by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
Herco van Brug aka “brugh” just released a new version of ESX Deployment Appliance(EDA), 0.87.
New in 0.87:
So if you want to install your ESX hosts in a consistent way and faster than ever before, look into EDA now. If you need a guide on how to set it up take a look at Simon Long’s post on GabesVirtualWorld.com.
Duncan Epping · ·
Joseph Holland just updated the “UPS initiated shutdown of ESXi” document I blogged about this week. This time Joseph used VIMA to get the job done. Here’s a link to the document on VI:OPS.
The procedure still requires an unsupported change on ESXi. My guess is that this will soon be fixed by using perl on VIMA. Perl enables you to use the SDK and vi-fastpass. Vi-fastpass is an authentication component which supports unattended authentication. In other words, there’s no need to store clear text passwords in script files anymore and no need to change ESXi. On twitter William Lam aka “@lamw” already hinted that he’s looking into this…
Duncan Epping · ·
After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.
The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.
Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time. [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design
Duncan Epping · ·
I’ve been waiting for APC to create a VIMA ready package of their PowerChute Network Shutdown software for a while now. It’s supposed to be released soon but I haven’t heard a release date yet.
For everyone that can’t wait VMTN User “jholland” created this PDF “How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS“. It’s a great creative solution that shuts down your vm’s and host when a power failure occurs keep in mind you need a UPS with network management capabilities. In short:
I guess the APC solution will work in a similar way by the way, but the APC solution will be full supported and this solution clearly isn’t cause you would need to alter ESXi. (The APC solution will use the RCLI/Perl toolkit probably)
I can imagine you would want to use it anyway. Thanks to jholland for creating this PDF, it’s his first post I hope there’s more to come! (By the way, it isn’t that difficult to apply this information on VIMA. I might test it out this week and update you guys)
Duncan Epping · ·
I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following:
RDA can do a lot more of course, so I suggest you head over to their website and download the demo and see if your VI3 environment is healthy or not. For those that already tested the previous release, 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:
New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.
Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.
Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.
Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.
Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.