VMware

Vote Now!

Duncan Epping · Sep 14, 2010 ·

Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the Top 25 Blogs worldwide has started again. I had the honor of placing 1st three consecutive times and of course this time I want to be first again, although this year more than ever there seems to be a lot of competition out there!

My personal Top-10 changed slightly as a couple of bloggers did an outstanding job the last 6 months and others stopped or topics changed. Bloggers like Frank Denneman, who published amazing articles on Resource Management and NUMA scheduling, Simon Long with his VCP-4 online exam and Nick Weaver with the Uber VSA really stepped up to the plate!

Instead of asking for your votes, I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs based on quality, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I did wanted to list my top 10 articles over the last 6 months:

Vote Now!

HA Cli

Duncan Epping · Aug 3, 2010 ·

I was just playing around with the HA Cli and noticed that when you give an “ln” (listNodes) that the failover coordinator (aka master primary) is also listed. I have never noticed this before, but don’t have a pre-vSphere 4.1 environment to test it on to see if this existed before 4.1. If you want to test it in your own environment just simply run “/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli” and give the “ln” command as shown in the screenshot below:

I also tested demoting of a node just for fun. In this case I demoted the node “esxi1” from primary to secondary:

And of course I promoted it again to primary:

** Disclaimer: This article contains references to the words master and/or slave. I recognize these as exclusionary words. The words are used in this article for consistency because it’s currently the words that appear in the software, in the UI, and in the log files. When the software is updated to remove the words, this article will be updated to be in alignment. **

VMware related acronyms

Duncan Epping · Jul 29, 2010 ·

We were just talking about some random VMware acronyms during a lab day and I thought I would write the ones down which some of us didn’t know. (Even google did not have the answer to some) I guess the most difficult one to figure out was VPXA/VPXD, which refers to VPX which was the official name for vCenter back in the days….

FDM = Fault Domain Manager
CSI = Clustering Services Infrastructure
PAE = Propero Application Environment
ESX = Elastic Sky X
GSX = Ground Storm X or Ground Swell X
VPX = Virtual Provisioning X
VPXA = Virtual Provisioning X Agent
VPXD = Virtual Provisioning X Daemon
VMX = Virtual Machine eXecutable
AAM = Automated Availability Manager
VIX = Virtual Infrastructure eXtension
VIM = Virtual Infrastructure Management
DAS = Distributed Availability Service
ccagent = Control Center agent
vswif = Virtual Switch Interface
vami =Virtual Appliance Management Infrastructure
vob = VMkernel Observation
MARVIN = Modular Automated Rackable Infrastructure Node
WCP = Workload Control Plane

How about code names for releases? Well we had a couple, note that the first name usually refers to ESX and the second to vCenter, so for KL “Kadinsky” was the code name for ESX and Logan for vCenter:

DM = Dali/McKinley = VI 3.0
NP = Neptune/Pluto = VI 3.5
KL = Kadinsky/Logan = vSphere 4.0
KL.next = vSphere 4.1
MN = Matisse/Newberry = vSphere 5.0
OP = Oliveira/Pikes = vSphere 5.5

Of course the big question is where the “X” comes from in ESX, GSX etc. To be honest I don’t know but according to VMware old-timer Mike Di Petrillo (source is this interview (21:30) by Rodney Haywood) the X had been added by an Engineer to make it sound technical and cool!

If there are any to VMware related acronyms that you feel should be on the list which are not too obvious… leave me a comment. (And too obvious would be something like vDS.)

VMware View without HA?

Duncan Epping · Jul 15, 2010 ·

I was discussing something with one of my former colleagues a couple of days ago. He asked me what the impact was of running VMware View in an environment without HA.

To be honest I am not a View SME, but I do know a thing or two about HA/vSphere in general. So the first thing that I mentioned was that it wasn’t a good idea. Although VDI in general is all about density not running HA in these environments could lead to serious issues when a host fails.

Now, just imagine you have 80 Desktop VMs per host running and roughly 8 hosts in a DRS only cluster on NFS based storage. One of those hosts is isolated from the network…. what happens?

User connection is dropped
VMDK Lock times out
User tries to reconnect
Broker powers on the VM on a new host

Now that sounds great doesn’t it? Well yeah in a way it does, but what happens when the host is not isolated anymore?

Indeed, the VMs were still running. So basically you have a split brain scenario. The only way in the past to avoid this was to make sure you had HA enabled and had set HA to power off the VM.

But with vSphere 4 Update 2 a new mechanism has been introduced. I wanted to stress this, as some people have already made assumption that it is part of AAM/HA. It actually isn’t… The question for powering off the VM to recover from the split brain scenario is generated by “hostd” and answered by “vpxa”. In other words, with or without HA enabled ESX(i) will recover the split brain

Again, I am most definitely not a Desktop/View guy so I am wondering how the View experts out there look against disabling HA on your View Compute Cluster. (Note that on the Management Layer this should be enabled.)

vSphere 4.1: Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo failed?

Duncan Epping · Jul 13, 2010 ·

When I was installing vSphere 4.1 ESXi I ran into a problem. I received the following error when I added the ESXi host to my cluster:

Call “Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo” for object “yellow bricks” on vCenter Server “W2K8-001” failed.

Although the error didn’t make much sense I had the feeling it had something to do with name resolution(This KB article gave a hint I guess). After I added my dns suffix on my NIC it worked. Problem solved.