I noticed at a few customer sites that the Performance tab of VirtualCenter was getting sluggish but never got the chance to really pinpoint the problem. A couple of days ago user “jterpstr” posted about this on the VMTN forum and it seems that the old rows aren’t deleted from the database for some reason. The table grows to an enormous amount of rows which causes some queries to become unresponsive or very very slow. For more info and a possible solution keep track of this topic om the forum. Thanks to the guys in this thread for pinpointing the problem and narrowing it down to a possible cause.
Server
Installing VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 SP4 server
Today I encountered a weird problem. When I started the installation of VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 Server I received the following error notification:”Setup cannot continue. The “VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.0″ requires Update 1 Rollup for Windows 2000 SP4. Please see KB article 816542 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816542/.”
I checked the server but the patch was installed, so I rebooted the machine to be sure the installation of the update was completed but no luck. I reinstalled the patched and tried to install VC but again no luck. Next thing to do was check the VMTN forum and luckily someone already encountered the same weird problem and they received the following fix from VMware support:
************ Problem ***********
Update from VC 2.0.0 to VC 2.0.1 not possible.
Error message that Update Rollup 1 is not installed.************ Root Cause (if known) ***********
Wrong registry check of installer.************ Solution ***********
Replace NTDLL.DLL by KERNEL32.DLL in the registry:HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows 2000\SP5\Update Rollup 1\Filelist\0]
“FileName”=”NTDLL.DLL”
“Version”=”5.0.2195.7006”
“BuildDate”=”Thu Jan 13 10:09:36 2005”
“BuildCheckSum”=”77ecb”
“Location”=”C:
WINNT
system32”
Everything you always wanted to know about XenMotion
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
There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:
- Shutdown the VM
- Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
- Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
- done!
And from the service console:
- vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
- mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
- cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
- vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
- find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec sed -e ‘s/vm-old/vm-new/g’ {} \;
- mv vm-old.vmx vm-new.vmx
for every file that hasn’t been renamed (.vmsd etc.)- vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new/vm-new.vmx
- done!
Distributed Power Management glitch
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…