I noticed at a few customer sites that the Performance tab of VirtualCenter was getting sluggish but never got the chance to really pinpoint the problem. A couple of days ago user “jterpstr” posted about this on the VMTN forum and it seems that the old rows aren’t deleted from the database for some reason. The table grows to an enormous amount of rows which causes some queries to become unresponsive or very very slow. For more info and a possible solution keep track of this topic om the forum. Thanks to the guys in this thread for pinpointing the problem and narrowing it down to a possible cause.
2.5
Howto: Rename a VM
There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:
- Shutdown the VM
- Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
- Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
- done!
And from the service console:
- vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
- mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
- cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
- vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
- find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec sed -e ‘s/vm-old/vm-new/g’ {} \;
- mv vm-old.vmx vm-new.vmx
for every file that hasn’t been renamed (.vmsd etc.)- vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new/vm-new.vmx
- done!
Distributed Power Management glitch
I was just testing the new, but still experimental feature, Distributed Power Management. I’ve installed 3 ESX Hosts and added all of them into an HA-DRS Cluster. I enabled DPM and set the mode to manual and pressed “Generate recommendations”. I had one host with an HA failure and DPM recommend me to switch off another host. Which in this case would leave me with no host for redundancy… weird.
I’ve also witnessed that the host with two VM’s running on it was recommended for a power down, instead of the host that did not have any VM’s running.
The VMware website states:
When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.
I guess having a full working HA cluster is definitely top priority to meet service level agreements, so be careful with this option and test it really well…
P2V’ing a Suse Linux server
I just P2V’ed a Suse Linux Server with the cold boot iso. When booting I was confronted with a kernel panic. This is caused by the fact that the modules for the LSI Logic or Bus Logic SCSI card aren’t available, which causes the root volume to be unmountable. I tried to boot from the installation CD with the “rescue” option but this did not provide me with a fast solution for the problem. But the following was a quick fix:
- Boot from Suse CD
- Select to setup a new system
- Select to boot from the currently installed OS
- Run Yast and configure the correct SCSI controller
- Remove all the NICS and configure a new NIC
- Install VMware tools
Swap files in 3.5 and the EMC Celerra PDF
The PDF I blogged about yesterday included info about 3.0.x and 3.5 features. One of the things that was missing was the option to have the swapfiles created locally. In 3.0.x this done by setting the option “sched.swap.dir” in the .vmx file. The only problem is that this prohibits you from using VMotion for these VM’s. In 3.5 VMware resolved this issue. It’s now possible to set the swap file location to local storage and keep VMotion at the same time. This can be done very easily the following way:
- Edit setting on cluster, click “Swapfile location” and select “Store the swapfile in the datastore specified by the host”
- Click on the ESX Host, click on the “Configuration” tab, click on “Virtual Machine Swapfile Location” and “edit”
Select “Store the swapfile in a swapfile datastore selected below”
Select the local attached storage: [hostname:storage1]