Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Delete all snapshots

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Today I encountered an old misunderstood principle again. A customer had created several snapshots on a virtual machine. Several… well to be exact 15. All snapshots were larger than 20GB. When the VMFS volume, on which this VM was located, ran out of diskspace he decided to use the button “Delete All”, but within a couple of minutes the VMFS volume ran out of diskspace again. What happened?

Situation:
Snapshot 1 – 20GB
Snapshot 2 – 10GB
Snapshot 3 – 30GB

When you choose “delete all” the following will happen:

  1. Snapshot 2 will grow to 40GB at most
  2. Snapshot 1 will grow to 60GB at most
  3. Snapshot 1 will be committed to the original VMDK
  4. All snapshot files are deleted

In other words: Snapshot 3 is merged into Snapshot 2, Snapshot 2 is merged into Snapshot 1, Snapshot 1 is merged into the original flat.vmdk and afterwards all snapshot files are deleted. This means that if you want to delete all snapshots at once you will need around 130GB of free diskspace. So think twice when you press the “delete all” button.

FastSCP not working with ESX 3.5

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Default FastSCP isn’t working with ESX 3.5. I just noticed this download: http://www.veeam.com/download/fastscp/FastSCP.xml
It’s indeed a firewall related problem, copy this file into /etc/vmware/firewall.
Run the following command “service mgmt-vmware restart” and open up the Portrange with VirtualCenter. Opening it up can also be done from the commandline with “esxcfg-firewall -e FastSCP”. Veeam still has to fix the “edit function” which doesn’t work with 3.5 anymore, expect a new release in Januari / Februari 2008.

Console connections and Getting Started tab

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When looking for the “maximum number of allowed console connections, I stumbled upon another handy option in VirtualCenter, “Edit -> Client Settings”.

  1. Set the maximum number of allowed console connections (0 to 100) to all virtual machines.
  2. Close all “Getting Started” tabs at once.

Where’s my lockdown mode in ESX 3.5?

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I’ve been looking for the lockdown option in ESX 3.5 for a few of hours these last couple of days and can’t seem to find it. In ESX 3i you can easily put it in lockdown mode when you add the host to the Cluster or afterwards here in the configuration/security section:

After a search on the internet is seemed I wasn’t the only that could not find the lockdown mode for 3.5. Viktor van den Berg opened a topic about it on the Dutch VMUG forum and decided to phone VMware about it… There answer was short, it’s not in 3.5 and it should have been. I guess it got lost in cyberspace.

For those who never heard of the lockdown mode:

VirtualCenter 2.5 provides administrators with the option to disable direct remote access to ESX Server 3 hosts as a root user after VirtualCenter 2.5 has taken control of a given host. This is called “lockdown mode.” Enabling this mode ensures that the host is managed only through VirtualCenter 2.5. Certain limited management tasks can still be performed while in lockdown mode by logging in to the local console on the host as a non-root user.

I guess we just have to wait for the upcoming patches.