Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Everything you always wanted to know about XenMotion

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VMware isn’t the only one anymore doing that magical live migration and Citrix wants everyone to know about the ins and outs:

XenMotion is a feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that gives an administrator the ability to move a running virtual machine from one XenServer to another. Virtual machines can be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance. Administrators can move running application work loads to take advantage of available compute power.

Read more at the source.

Howto: Rename a VM

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There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:

  1. Shutdown the VM
  2. Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
  3. Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
  4. done!

And from the service console:

  1. vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
  2. mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
  3. cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
  4. vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
  5. find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec sed -e ‘s/vm-old/vm-new/g’ {} \;
  6. mv vm-old.vmx vm-new.vmx
    for every file that hasn’t been renamed (.vmsd etc.)
  7. vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new/vm-new.vmx
  8. done!

Distributed Power Management glitch

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I was just testing the new, but still experimental feature, Distributed Power Management. I’ve installed 3 ESX Hosts and added all of them into an HA-DRS Cluster. I enabled DPM and set the mode to manual and pressed “Generate recommendations”. I had one host with an HA failure and DPM recommend me to switch off another host. Which in this case would leave me with no host for redundancy… weird.

I’ve also witnessed that the host with two VM’s running on it was recommended for a power down, instead of the host that did not have any VM’s running.

The VMware website states:

 When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

I guess having a full working HA cluster is definitely top priority to meet service level agreements, so be careful with this option and test it really well…

Checking for snapshots, html email report!

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When reading the VMTN forum I stumbled upon a topic about checking the VMFS for snapshots. Besides snaphunter by Xtravirt, which is an excellent script, there isn’t much out there. You can check the VirtualCenter database for snapshots but this way you would not notice the orphaned snapshots. (Orphaned snapshot occur when the vmsd file gets corrupted.) A couple of months before Xtravirt posted their script I wrote my own snapshot checking script named snapcheck.sh. [Read more…] about Checking for snapshots, html email report!

P2V’ing a Suse Linux server

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I just P2V’ed a Suse Linux Server with the cold boot iso. When booting I was confronted with a kernel panic. This is caused by the fact that the modules for the LSI Logic or Bus Logic SCSI card aren’t available, which causes the root volume to be unmountable. I tried to boot from the installation CD with the “rescue” option but this did not provide me with a fast solution for the problem. But the following was a quick fix:

  1. Boot from Suse CD
  2. Select to setup a new system
  3. Select to boot from the currently installed OS
  4. Run Yast and configure the correct SCSI controller
  5. Remove all the NICS and configure a new NIC
  6. Install VMware tools