Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

What about those Jumbo Frames?

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Support for Jumbo Frames is one of the major new features for ESX 3.5. Especially for the people who are using an iSCSI SAN configuring jumbo frames could be very beneficial. Instead of having an MTU(maximum size of transmitted packet) of 1500 an MTU of 9000 would be possible. That would cut out a lot of the iSCSI overhead. But are jumbo frames supported for 3.5? Answer: Yes and no. [Read more…] about What about those Jumbo Frames?

Virtual Machine High Availability

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I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly any evidence that HA did it’s job, in other words no events logged in VirtualCenter as far as I can see. [Read more…] about Virtual Machine High Availability

OVF Tool and Nostalgia

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I was trying to convert the great Nostalgia Virtual Appliance to a VMware Workstation compatible format but just copying didn’t work. I did the following to get this thing running directly under VMware Workstation 6.02:

  • I exported the Nostalgia VM from VirtualCenter 2.5 into an OVF format.
  • Copied the OVF files to my PC(d:\ovftools).
  • Downloaded the OVF Tool and unzipped it into: d:\ovftools
  • Ran the following command cause the damn ovf batch file didn’t work: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_05\bin\java” -jar d:\ovftool\ovftool.jar d:\ovftool\nostalgia.ovf d:\nostalgia\ (The batchfile was complaining about the fact that the JAVA_Home environment variable wasn’t set, but it actually was…)
  • Now it’s converted to a Workstation 6 compatible VM, just open it and start it.

Let’s see if I can fix that sound in the next couple of days…

Update:
Arne just posted a solution to the JAVA_Home environment error… And I just discovered that the fact that the ovftool.bat doesn’t work is because of the long file names within dos. You’ll have to set the environment variable with an 8.3 notation: JAVA_HOME = C:\Progra~1\Java\jre1.5.0_05\
No quotes or what so ever because VMware already used quotes in the batch file for the if exist statement.