Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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I was exploring the next version of ESX / vCenter again today and did a Storage VMotion via the vSphere client. I decided to take a couple of screenshots to  get you guys acquainted with the new look/layout.

Doing a Storage VMotion via the GUI is nothing spectacular cause we all have used the 3rd party plugins. But changing the disk from thick to thin is. With vSphere it will be possible to migrate to thin provisioned disks, which can and will save disk space and might me desirable for servers that have low disk utilization and disk changes. [Read more…] about Storage VMotion, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

Pre-installing the vCenter agent?!

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You might wonder why you would want to pre-install the vCenter agent on an ESX box? Well if you have several remote offices which need to be connected to a central vCenter Server it will take a while before these agents are pushed and installed. Especially if the connection between these sites isn’t as fast as most of us are used to at home. (I’m talking 128KB here for instance…) One of my colleagues, as mentioned in a previous article, is doing a major roll out of ESX. With their current bandwidth adding an ESX server to the central vCenter Server took over 20 minutes. With the vCenter agent pre-installed this was cut down to only 2 minutes. That will save you a lot of time when you need to do over 200 hosts…

  • On the vCenter Server, look for the following files in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\upgrade 
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215.sig
  • copy the files to the ESX host and run the following commands: 
    sh vpx-upgrade-esx-7-linux-104215
    service mgmt-vmware restart
  • wait 5 min…

Update: VMware Health Check Report 0.94

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William Lam posted an update of his Health Check script on the VMTN Communities. I’ve been using this script extensively at several customer sites together with VIMA. Here are the release notes:

03-24-2009 – v0.9.4
Fixes:
-There was a bug reported by Duncan Epping and others regarding hosts that were appearing in the wrong cluster with respect to the portgroup listings, this should be fixed.

Enhancements:
-Detail Hardware Health sensor readings provided by CIM
-CDP Summary (individual cdp.pl available)

vCenter Mobile Access technology preview available today

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I received a private message on the VMTN Community that the vCenter Mobile Access forum had been opened up. I wasn’t sure if I could blog about it but John Troyer just posted a message on twitter so it’s out in the open. Read the VMTN blog post about vCenter Mobile Access for more info or just watch the youtube movie and discover what it is all about. Go to the VMTN Community forums, join the program and manage your virtual environment from your mobile phone!

HA enhancements, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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Let’s start with a screenshot:

These are the properties of an HA cluster, as you can see there are two sections that changed:

  1. “Enable Host Monitoring” is a brand new feature. Anyone who did network maintenance while HA was enabled knows why this feature will come in handy. Those that didn’t: Isolation response! If ESX is unable to send or receive it’s heartbeat and can’t ping it’s default isolation response address it will shutdown all VM’s. To avoid this behavior you can switch of HA for a specific host with this new feature. In just four words: Maintenance mode for HA.
  2. Besides the amount of host failures a cluster can tolerate you can also specify a percentage. With the “host failures” option VMware uses the highest values of CPU and Memory reservations to calculate the amount of slots. (For more on slot / slot size read the Resource Management Guide for ESX 3.5) With the new option “Percentage of cluster resources” this isn’t the case. This new option uses the actual reservation of the VM and calculates the total percentage of resources used based on these calculations. If no reservation have been made it uses the default 256Mhz / 256MB reservation. In other words, you will be more flexible and will get a higher consolidation ratio. If the default reservation values are to low you can always use the advanced options to increase it. Another new option is “specify a failover host”. This option can be compared to “das.defaultfailoverhost”. The good thing about this option is that the designated host will be used for fail-over only. DRS will not migrate VM’s to this host, and it’s not possible to start VM’s on this host.