by Duncan Epping
Today I received the following error at a customer site when applying patch via the Update Manager:”Metadata for patch missing.” After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter wasn’t running on port 80 but on 81 for some reason. Opening up the ESX Firewall and restarting the VMware Update Manager service seems to fix this problem. The firewall was opened up as follows
esxcfg-firewall –openport 81,tcp,out,updatemanager
Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s only around 30GB assigned, nowhere near the 66,9% or the 106,01% for that matter. Anyone who can confirm this behavior or even better explain it. I’m afraid it’s a bug…
Two days ago RyanWI posted about an unidentified partition which generates errors in the vmkernel log. Today I visited a customer with the same setup, Dell servers and an EMC SAN and I was curious if I could reproduce this error. Well I did not had not much trouble reproducing the error because they already had the same issue. I encountered the following errors in the vmkernel log:
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: SCSI device sdc: 2097151 512-byte hdwr sectors (1074 MB)
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: sdc: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: unable to read partition table
After a close inspection it seems that in the DRAC Bios of the Dell server the “Virtual Media Configuration, Virtual Media” is set to “attached”, this causes a unrecognizable device to appear which causes the above errors. If you set the “Virtual Media” to “detached” the problem is solved.
[edit 18-02-2011: It has come to my attention that the info in this article was incorrect / outdated. The LSI Logic has a default queuedepth of 32. Even if the LSI could go higher than 32 it would be capped by either the device queue depth or disk.schednumreqoutstanding. To enable a single VM to have a queuedepth larger than 32 the pvscsi card should be used and for optimal performance all layers should be aligned.)
A couple of months ago at the Dutch VMug meeting Bouke-Jumé gave some good storage tips. This is one of them:
The LSI Bus Logic Controller / Driver has a standard queue depth of 256. Although it isn’t possible to set this higher it is possible to add a second controller and when you make sure the SCSI ID of your disk corresponds to the SCSI card you will have another queue of 256. This can lead to improved performance for Database Servers, Fileservers and other I/O intensive VM’s.
Open the properties of the VM,
For the first disk and SCSI Controller 0 go to the virtual disk and select 0:X
For the second disk and SCSI Controller 1 go to the virtual disk and select 1:X
And so on…
Vinternals wrote a short article on how to de-install or hide the Capacity Planner plugin for VirtualCenter:
Capacity planner is rather pesky to have hanging around on every VirtualCenter box in the enterprise… especially if you use some other tool for the job! So just add this line to the end of your VirtualCenter install script:
msiexec /qn /x {2A2750C9-E14E-4635-8595-C1CD214445B0}
and away she goes!
Altenatively, you can simply hide it from the Virtual Infrastructure client by adding the following in the
section of vpxd.cfg <vcp2v>
<dontstartconsolidation>true</dontstartconsolidation>
</vcp2v>