Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX 3.5 and weird DRS/HA behaviour…

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During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

  1. During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
  2. When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node is set to “seperate” two specific virtual machines VMware has a hard time relocating a VM when a host goes into “maintenance mode”. I can imagine why this happens but it’s definitely not something that’s suppose to happen in my opinion. It’s a Admin initiated manual action it should overrule all affinity settings.

So let me hear which weird behavior you noticed with ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5….

ESX 3i backdoor

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According to this new KB article there’s a backdoor for ESX3i:

  1. Log in to your ESX Server 3i at the console.
  2. Press Alt+F1 to switch to the console window.
  3. Enter unsupported to start the Tech Support Mode login process. Note that no text will appear on the console window.
  4. Enter the password for the root user. Tech Support Mode is now active.
  5. Complete tasks in Tech Support Mode.
  6. Enter the command exit to exit Tech Support Mode.
  7. Press Alt+F2 to return the server to DCUI mode.

For more info check the KB article. I will be checking out this feature over the next couple of days to see what’s possible in this mode.

Selective VCB fullvm images

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During the VMware course DSA I discovered that it is in fact possible to dump specific vmdk’s with the use of the default VCB tools. While I was finding out a way to script this I was notified in one of my blogs by JTurver(Justin Turver) that he already wrote a script that could do what I was looking for. It’s a great script for dumping all system disks and leaving the disk that are filled with data alone. You can use a text file as input for the vbs script. Check out his blog on the VMware website! Great work and thanks for pointing me out!

VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 3

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VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:

Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 – Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.

PR:225357 – Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are configured for a virtual machine can fail to update. This issue is usually encountered after the virtual machine has changed power state.

PR:163019 – Virtual Machines Do Not Show Correct Status This release fixes an issue where the status indicators of some virtual machines do not accurately reflect the virtual machine’s status. This issue usually occurs after a restart of the VirtualCenter Server.

Licensing Issues
R:229629 – VirtualCenter Does Not Correctly Display New License Format This release fixes an issue where earlier versions of VirtualCenter are not able display licenses from license files issued since the release of VirtualCenter 2.5. On versions of VirtualCenter before 2.0.2 Update 3, the license files appear to install normally but log warnings such as “Chunk ‘desc=ESX Server Enterprise’ was not well formed, skipping” in the log files when license files of the new format are displayed in VirtualCenter.

The release notes aren’t online yet, so we will have to wait for a more detailed view on what has changed in this release.

Two times VCP 3

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Two weeks ago I finally received my VCP welcome kit with my VCP number. It took a while but I’m glad I finally received it. For some reason VMware decided to send me another VCP kit with another VCP number. Weird… Well it’s better to have two than none I guess…