I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly any evidence that HA did it’s job, in other words no events logged in VirtualCenter as far as I can see. [Read more…] about Virtual Machine High Availability
Migration will cause the virtual machine’s configuration to be modified
When live migrating from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5 VMware gives an error:”Migration will cause the virtual machine’s configuration to be modified, to preserve the CPU feature requirements for its guest OS.” This error indicates that the .vmx file is about to be changed.
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OVF Tool and Nostalgia
I was trying to convert the great Nostalgia Virtual Appliance to a VMware Workstation compatible format but just copying didn’t work. I did the following to get this thing running directly under VMware Workstation 6.02:
- I exported the Nostalgia VM from VirtualCenter 2.5 into an OVF format.
- Copied the OVF files to my PC(d:\ovftools).
- Downloaded the OVF Tool and unzipped it into: d:\ovftools
- Ran the following command cause the damn ovf batch file didn’t work: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_05\bin\java” -jar d:\ovftool\ovftool.jar d:\ovftool\nostalgia.ovf d:\nostalgia\ (The batchfile was complaining about the fact that the JAVA_Home environment variable wasn’t set, but it actually was…)
- Now it’s converted to a Workstation 6 compatible VM, just open it and start it.
Let’s see if I can fix that sound in the next couple of days…
Update:
Arne just posted a solution to the JAVA_Home environment error… And I just discovered that the fact that the ovftool.bat doesn’t work is because of the long file names within dos. You’ll have to set the environment variable with an 8.3 notation: JAVA_HOME = C:\Progra~1\Java\jre1.5.0_05\
No quotes or what so ever because VMware already used quotes in the batch file for the if exist statement.
Howto: Adding a firewall service on ESX
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.
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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.
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