Server

New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF

Duncan Epping · Dec 30, 2007 ·

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.

Memory incorrectly balanced

Duncan Epping · Dec 28, 2007 ·

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

Duncan Epping · Dec 27, 2007 ·

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

Duncan Epping · Dec 21, 2007 ·

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

Starting a VM after applying 15 November and up patches on 3.0.2

Duncan Epping · Dec 20, 2007 ·

When patching ESX Hosts with iSCSI attached SAN’s it’s possible you encounter the following event when starting a VM:

“A general system error occured: The system returned an error. Communication with the virtual machine may have been interrupted.”

This is caused by the fact that the “Software iSCSI Client” isn’t enabled on the ESX firewall. November the 15th VMware released a couple of patches which addressed a bug. This bug made it possible to connect via the iSCSI software initiator without enabling the service on the ESX firewall. To open up the port open a console session to the ESX host and type “esxcfg-firewall -e swISCSIClient” or enable it via VirtualCenter “Configuration -> Security Profile -> Properties -> Check Software iSCSI Client”.