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by Duncan Epping

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Custom shares on a Resource Pool, scripted

Duncan Epping · Feb 24, 2010 ·

We’ve spoken about Resource Pools a couple of times over the last months and specifically about shares. (The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox, Resource Pools and Shares.) The common question I received was how can we solve this. The solution is simple: Custom Shares.

However, the operational overhead associated with custom shares is something most people want to avoid. Luckily for those who have the requirement to use share based resource pools one my colleague Andrew Mitchell shared a powershell script. This powershell script defines custom shares based on a pre-defined weight and the amount of VMs / vCPUs in the resource pool. I would recommend to schedule the script to run on a weekly basis and ensure the correct amount of shares have been set to avoid running into one of the scenarios described in the articles above.

Please keep in mind that if you use nested resource pools you will need to run a separate script for each level in the hierarchy.

Eg. If the resource pools are setup like this the following you will need one script to set the shares for RP1, RP2 and RP3, and another script to set the shares for RP1-Child1 and RP1-Child2.

RP1
>>RP1-Child1
>>RP1-Child2
RP2
RP3

Download the script here. Again to emphasize it I am not the author, we would appreciate it though if you could share any modifications / enhancements to this script.

ESXi and Boot From SAN support

Duncan Epping · Feb 24, 2010 ·

Rodos just reported on twitter that it looks like Boot From SAN is supported for ESXi. Unfortunately the KB article Rodos refers to in his tweet, kb.vmware.com/kb/1015000, is incorrect and Boot From SAN is not supported for ESXi. I’ve already reported this internally and hopefully the KB article will be fixed soon. The correct statement can be found in the install guide and is as follows:

Installing on a Fibre Channel SAN is supported experimentally. Do not attempt to install ESXi with a SAN attached, unless you want to try this experimental feature.

Source: ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide (page 20)

For those interested in what “experimental” actually means, read this section on the VMware website.

Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.8.1

Duncan Epping · Feb 21, 2010 ·

Rob de Veij has just released a new version of RVTools. The update only contains bug fixes but most definitely worth downloading again!

Version 2.8.1 (February 2010)

  • On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
  • On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
  • Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
  • When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
  • When datastore name or virtual machine name containts spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
  • Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

VUM and downloading patches via PAC

Duncan Epping · Feb 16, 2010 ·

When I tried to download patches via a freshly installed VMware vSphere Update Manager today I received the following error:

https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/index.xml;
hosting the patch definitions and patches cannot be reached or has no patch data

Although we configured a proxy including the appropriate account it would not work. As suggested in this KB article I removed the “http://” part of the proxy address but still it bailed out with the error above. After trying several combinations I noticed that the proxy was actually a PAC address instead of a proxy server. A PAC basically serves a list which contains the proxy details of the environment. This comes in handy when you’ve got multiple proxy for redundancy… In this case VMware Update Manager wasn’t fond of the PAC file. When I used the address of the proxy server instead of the host server the PAC file it worked like a charm…

Definition of the advanced NFS options

Duncan Epping · Feb 13, 2010 ·

An often asked question when implementing NFS based storage is what do these advanced settings represent you are recommending me to change?

VMware published a great KB article which describes these. For instance:

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures
The number of consecutive heartbeat requests that must fail before the server is marked as unavailable.

The KB article does not only explain the separate NFS settings but also how you can calculate how long it can take before ESX marks a NFS share as unavailable. Good stuff, definitely highly recommended!

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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