by Duncan Epping
Duncan Epping · ·
For those attending the VMworld, check out the time table Rene created in Excel. Will come in handy when deciding which session to attend!
I am attending VMworld Europe 2008 Next week in Cannes. Today I was looking what kind of sessions wil be presented. On the VMworld site there is a link to see a long list of available sessions, but I found this list hard to use. I made a nice timetable in Excel to see which session is on what time in which room.
Duncan Epping · ·
For those attending the VMworld, the time table for the technical sessions is online! Check it out! I’m having a hard time picking which deep-dive sessions I will attend, there are so many to choose from!
Duncan Epping · ·
VMware justed added a new KB article about problems with Storage VMotion script:
Storage VMotion can fail for a virtual machine with the error message:
Failed to unstun VM after disk reparent.
The virtual machine is partially migrated and powered off. Generally, the virtual machine cannot be powered on again.
This issue affects:
- Virtual machines converted in-place (not deployed or cloned) from template virtual machines with compact disks.
- Virtual machines cloned from a virtual machine of the above type (as well as virtual machines cloned from those virtual machines, and so on).
- Virtual machines with disks created with the following command: vmkfstools -i <source> -d <destination>. ESX Server 3.5 does not support thin-provisioned (or sparse) disks.
- Virtual machines created through the SDK with at least one disk created using the RelocateSpec.transform parameter set to sparse. Again, ESX Server 3.5 does not support thin-provisioned disks.
This issue affects the above types of virtual machines because when a disk that is thin-provisioned, or is flat but was cloned from a virtual machine that thin-provisioned disks, is copied to the target datastore as part of Storage VMotion, the disk’s content ID (CID) value is not preserved (although the content of the disk is correctly copied). When the virtual machine attempts to open the disk, it notices the CID is different from what it expects and fails to resume because it believes the disk is corrupted. In reality, the disk is not corrupted, only the CID is incorrect. So not only does the virtual machine end up powered off, but it cannot be powered back on because the CID is still incorrect.
To identify and solve the problem download the scripts attached to the article!
Duncan Epping · ·
Netapp just announced a new product “SnapManager® for Virtual Infrastructure”:
SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure enables customers to protect their VMware environments with automated data protection and recovery of their virtual machines. SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure dramatically reduces human error and increases server utilization for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores. As a result, customers can protect their data more reliably. More information is available at www.netapp.com.
Duncan Epping · ·
Before installing VCB and connecting the proxy host to the SAN you should disable automount via diskpart(cmd, diskpart, automount disable, automount scrub). When you don’t disable automount Windows will signature all “incoming” disks. When this happens the VMware hosts will not recognize the VMFS volumes anymore. But fortunately you can re-label the luns as VMFS.
Check with “fdisk -lu” what the current ID value is of the volumes, it’s “SFS” if Windows wrecked it. Write all the devices down and label them again as VMFS:
fdisk /dev/sd? (? the letter for that specific volume)
p
d
n
p
1
default
t
fb
X
b
1
128 (disk alignment, check your SAN manual for the correct value, 128 is correct in most cases…)
W
Now rescan the HBA devices, esxcfg-rescan vmhba0 etc etc.