Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Howto

Automatic rescan of your HBAs….

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As some of you, and I hope all of you, have noticed by now when you create / expand / extent / delete a datastore a rescan of your HBAs will automatically be initiated. This however can lead to a “rescan storm” when you are building a new environment.

You can imagine that it’s pointless to rescan your HBA 25 times in a row when you are adding more than 1 new datastore. I can even imagine you would like to be in control; when, which server and at what time. This behavior was introduced with vCenter 2.5 U2 I believe but as I just found out can be disabled. Now keep in mind that disabling is not a best practice. This should be avoided as a default setting but will come in handy when you are building a new site.

  1. Open up the vSphere Client
  2. Go to Administration -> vCenter Server
  3. Go to Settings -> Advanced Settings
  4. If the key “config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter” is not available add it and set it to false

Make sure to set it to “true” as soon as you are done because you would like to make sure the environment is consistent in the future when you or your customer is adding/removing/expanding a datastore.

NetApp’s vSphere best practices and EMC’s SRM in a can

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This week both NetApp and EMC released updated versions of documents I highly recommend to everyone interested in virtualization! Now some might think why would I want to read a NetApp document when we are an EMC shop.! Or why would I want to read an EMC document when my environment is hosted on a NetApp FAS3050. The answer is simple, although both documents contain vendor specific information there’s more to be learned from these documents because the focus is VMware products. No marketing nonsense, just the good stuff!

NetApp’s guide dives in to the basics of multipathing for instance. Especially the section on iSCSI/NFS is useful, how do I setup multiple VMkernels for load balancing and are the pros and cons. EMC’s SRM and Celerra guide includes a full how to set this up. Not only the EMC side but also the VMware SRM side of it. Like I said both documents are highly recommended!

Howto: vCenter on Windows 2008 with Oracle

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I received this how to in my email a couple of days ago from colleague Daniel Langenhan. Daniel was so kind to let my share this with you. If you are looking into installing vCenter on Windows 2008 with an Oracle database this might come in handy:

  1. Download 32bit Oracle client (even on a 64 bit system). Oracle 9i is not supported and the installer actually checks that. You only can use 10 or 11″.
  2. (10g) Download patch 5699495
  3. Install the 32 bit client using full Admin mode
  4. Use Net Manager to setup connection to Oracle server and test
  5. Use 32 bit ODBC [windows]/sysWOW64/obdcad32.exe
    The 64 bit is the one that shows up in Administrative tools and the installer will not use this.
  6. Create system DSN’s and test connection
    (10g) if error pop up doing so the patch from step 2 was not installed

VMworld 2009 – TA2259 Ask the Experts Panel Session

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We are proud to officially announce the VMworld 2009 – Ask the Experts Panel Session.  This session will feature virtualization experts Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Chad Sakac and Tom Howarth answering your questions on virtual infrastructure design.  In the next week or so we will be posting sections on our blog sites for you to submit questions for review during the session, so stay tuned!

Session ID: TA2259
Session Title: Ask the Experts – Virtualization Design
Track: Technology and Architecture
Abstract: Are you running a virtual environment and experiencing some problems?  Are you planning an upgrade from VI3 to vSphere 4 and have some questions about the infrastructure architecture changes required?  Do you have a virtual infrastructure design and want it blessed by the experts?  Come join us for a one hour panel session where your questions are the topic of discussion!  Join the Virtualization Experts; Rick Scherer from VMwareTips.com, Scott Lowe author of Mastering vSphere 4, Duncan Epping from VMware, Chad Sakac from EMC and Tom Howarth from planetVM.net as they answer your questions on virtualization design.

I shamelessly copied this from vmwaretips.com… But I don’t think Rick will mind the extra promotion for this session!

vSphere ESXi on a USB memory stick

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***Please use this supported method instead of the one below***

The procedure has not changed much since ESXi 3.5 but I thought I would document it anyway. A lot of people seem to end up here by googling “USB ESXi vSphere”.


Here you go:

  1. First get the following tools: 7-Zip(Free), WinImage(Demo)
  2. Download the ESXi ISO (VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-164009.x86_64.iso)
  3. Open the ISO with 7-Zip
  4. Open “image.tgz” with 7-Zip
  5. Browse to “image.tgz.temptarusrlibvmwareinstallerVMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd.bz2”
  6. Extract “VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd”
  7. Open WinImage and go to Disk, click on “Restore Virtual Harddisk Image on physical drive”
  8. Select a physical drive
  9. Select “VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd”
  10. And click “yes” to write the DD image to the USB Disk

Done! Now, let’s see if I can get my old Dell GX620 running with vSphere ESXi