Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

3.5

VMReference Card 1.1!

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Forbes just uploaded a brand new version of the VMReference Card. Download it, print it and keep it close!

Source: http://vmreference.com/

Here is version 1.1 in all its shining glory.

I’ve made several corrections (thanks everyone), added a few extra snippets and dusted it with a sprinkling of handy tips and tricks.

The biggest change is a small 3i section. I have been wanting to do this for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it since its beta. There is quite lot of information around about 3i now, but I just wanted to add the sort of stuff people would actual use.

New version of ESX 3.5 and patches for 3.0.x

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VMware just released a new version of the ESX 3.5 ISO according to their download site. The release notes haven’t been update yet so unfortunately I can’t tell you what’s included, but my guess would be the patches released on the 17th of January.

Latest Released Version: 3.5.0 | 02/20/08 | 64607 | 565 MB

There are no new patches available for 3.5 at the moment, but they did patch 3.0.x and the following is fixed in these patches(8 patches for 3.0.2, over 140MB):

  • Security Update to the Samba Package
  • Security Updates to the Python Package
  • Fix for aacraid SCSI Driver Security Issue
  • Virtual Machines on the ESX Server host do not power ON automatically
  • ESX Server host might stop responding when a CD-ROM drive is accessed
  • iSCSI LUNs in the pass-through mode might cause the ESX Server host to stop responding
  • Fixes for Remote-Console Black-out, OpenSolaris Boot Delay, Duplicate Packet Issue; Support for Virtual Machines to Share Generic SCSI Devices
  • Fixes for VMware Tools Installer

By the way I signed in on the patch/updates email and haven’t received anything yet… Did any of you guys receive anything?

ESX 3.5 and weird DRS/HA behaviour…

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During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

  1. During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
  2. When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node is set to “seperate” two specific virtual machines VMware has a hard time relocating a VM when a host goes into “maintenance mode”. I can imagine why this happens but it’s definitely not something that’s suppose to happen in my opinion. It’s a Admin initiated manual action it should overrule all affinity settings.

So let me hear which weird behavior you noticed with ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5….

Performance counters bug for the cluster?

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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…

Unidentified Flying Partition?

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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.