Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

esxi

SRM, it’s just too easy

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You’ve probably also noticed a whole bunch of Site Recovery Manager(SRM) related articles popping up with people installing and configuring it in their home lab:

I love these articles because they are prove of the fact that SRM is really easy to set-up. But, and this actually scares me, it might seem a bit too easy. I said “too easy” because implementing a Disaster Recovery solution isn’t about the tools you are using. The tools, which will make your life a lot easier, are not the most important piece of the puzzle. Indeed PUZZLE.

There a whole bunch of SRM projects going on globally where VMware PSO, the department I work for, is assisting. These projects typically have a duration of 3 to 9 months, while it seems that with the ease of VMware Site Recovery Manager this should be a matter of days.

People tend to forget that the most important thing about Distaster Recovery / Business Continuity is the business. You need to know the organisation and IT environment very well before you can even start:

  • SLA’s? –> RPO / RTO?
  • Which services are most important to the business?
  • Which servers are part of the service?
  • In which order need these be started?
  • Which service have the highest priority?
  • Are there any dependencies between services?
  • What about the desktops?

And these are just a couple of questions one should normally have to answer before even going down the SRM road. The fact that SRM is so easy to setup makes it really hard to actually explain to a customer why a BCDR project will take much longer then he expected. And remember that although SRM is a great tool you would still need to create a Disaster Recovery Plan, SRM will be part of the plan but it needs to be in place!

I’m not saying that you should not go down the BCDR / SRM road, but be sure to be prepared. (read this e-book, it’s good and it’s free) Get to know your “business”, and be prepared for a long engagement… cause my experience is that normally people have a hard time answering really obvious questions.

You will talk to a lot of people who don’t have a clue of what the core business services / applications actually are. And the same goes for the sys admins, dependencies? Why would you want to know about that and how would I know?

Do you know which questions to ask, do you know how to get the right answers… This is why BCDR subject matter experts are needed for SRM engagements, so before you start give VMware a call, or your local VAC partner for that matter and make sure you get the best out of the SRM product.

Update: Symantec and VMotion, Supported or not?

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There has been a lot of hassle on this one over the last couple of days. Symantec wasn’t supporting VMotion for their anti-virus suite. (Mike D., Lone SysAdmin, VInternals)A little birdie just told me that the article has been updated:

Is VMware VMotion ESX server supported with Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Endpoint Protection?

Symptoms:
Symantec supports running Symantec AntiVirus, Symantec Endpoint Protection, and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager in VMware environments.

A few customers have reported problems with Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager with VMware VMotion ESX server. These problems may or may not be related to the presence of VMware VMotion or the presence of the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager.

Some the problems include:

  • Client communication problems
  • Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager communication problems
  • Content update failures
  • Policy update failures
  • Client data does not appear in the database
  • Replication failures


Solution:
Symantec is investigating each support case and will update Symantec products where necessary. If you experience a problem that you suspect is related to VMware VMotion, please contact Symantec Technical Support.

So in short, there have been problems which might or might not have been related to VMotion or Symantec EPM. Symantec will support products running in a VMware Environment!

SVMotion and disk space

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I received this question a couple of times and there’s no real definitive answer written anywhere…

“Does storage vmotion require additional disk space on the source volume?”

The answer is: Yes it does. Storage VMotion uses the snapshot technology to release the lock on the source disk. This snapshot is placed on the source volume. So in other words, all changes that take place during a Storage VMotion are written to the delta file. This delta file, can and will grow fast.

So keep this in mind if you need to storage vmotion a VM because the VMFS volume is running out of diskspace… it might run out of diskspace sooner than you think.

Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer

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About a week ago Eric Sloof wrote about Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) by a company called Replicate Technologies. I think his blog title is a great caption of the product “RDA Rocks”. It does indeed.

The one thing that really stands out is the simplicity of implementing the product, their website claims 30 minutes and that’s exactly what it took me. (Could have been faster if I had a decent testing kit) You just download the two virtual appliances and import them into your environment. One appliance(the probe) needs to be converted to a template and the other one just needs to be started up.

If you’ve got DHCP running your RDA Controller will be available via HTTP. Just type in the IP and you’re good to go. You still need to install “probe vm’s” for RDA to be able to gather and analyse all the date. The probes can be considered as tiny helper vm’s. They only consume 64MB of memory and 640MB of diskspace, and installing them is just a matter of “next, next, finish”.

Like I said, simplicity seems to be the main theme around RDA 1.0. After the probe vm’s have been installed it’s just a matter of clicking “update analysis”, or you could do this automatically on a regular interval, and after a few minutes of gathering and analyzing data you can already view the reports.

The first thing that pops up is the dashboard, which gives an overview of “possible” problems:

Next two screenshots are more detailed views of two specific sections to give you an idea what RDA is capable of:

I think that this 1.0 version looks really promising for the future. Still I would love to see more detailed information added. I just wrote down a couple of them:

  1. Time Sync, compare ESX hosts and reveal if all VM’s are syncing or not
  2. VirtualMachine memory, balooning / swapping / limits set lower than assigned memory
  3. Storage counters for free disk space etc
  4. Queues, disk and cpu
  5. ESX Service Console swapping
  6. ESX Advanced Settings set (compare with other hosts and display difference)
  7. Export findings to csv, pdf, excel etc…

Still RDA is a tool you should look into, you can download a free trial for RDA here. Just check it out.

ESX in a Box with Shared storage but…

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I was just rebuilding my “ESX in a box” setup. I wanted to install an iSCSI Virtual San Appliance but why should I? Your answer probably is: well because you need shared storage to do a VMotion / HA / DRS etc. Yes you are completely right I do need shared storage to have these capabilities, but there’s no need for an iSCSI VSA or NFS appliance for that matter.

A while ago Bouke G. of Jume wrote a nice blog on how to set up shared storage without a SAN appliance. In short you just create an additional disk(scsi id 1:0) on the first ESX VM. Close down VMware Workstation and edit your .vmx file. I would suggest a copy and paste of the following lines and remove the duplicate lines. (scsi1:0.filename etc)

scsi1.present = “TRUE”
scsi1.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
scsi1.sharedBus = “VIRTUAL”
scsi1:0.present = “TRUE”
scsi1:0.fileName = “D:\Virtual Machines\shared_disk.vmdk”
scsi1:0.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi1:0.redo = “”

disk.locking = “FALSE”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = “0”
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = “4096”
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = “0”

Now copy the correct .vmx entries to the second ESX VM’s .vmx file and just boot them up. It’s as simple as that. Yes I know setting up iSCSI isn’t difficult but this will save you precious memory, especially when running this as a demo kit on your laptop!