Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Bugs

VMware ESX 3.5 Template Deployment Bug

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I just encountered the same bug that Aaron Delp blogged about in January:

It appears we have found a possible bug in the Deploy from Template Command in ESX 3.5. When you create a Windows Server based template and then try to deploy directly into an Active Directory with customization, the new system will get an error that a service failed to start when the machine is launched. This is because the VMWare BootRun service is not removing itself properly after deployment. This does not happen with deployments into a workgroup.

If you aren’t familiar with the BootRun service, this service will make all of the customizations after the sysprep work is complete during the deployment. You usually never see it because it runs on the first boot, makes the changes, and then removes itself from the machine.

In this case, the files are removed but the service entry is still there, hence the error that it can’t start up. VMWare has confirmed this to be a problem and they are investigating.

This customer runs the latest and greatest version of ESX and VirtualCenter so it appears that the bug hasn’t been fixed yet.

VC 2.5 HA constraints

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VMTN user “ian4563” recently posted a thread about problems with the HA constraints. The error that was pulled from the log files:

Das admission check failed. Configured failover: 2, Expected new failover: 0

And the solution according to VMTN user “eziskind”, who also is a VMware employee:

Looks like you have some 4-cpu vms in the clusters too. That will really skew things. You’re being hit by the combination of 2 new things in the HA admission control for VC 2.5:

1) If no reservation is set for a vm (or it is set to 0), use default of 256MHz, 256MB. (these values can be changed using HA advanced options: das.vmMemoryMinMB, das.vmCpuMinMHz)
2) For the cpu component of the slot, use (max MHz per virtual cpu) * (max number of vcpu’s per vm)

The HA admission control algorithm is overly conservative in non-homogenous clusters, ie. ones with vms which have different reservations and/or vcpu number. #2 above makes it more conservative. Given these limitations, its best to try to keep the cluster as homogenous as possible. Is it possible to put the 4-cpu vms in a separate cluster? If not, you can try setting the default vm resources to 0 (using the advanced options in #1). This is how things worked in VC 2.0.

Thanks goes out to my colleague Remco for pointing this topic out.

VCB and Solaris 32 Bit VM’s

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One of my readers just emailed me the following, again thanks for this info which might me useful to any of you guys out there playing with VCB:

Today with the help of VMware Support I solved a strange problem.
With all my Solaris10-32Bit VM’ s I was getting an error, when I tried to backup them via VCB. Creating snapshot of the VM failed with “Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the (user-supplied) custom pre-freeze script in the virtual machine exited with a non-zero return code”. But there doesn’t exists a pre or post script in all of the VMs.

So as you know, no snapshot means no backup of this VM. I monitored the hostd of the host, where the VM is running. There I saw this messages: ” Could not run custom freeze/thaw operation: Insufficient permissions in guest operating system”.

VMware support told me, that there is a problem within the VMTools in the Solaris VM’s. They know about this problem (I didn’t find anything about this in the internet) and will solve it in a future patch.

For now, the only way is to use the “-Q 0” switch with the vcbmounter command. This way VCB will ignore any pre or post scripts.

Christoph P.

So in short, -Q 0 disregards any pre or post scripts. Thanks Christoph for contributing to my blog!

Pegasus error after installing ESX 3.5 update 1

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After installing ESX 3.5 update 1 an error occurs during the boot proces:

Parsing error: parse error: Error adding class VMware_IdentityMemberOfCollection to the repository: CIM_ERR_NOT_FOUND: The requested object could not be found: “VMware_Identity”
Compiling omc-smash-interop-schema.mof into root/PG_Interop

A quick search on the VMTN forum revealed that I wasn’t the only one experiencing these problems. Luckily Mike Laspina already discovered how to fix this problem:

Here is what you will need to do.

Edit the roleauth-schema compiler directive to include the VMware_Identity class definition using nano /var/pegasus/vmware/install_queue/3_files/mofs/root/PG_Interop/roleauth-schema.mof

Add the bolded line above the pre-existing member directive.

#pragma include (“VMware_Identity.mof”)
#pragma include (“VMware_IdentityMemberOfCollection.mof”)

It also needs to be added in the standard cimv2 path.

nano /var/pegasus/vmware/install_queue/3_files/mofs/root/cimv2/roleauth-schema.mof

#pragma include (“VMware_Identity.mof”)
#pragma include (“VMware_IdentityMemberOfCollection.mof”)

Copy the missing file from the stardard cimv2 path to the shared path.

cp /var/pegasus/vmware/install_queue/3_files/mofs/root/cimv2/VMware_Identity.mof /var/pegasus/vmware/install_queue/3_files/mofs/root/PG_Interop/

Stop and start the service with these commands.

/etc/init.d/pegasus stop
/etc/init.d/pegasus start
Once the scripts completes the install_queues will be empty and the service will start much more quickly.

And according to the user mjilin VMware support is also aware and this issue will be addressed soon:

Dear ESX users,

Thanks for your timely feedback regarding upgrading to ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 1.

As one user correctly pointed out, we use Pegasus to provide system management information, which third-party vendors can incorporate into their management applications.

We have identified the root cause of the issue and will provide fixes in an upcoming patch release. More information can be found in the Knowledge Base article 1004257.

Thanks for your information sharing in the community forum and keeping the discussion lively. We appreciate your support and feedback.

Best regards,

VMware ESX Product Tea

VM’s automatically renamed

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Yesterday evening I witnessed a weird phenomenon. We had to bring down a complete environment to move a 19″ rack to a different location. We switched the SAN on, waited a couple of minutes and switched the ESX hosts on. When the ESX hosts finished booting we booted the VirtualCenter. Everything looked normal in the VI Client. I had all connections to the SAN and all ESX Hosts were up and running. So I decided to power up the first VM, it was a VM named LNX01. Within a second the VM got renamed to LNX05(1). I though I was going nuts. I checked the settings of the renamed VM and indeed it was pointing out to the LNX05 diskfiles/vmx.

Maybe it was just me, or this one VM so I decided to give another one a try, I powered up LNX02. Same happening here, within a second the VM was renamed to PS01(1) and booted fine. The settings were pointing out to PS01. I checked a couple of VM’s but could not find anything weird. I restarted the VirtualCenter service just to be sure. I started the VM LNX03 and again it was renamed… Than I decided to restart the “mgmt-vmware” services on all of the ESX hosts and the problem never returned again. It seems like VirtualCenter had a different view than the ESX hosts had. But I can’t think of a logical reason what could cause this. I searched the knowledge base but could not find any related problems, well besides an old article based on VirtualCenter 1.2.