this page for a couple screenshots, it already looks promising I must say! So I’m gonna build a Ubuntu workstation and hope I will receive this beta soon and can start testing!

I love the title in the application bar: Kodiak: Ruling your virtual empire. How cool does that sound!

Why I dislike agents in my Service Console

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I’ve never been a huge fan of agents in the Service Console. Too many times I’ve seen hosts fail because of an agent that had a memory leak etc. Now it seems that running the HP IM agents causes your ESX 3.5 U2 to become unavailable after a certain amount of time.

The errors that appear:

0 Z root 8536 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 8537 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 8543 3673 0 78 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32350 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32351 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32352 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32353 3673 0 78 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera

HStrydom on the VMTN forum posted the following:

I am having the same issue. What happens after 17 days is that there are about 32000 of these processes. ESX has a max value of +- 32000 PID’s. Thus when all have been used up, one cannot SSH into the server, log in from the console or the ESX server disconnects from VC.

Also we have HP servers with the HP agents loaded. Our Dell servers does not have this problem.

Have a look at your cron log, /var/log/cron & cron.1. you might see that some of the job have not run. Also look in your /var/log/messages. There is a lot of login failures.

In other words, if you see the same thing happening call HP and let’s hope they release a fix soon! And in the meanwhile start thinking about ESXi, it’s problems like these that makes you think about why you even need a Service Console in the first place.

fstab modifications gone after upgrade VMware tools

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About a month ago I got an email about problems with upgrading VMware tools on a Linux VM. When upgrading VMware tools all modifications done in /etc/fstab after the VMware tools section would be deleted. I never got the chance to actually test it myself but now a KB article popped up and confirmed the bug. Apparently the engineers are working on it so expect a fix/update in the near future. Michael Wilmsen of Wilmsen Automatisering pointed me out to this bug.

ESXi and SSH, what’s next

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I get a lot of questions about ESXi and SSH. Most people manage to connect to their ESXi but don’t know what to do next because there’s no actual Service Console there. Well the answer is short and simple: vim-cmd.

A couple examples of stuff you can do with vim-cmd:
enter maintenance mode: vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

List all registered vm’s: vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms

Install VMware Tools for VM with ID: vim-cmd /vmsvc/tools.install [vmid]

Power on a specific VM: vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.on [vmid]

So check out the link above and start trying out this poweful command