I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly any evidence that HA did it’s job, in other words no events logged in VirtualCenter as far as I can see. [Read more…] about Virtual Machine High Availability
ESX
Migration will cause the virtual machine’s configuration to be modified
When live migrating from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5 VMware gives an error:”Migration will cause the virtual machine’s configuration to be modified, to preserve the CPU feature requirements for its guest OS.” This error indicates that the .vmx file is about to be changed.
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Howto: Adding a firewall service on ESX
Lane Leverett pointed me out to the fact that it’s possible to add a firewall service instead of opening up a huge range or multiple ranges for one service by hand. This way a junior system engineer can easily open up a port range via VirtualCenter instead of the console. I tried this in our testlab with ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 and it works like a charm.
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New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF
VMware updated the PDF about High Availability with extra advanced options for ESX 3.5/VC 2.5. They’ve also added recommendations for additional Service Console redundancy. Until now I’ve always worked with a two nic based Service Console instead of a second Service Console on the VMKernel network, will test with the second Service Console to see if it works like expected… cause according to the VMware recommendations it saves up till 40 seconds in recovery time.
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Port range and esxcfg-firewall
An often made mistake when trying to open up or close a port range with the ESX(3.0.2 and 3.5) firewall is using the dash(-) as a divider. Using the dash unfortunately does not always result in an error. To open up or close a port range you should use a collon(:) as a divider:
esxcfg-firewall –openport 6000:6010,tcp,in,test