Lane Leverett pointed me out to the fact that it’s possible to add a firewall service instead of opening up a huge range or multiple ranges for one service by hand. This way a junior system engineer can easily open up a port range via VirtualCenter instead of the console. I tried this in our testlab with ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 and it works like a charm.
[Read more…] about Howto: Adding a firewall service on ESX
Server
New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF
VMware updated the PDF about High Availability with extra advanced options for ESX 3.5/VC 2.5. They’ve also added recommendations for additional Service Console redundancy. Until now I’ve always worked with a two nic based Service Console instead of a second Service Console on the VMKernel network, will test with the second Service Console to see if it works like expected… cause according to the VMware recommendations it saves up till 40 seconds in recovery time.
[Read more…] about New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF
Memory incorrectly balanced
During a VMware healthcheck at one of my customers I ran across the following error in /var/log/vmkwarning: “Memory is incorrectly balanced between the NUMA nodes of this system which will lead to poor performance. See /proc/vmware/NUMA/hardware for details on your current memory configuration.”
Port range and esxcfg-firewall
An often made mistake when trying to open up or close a port range with the ESX(3.0.2 and 3.5) firewall is using the dash(-) as a divider. Using the dash unfortunately does not always result in an error. To open up or close a port range you should use a collon(:) as a divider:
esxcfg-firewall –openport 6000:6010,tcp,in,test
VMware ESX 3i installable general availability
VMware just officially released VMware ESX 3i, you can download the installable iso here. For now it’s only supported on Dell Poweredge 2950(Full) and HP DL380G5(Experimental) servers. Check out the installable, I booted it within VMware Workstation and right until I tried to boot a VM it worked fine, than it crashed. [Read more…] about VMware ESX 3i installable general availability