Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

Netapp SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure

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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.

VCB: I forgot all about “automount disable” what now?

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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.

Undocumented VCB config.js feature

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One of my customers wanted to use the default VCB framework but did not want to quiesce the VM for several reasons. (Databases, Active Directory etc.) I could not find an option in the config.js file but noticed the following in the file glue.js:

// A fallback to be able to switch to non-quiesced snapshots
if (typeof(NO_QUIESCE) != "undefined") {
cmd +="-Q 0 ";
}

In other words, setting the option “NO_QUIESCE” with no value in config.js results in the VM not being quiesced, default it will quiesce the VM! I added the following line to the  config.js file to accomplish this:

NO_QUIESCE="";

VCB – Weird errors

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Today I encountered a weird error during an implementation of VMware Consolidated Backup. When ever I ran vcbmounter I received the following error:”Run time error – the application the application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.”

It seemed that for some reason the vcbuser did not have the role “VMware consolidated backup user” linked anymore. I would have expected an error in the line of “permission denied” or “not enough permissions to complete task” and definitely not a Runtime error…

Anyway I tested the script I blogged about yesterday and it works like a charm, check it out!

CDP, why?

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That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of strange routing / connection errors to the virtual machines. CDP was very useful because I could setup a remote connection to the customer and check which vmnic was connected to which port on the switch. So use CDP when in doubt!
Click on the blue cloud next to the vmnic name on the right:

This is the result:

(Screenshots taken from the RTFM Upgrade Guide.)