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.
[Read more…] about Howto: Adding a firewall service on ESX
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.
[Read more…] about New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF
mRemote 1.0!
mRemote has just released version 1.0. For those who never heard of mRemote, it allows you to manage all your remote connections in a single place. It currently supports the RDP, VNC, SSH, Telnet, RAW, Rlogin, ICA and HTTP/S protocols. Pick it up at sourceforge.net.
Memory incorrectly balanced
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
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