During the installation of VirtualCenter the following error code was presented “25036”. With no further message the installation is cut-off. After a close inspection it seemed that there already were a couple of SQL Express 2005 services installed, the software was removed and the services were still there but disabled. I guess for some reason the removal of SQL 2005 Express wasn’t successful. The installation procedure seems to have a hard time overwriting the registry values or changing the old values. This problem can easily be solved by manually deleting that specific service in the registry. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services)
VirtualCenter
VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 3
VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:
Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 – Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.PR:225357 – Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are configured for a virtual machine can fail to update. This issue is usually encountered after the virtual machine has changed power state.
PR:163019 – Virtual Machines Do Not Show Correct Status This release fixes an issue where the status indicators of some virtual machines do not accurately reflect the virtual machine’s status. This issue usually occurs after a restart of the VirtualCenter Server.
Licensing Issues
R:229629 – VirtualCenter Does Not Correctly Display New License Format This release fixes an issue where earlier versions of VirtualCenter are not able display licenses from license files issued since the release of VirtualCenter 2.5. On versions of VirtualCenter before 2.0.2 Update 3, the license files appear to install normally but log warnings such as “Chunk ‘desc=ESX Server Enterprise’ was not well formed, skipping” in the log files when license files of the new format are displayed in VirtualCenter.
The release notes aren’t online yet, so we will have to wait for a more detailed view on what has changed in this release.
Performance counters bug for the cluster?
Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s only around 30GB assigned, nowhere near the 66,9% or the 106,01% for that matter. Anyone who can confirm this behavior or even better explain it. I’m afraid it’s a bug…
Add multiple SCSI controllers to your VM to improve performance
[edit 18-02-2011: It has come to my attention that the info in this article was incorrect / outdated. The LSI Logic has a default queuedepth of 32. Even if the LSI could go higher than 32 it would be capped by either the device queue depth or disk.schednumreqoutstanding. To enable a single VM to have a queuedepth larger than 32 the pvscsi card should be used and for optimal performance all layers should be aligned.)
A couple of months ago at the Dutch VMug meeting Bouke-Jumé gave some good storage tips. This is one of them:
The LSI Bus Logic Controller / Driver has a standard queue depth of 256. Although it isn’t possible to set this higher it is possible to add a second controller and when you make sure the SCSI ID of your disk corresponds to the SCSI card you will have another queue of 256. This can lead to improved performance for Database Servers, Fileservers and other I/O intensive VM’s.
Open the properties of the VM,
For the first disk and SCSI Controller 0 go to the virtual disk and select 0:X
For the second disk and SCSI Controller 1 go to the virtual disk and select 1:X
And so on…
Vinternals: howto disable the Capacity Planner
Vinternals wrote a short article on how to de-install or hide the Capacity Planner plugin for VirtualCenter:
Capacity planner is rather pesky to have hanging around on every VirtualCenter box in the enterprise… especially if you use some other tool for the job! So just add this line to the end of your VirtualCenter install script:
msiexec /qn /x {2A2750C9-E14E-4635-8595-C1CD214445B0}
and away she goes!
Altenatively, you can simply hide it from the Virtual Infrastructure client by adding the following in the
section of vpxd.cfg <vcp2v>
<dontstartconsolidation>true</dontstartconsolidation>
</vcp2v>