Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

u2

Health status not showing..

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I’ve seen this one on the VMTN forum a couple of times. When the Health Status isn’t showing you could do the following to fix it:

  1. Restart VirtualCenter service on the VC Server
  2. Restart mgmt-vmware service on the hosts that are affected (service mgmt-vmware restart)
  3. Restart vmware-vpxa on the hosts that are affected (service vmware-vpxa restart)

If the above did not fix the issue:

  1. Disconnect the affected Host from Inventory on VC
  2. Reconnect the affected Host from Inventory on VC

And if that doesn’t work this is also a possible solution:

  1. Restart the Pegasus service (service pegasus restart)

Follow Up: HA Change (isolation response)

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I’ve been asking around why the default isolation response has been changed from “power off” to “leave powered on”. It seems that this is done because a lot of customers had VM’s being powered off unnecessary. This happened because the service console or physical switches weren’t setup redundant and thus caused HA to kick in. In other words, for those having complete redundancy, switches and nics, change the default back to “power off” or use the new option “Shutdown VM”.

Shutdown VM requires VMware Tools to be installed. If HA is unable to shutdown the VM within 5 minutes it will be powered down. I would prefer this option, especially when you virtualized services like Exchange, SQL, Oracle etc.

VirtualCenter database

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There has always been much discussion about the VirtualCenter database if it was important enough to back it up. Most people agreed that the information that the database held was not important. A datacenter and cluster could be easily reconfigured and all other settings were saved on the host. HA wasn’t even using VirtualCenter, and DRS well a day without DRS is something most companies could afford.

VirtualCenter 2.5 already contained a feature called “Distributed Power Management”, with this feature the VirtualCenter database became more important but still one could easily do without it. But VMware just released VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2. This update contains a new feature for HA. HA will get it’s IP info straight from VirtualCenter instead of the /etc/hosts file or DNS. With this info HA fills up /etc/FT_HOSTS. This all of a sudden makes the VirtualCenter database and the VirtualCenter server more important than ever.

I guess it’s time to start building the VirtualCenter server in a different way. Going virtual might be the best solution for having a highly available VirtualCenter server and database. But what about actually backing up the Database, via a maintenance plan or a backup engine. In time the VirtualCenter database will only get more important, especially when for instance DPM evolves. I can imagine DPM will detect trends and switch servers on and off accordingly.

Anyway, the only message I wanted to get out is start backing up that database!

Cool feature of the VMware Converter plugin

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How about backing up that dreadful application/server that you couldn’t or did not wanted to virtualize to your ESX environment? It could be useful to have a copy of a server that for whatever reason you did not virtualize. The new VMware Converter plugin for VirtualCenter gives you this option. You can create a reoccurring schedule for a p2v, you can even save several version of the converted machine. How cool is that! Seems like a great way to backup a machine!

How do I do this:

  1. click on scheduled tasks
  2. click new and pick “import a machine”
  3. select “physical” and enter the servers name/ip and username and password
  4. select the disks you want to import
  5. type a name for the VM
  6. select the destination host
  7. select a datastore
  8. select a network
  9. and schedule the task!

ESXi 3.5 Update 2 on a USB memory key

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For those like me who would like to check ESXi 3.5 update 2 but don’t want to install on a local harddisk. Here’s a good pdf about how to install it on a USB memory key. It’s fairly easy and I just booted my IBM X61 laptop with ESXi.


In short:

  1. First get the following tools: 7-Zip(Free), WinImage(Demo)
  2. Download the ESXi ISO
  3. Open the ISO with 7-Zip
  4. Extract “install.tgz”
  5. Open “install.tgz” with 7-Zip
  6. Click on “install.tar”
  7. Browse to “usr\lib\vmware\installer\”
  8. Open “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd.bz2”
  9. Extract “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd”
  10. Open WinImage and go to Disk, click on “Restore Virtual Harddisk Image on physical drive”
  11. Select a physical drive
  12. Select “VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd”
  13. And click “yes” to write the DD image to the USB Disk

Done! For a more detailed procedure check the pdf above, it also includes screenshots!