Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX

VMware Stage Manager

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VMware starts a new beta program the 21st of January, the product is called Stage Manager. Stage Manager seems to be some sort of Lab Manager spin off. But it goes way beyond what Lab Manager can do.

  • You can easily boot shadow production servers
  • Create test environments for infrastructure changes
  • Build complex pre-production environments
  • Systematically propagate complex system changes through development, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing systems into production
  • Get a better grip on your change, configuration and release (CCR) management processes

If you’re interested than contact your VMware partner and maybe you’ll be the one winning that “VMWorld 2008” pass! I will try to get my hands on the product and see if I can find the time to test it.

    Delete all snapshots

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    Today I encountered an old misunderstood principle again. A customer had created several snapshots on a virtual machine. Several… well to be exact 15. All snapshots were larger than 20GB. When the VMFS volume, on which this VM was located, ran out of diskspace he decided to use the button “Delete All”, but within a couple of minutes the VMFS volume ran out of diskspace again. What happened?

    Situation:
    Snapshot 1 – 20GB
    Snapshot 2 – 10GB
    Snapshot 3 – 30GB

    When you choose “delete all” the following will happen:

    1. Snapshot 2 will grow to 40GB at most
    2. Snapshot 1 will grow to 60GB at most
    3. Snapshot 1 will be committed to the original VMDK
    4. All snapshot files are deleted

    In other words: Snapshot 3 is merged into Snapshot 2, Snapshot 2 is merged into Snapshot 1, Snapshot 1 is merged into the original flat.vmdk and afterwards all snapshot files are deleted. This means that if you want to delete all snapshots at once you will need around 130GB of free diskspace. So think twice when you press the “delete all” button.

    FastSCP not working with ESX 3.5

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    Default FastSCP isn’t working with ESX 3.5. I just noticed this download: http://www.veeam.com/download/fastscp/FastSCP.xml
    It’s indeed a firewall related problem, copy this file into /etc/vmware/firewall.
    Run the following command “service mgmt-vmware restart” and open up the Portrange with VirtualCenter. Opening it up can also be done from the commandline with “esxcfg-firewall -e FastSCP”. Veeam still has to fix the “edit function” which doesn’t work with 3.5 anymore, expect a new release in Januari / Februari 2008.

    What about those Jumbo Frames?

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    Support for Jumbo Frames is one of the major new features for ESX 3.5. Especially for the people who are using an iSCSI SAN configuring jumbo frames could be very beneficial. Instead of having an MTU(maximum size of transmitted packet) of 1500 an MTU of 9000 would be possible. That would cut out a lot of the iSCSI overhead. But are jumbo frames supported for 3.5? Answer: Yes and no. [Read more…] about What about those Jumbo Frames?