I will not be online that much the upcoming two weeks, so no regular updates to my blog. We recently bought a new house and are busy painting etc. We are probably going to move first week of June, so gotta put in some extra time and effort to get things ready on time.
Corrupt cluster or VirtualCenter database
Today I witnessed something weird. For reason VirtualCenter was totally lost. There were 3 ESX 3.5 hosts in a cluster. One of them failed and it seemed that all the vm’s failed over to the other two. This could be confirmed in VirtualCenter cause all VM’s were registered on either the first or the second host. I could not double check it on the third host because it was impossible to run “vmware-cmd -l” or contact is via the VI Client.
This also meant that I did not have the opportunity to put the host in maintenance mode, because it was also disconnected. Seeing all these symptoms one would expect that the host was completely empty so I decided to reboot the host. Well I guess that was a big mistake because around 15 VM’s got shutdown. Although according to VirtualCenter they were running on a different ESX host the third host decided to kill them.
When I restarted the machine VirtualCenter still showed me wrong information. So I decided to kill the cluster and recreated it. When added the ESX hosts to the cluster everything functioned like it should. Anyway, it’s really tough troubleshooting when you can’t seem to rely on the management tools. Hope this is something VMware fixes soon, or create a workaround like “forced database update”….
Site Recovery Manager, random thoughts
I’ve been disconnected from the internet the last couple of days because of a UPC screw up. So I missed out on all the SRM blogging. I am just reading all the new blogs that were created over the last couple of days. Here are just a couple random thoughts…
- The SRM docs talk about a “proteced” and a “recovery” site. Does this mean that SRM always needs an “active/passive” setup. In other words, can I only use 1 SAN for production.
Why? Well I could imagine that one would benefit from having some sort of load balancing with 2 VirtualDatacenters and 2 active SAN’s. Not only will the uptime increase, because if a site fails only half will failover, but also performance will be less of an issue having half of your active vm’s running on another SAN and cluster. And I’m not even gonna talk about TCO when half of your environment is doing nothing. - What about the VirtualCenter licensing? Do I need 2 VirtualCenter Licenses?
- What about failing back? I played around with a beta and there’s no automated option for a fail back at this moment, when will it be available?
- What about a third site? Think about switching datacenters every week or so for the insurance / banking industry. (Think Anti-Terrorism.)
VMware tools version?
A couple of weeks ago I contacted Rob, the man behind RVTools, and asked him if he could add an export or copy+past functionality to his amazing tool “RVTools”. This amazing tool checks the VMware tools version and gives you the option to update them all at once. Rob updated his tool today:
Version 1.1
Changes: May 10, 2008
You can copy the selected datagrid values with ctrl-c to the clipboard. The header text is automatically included. After this you can paste the clipboard data to your favorite editor.
The login form remembers the names and/or IP addresses of the entered ESX hosts and/or VirtualCenter servers.
You can use a filter to display only the “templates” or “virtual machines”.
Annotations “notes” field is visible in the datagrid.
http://rvtools.deveij.com
Especially the copy and paste option is handy for those who do consultancy like me, thanks Rob for adding this feature and for this excellent tool! Nextup converting it into a VirtualCenter plugin?!? 😉
Thinstall will be renamed to Thinapp
VMware will be renamed Thinstall to Thinapp. Read it here. Besides this blog a Thinstall employee confirmed this.