Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

3.5

Howto: Sending html email from the service console

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*** This article is from 2008, this does not work for ESXi, look at vCheck from Alan Renouf instead ***

When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is:

A while back VMGuru.com hosted a script which enabled you to send email from the service console. I just browsed their site and it’s nowhere to be found. So I hosted it on my site, mind: I changed the script so that you are able to send HTML emails. [Read more…] about Howto: Sending html email from the service console

Patches for ESX 3.5 and 3i

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VMware just released 9 patches for ESX 3.5 and 1 for ESX 3i! You can download them here for 3.5 and here for 3i.

The patch for ESX 3i fixes the following:

  • ESX Server 3i hosts using more than two processor sockets cannot be licensed when using host-based licensing.
  • VMware Virtual Center does not properly record the number of processors on Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 7200 series based hosts.
  • An issue with the BCM5709 firmware where ping requests sometimes fail after loading and unloading the bnx2 driver.
  • An issue with the bnx2 driver where a device using the bnx2 driver fails to connect to the a 100 Mbps network during the network autonegotiation period after system boot.

The patches for ESX 3.5 contain the following:

  • Update to the bnx2 Driver
  • Security Update to the Samba Package
  • Security Update to the util-linux Package
  • Security Update to the Perl Package
  • Security Update to the openssl Package
  • Daylight Saving Time Update
  • vmkernel-vmnix Update for the bnx2 Driver
  • Intel Xeon Processor 7200 Series Based Servers Licensing Issues
  • Multi-processor Licensing Issues, VMotion Assert Failure

I’m glad VMware released this fixes, now I can finally test the Update Manager for my ESX Hosts.

ESX Host not reconnecting after adding SCSI card

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When I added an extra SCSI card to my ESX 3.5 test system I could not get it to reconnect again with VirtualCenter. After a close inspection I noticed that vmnic0 did not exist anymore(esxcfg-nics -l), it got renamed to vmnic1. Because of that my vSwitch0 did not have a NIC linked to it anymore. I linked the new vmnic1 to my vSwitch0(esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1) and everything was up and running again. I’m glad this didn’t happen in a production environment with several vSwitches and portgroups, than again it is possible to rename them again by manually editing the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file. There’s a knowledge base article on this behavior on the VMware support site, I noticed it a couple of weeks ago an now I witnessed it. Definitely not the first place I would normally look. I hope VMware can fix this glitch, although I can fully understand why this happens.

New VCB features

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When exploring VCB 1.1 I noticed some new features. One of the most prominent is the option to run VCB from within a VM. I can hear most of you think what’s the point of that and how about that HBA / iSCSI connection you need. Well if it’s of any use I will leave in the middle because I don’t see any reason for virtualizing VCB for larger environments. But for small environments, which don’t have shared storage this can be an easy way to dump their data without resorting to unsupported scripts. VCB is easily setup via the executable, next next finish. [Read more…] about New VCB features

Service Console redundancy

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The last couple of weeks more blogs and topics appeared around the warning VirtualCenter gives when there’s no service console redundancy. Several people posted about a workaround to clear this warning. The workaround is very easy: temporarily assign an additional nic to the service console vSwitch and reconfigure your HA. Notice that I used ” workaround” cause I definitely don’t see this as a solution for the problem. With the current technology there’s not much reason not to have a redundant service console in my opinion, especially when you are using HA. I know a nic hardly ever breaks but in this case probably more than 8 VM’s rely on this nic, the physical switch and the network cable it’s attached to. [Read more…] about Service Console redundancy