I just had a discussion about an upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5. During that conversation the new HBA drivers that VMware uses came up. After an upgrade it seems that the queue depth settings are lost. Thinking about it I can understand why. ESX 3.5 uses different driver for most HBA’s. For instance Emulex, their driver for the LP11002 used to be the “lpfcdd_732” and now is the “lpfc_740”. After an upgrade the new driver/module doesn’t get the options you provided with “esxcfg-module” because it was specified for that specific “old” module. This means that you have to set these options again!
ESX
VCB – Weird errors
Today I encountered a weird error during an implementation of VMware Consolidated Backup. When ever I ran vcbmounter I received the following error:”Run time error – the application the application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.”
It seemed that for some reason the vcbuser did not have the role “VMware consolidated backup user” linked anymore. I would have expected an error in the line of “permission denied” or “not enough permissions to complete task” and definitely not a Runtime error…
Anyway I tested the script I blogged about yesterday and it works like a charm, check it out!
CDP, why?
That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of strange routing / connection errors to the virtual machines. CDP was very useful because I could setup a remote connection to the customer and check which vmnic was connected to which port on the switch. So use CDP when in doubt!
Click on the blue cloud next to the vmnic name on the right:
This is the result:
(Screenshots taken from the RTFM Upgrade Guide.)
Follow-up: Intel quad-port nic and VST
A couple of days ago I wrote about the problems with VST and the Intel Quad-port nics. I tested the work around, using “access ports” on the physical switch(EST, external switch tagging) and it seems that the problem is “solved”. A couple of hours ago VMware posted a knowledge base article about this problem, so if you are experiencing these problems keep track of this KB article!
VMware ESX healthcheck
One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much much more. I just tested the script on ESX 3.5 and it still works great. The script is created by two guys of the Danish VMUG one of them is A. Mikkelsen, check his blog for more scripts! Be sure to check out this script, it’s worth it! By the way, you can schedule it and have the html emailed to you via the use of smtp_send.pl.