To spread the word and hopefully get as many people as possible I’m reposting Simon Seagrave’s posting about the second vBeers to be happening. I unfortunately can’t make this one due to already attending a VMware partner Exchange. Firstly a definition of vBeers:
vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.
The London vBeers meet-up is held at the lovely ole English pub, ‘The Cittie of Yorke’. Details and directions below:
When & Where
The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.
Having seen a recent VMware communities posting with someone having the same problem I had I thought I’d write this up.
Almost a month back now while doing some routine maintenance on some of our then ESX3.x virtual machines we decided to expand the primary hard drive of a windows 2003 virtual machine due to it running out of space. As I’m sure you’ve guessed from the title of this posting we made the critical and very embarrassing mistake of forgetting to check if the virtual machine had a snapshot attached to it(What an idiot). Unlike vSphere, ESX3.x allows you to extend the hard drive with a snapshot attached so once we had done the extending of the drive and reattached it to the vm again (this is the way I liked to do it and I do know there are easier ways which after this problem I’ve made sure I know how to do). Once we powered the vm back up we received an error stating:
“Cannot open the disk ‘path to the .vmdk file’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created’
This kind of error I had seen before after cold migrating a machine with a snapshot and the CID then being different from the number in my VMDK. So I went through the steps as mentioned in this Knowledge Base article to try see if this error had anything to do with my problem.(*NB* Follow steps below before trying this)
Now as to make this posting structured to try help someone fix this problem if they have done it themselves I’m going detail the steps you should/ i myself did follow. Firstly I have to warn you that before you follow these steps I can’t promise you will get your snapshot data back nor can I promise it won’t corrupt your vm but having done this process with VMware support for this problem this is what they would make you follow also.
First is make a clone of the machine we’re trying to fix just in case
Next is the fun part due to you expanding the drive and therefore the snapshot has a different RW value than your vmdk.So you need to use putty and edit the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file in notepad and look for
WRITE THE NUMBER AFTER RW DOWN.This one is what the drive was before the expand
Next open the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file and look for the RW **number** VMFS "VirtualDisk-flat.vmdk" value. What we are going to do is make it look as if the expand never happened. So edit the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file and put in the FIRST number from the “RW **number** VMFS “VirtualDisk-000001-delta.vmdk” into the VirtualDisk-flat.vmdk line and save it.
Secondly as I said one of the problems could be down to your CID for your VMDK being different from your snapshot/s so follow this Knowledge Base article.
After making sure the CID’s match then "delete" the snapshots. If your snapshot manager shows no snapshots(like mine did) then create one called test or whatever you like, let it create, then go to snapshot manager and click delete all and this should apply/"delete" the snapshots.
Just a very fast posting to notify that the blueprint for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacentre Administration blueprint has been released. As I’ve said I’m really looking forward to this exam as hopefully it will enable me to differentiate myself from the multitude of vcp’s that qualified recently and hopefully also teach me and hone my skills for preparation for my VCDX someday in the future.
The Blueprint is here and it looks like a very good exam and loads of really interesting and testing things in it. I look forward to learning more about it in the coming weeks and months.
The whole community has been buzzing with the news of the vExpert’s for 2010. As I said in the last all things virtual I didn’t think I was going to become one and I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t become one. I wrote a blog posting about the reasons I feel I didn’t get it and how I think if I keep trying hopefully I will be selected as one. One encouraging part from this past week was a twitter message from John Troyer the leader/owner of the vExpert community saying he thinks I’m off to a great start on my way to becoming one. Thanks John it really means a lot to me 🙂
Scott Lowe whose book Mastering VMware vSphere 4 was a massive help for my in my preparation for my VCP4 posted a very thought provoking posting all about blogging for the right reasons. This isn’t virtualisation per se but it does relate well to people blogging just for the sake of possibly becoming a vExpert or for getting a new job/role. Speaking of Scott’s book his book is now available as an Ebook.
Arnim van Lieshout posted all about the latest release of the vEcoShell and the new features it has. The vEcoShell is a brilliant tool and is one I’m trying to strengthen my knowledge on due to the great customisations you can do with it and the power it has for running scripts via PowerCli in your virtual environment.
VMware have also released the latest version of the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam Blueprint Guide. These blueprints are amazing and are the best way I feel in making sure you know and have the required knowledge and skills to pass the VCP4 exam.
VMware have also announced that there is now support for VMware SDK’s via the support team tasked with this support. Mike DiPetrillo has written a blog posting all about this release and what it means for people like himself helping people prepare their applications and services for the cloud.
Rick Scherer has posted a blog posting all about EMC’s new technology EMC VPLEX. This was released at EMC world and allows the infamous long distance vmotion. I won’t try describe it capabilities as Rick has explained it great in his posting and the video from EMC world in which Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) had a major role in setting up and making sure it ran smoothly. The video is below
Jason Boche has posted up how to win yourself a free pass to this years VMworld.I’m sure a staggering amount of people are going to be entering as most companies are still weary of spending money on these kinds of conventions so this is a great way for someone to make it. I’ve been given the nod to make it to this years one which I’m extremely excited about and hopefully I can generate some really good blog postings while there like the ones I read so much for last years one.
While catching up on my VMware Communities Roundtable podcasts I was listening to the podcast from a few weeks back about the VCAP exams and was very pleased to hear that live labs are going to be a large part of the exams to stem the tide of people using “braindump” materials.
Colin Steele was the first person I saw to have posted a blog on an error is saw pour in at the VMware communities about a Microsoft patch that was preventing vSphere client logins. VMware have also created an official knowledgebase article on the problem and how to fix it.
Lastly a friend of mine who also works in virtualisation Kivian Johnson of First Rand Bank alerted me to a very helpful and possibly integral free tool by Foundstone a division of McAfee’s VIDigger. The tool is “designed to help administrators check the configuration of ESX server and the virtual machines hosted on ESX server against the VMware Infrastructure Hardening guide and other best practices.” I am yet to fully try it out in my lab environment but if it really does do all the things they say it will be a brilliant tool for any virtual infrastructure administrator.
As of last night VMware have released VMware vCentre 4.0 Update 2 & VMware vSphere Update 2
All the patches that were released and their build numbers are:
vCentre Server 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
vSphere Client 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
ESX 4.0 Update 2 (Build 261974)
VMware Tools (Build 261974)
The new features with the latest release of vSphere are:
Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.
Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s,MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency).
Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
The new features with the latest release of vCentre are:
Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
SLES 11 (x32 and x64)
SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)
RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)
Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)
Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)
Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)
Check out the VMware vCentre 4 Update 2 Release Notes here and VMware vSphere Update 2 Release Notes here for all the resolved issues and all the fixes from previous bundles and how to update your environment.
You can download the latest update from the VMware download page here.
Firstly a massive congratulations to all who were bestowed with this accolade. In particular a massive congratulations to Barry Coombs (@VirtualisedReal) ,Gabrie van Zanten (@gabvirtualworld) ,Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) ,Tom Howarth (@tom_howarth) ,Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) ,Eric Sloof (@esloof) and Simon Long (@SimonLong_). Who have always been more than happy to answer any questions I have had via twitter, mail or even as recent as last night willing to power up their laptop to help with a problem we were having (Thanks again Gabrie, you’re a legend)
As I said in my last posting I didn’t have a massive amount of confidence in my being selected as a vExpert. This due to what I feel are very fair and understandable reasons and how I feel my continued efforts will hopefully help me have a much stronger case for next years. John Troyer who is the leader of the vExpert community has posted a brilliant article on the reasons some people didn’t receive it and has also given some really great pointers on how to better yourself for next years. Off of this here is some of the reasons I feel I understandably missed out and why I think I’m on the right track for next years:
I only started this blog at the end of November last year so due to the award being given for the activities you did in 2009 means I did extremely little and therefore rightly so was no where near being in contention. Since then though I have made a concerted effort to post more and try bring new ideas to the community. With this blog having had almost 3000 individual views so far , 2435 of that being between January to May this year and by the views increasing by at least 200 views every month it gives me hope that I’ll be a much stronger contender for next years if I keep it up.
I only started interacting with the virtualisation community late last year via twitter and was only able to attend my first VMUG end of November last year so I still need to make a name for myself and surpassing 300 followers on twitter last week of which over 98% are technical people gives me confidence that I am building a good reputation for myself among my peers and that the opinions and information I post is of interest to people in the IT field.
I need to strengthen my blog postings. I’m the first to admit that my blog postings aren’t the best for a few reasons but after having read through my postings even from a few months back I can see that with each posting I feel I’ve become a lot better at it and have learnt from each one.The increased readership I feel is partly due to this refining of my skills.
Plain and simple I’m either too busy or just lazy some times and due to this I haven’t been able to give back as much to the VMware communities pages and been able to join the live roundtables as much as I would like to. I plan to change this and hopefully via this be inspired to write more postings ,as one of the reasons I only post every week or so is due to the lack of good material/ideas and therefore I would rather not post up anything rather than some drivel for the sake of posting.
My lack of knowledge on the many things VMware does and the technologies that are available and how they work. I only became a VCP in VI3 in September last year due to only being able to attend the pre-requisite course a few weeks before and since then I have also obtained the VCP4 accreditation within a month of it becoming available late last year and with a very nice score if i do say so myself. With this ,my knowledge on all the subjects is increasing each day and thereby my blogs can be more knowledgeable and I will have the confidence in my knowledge to write up more postings on certain subjects as the worry of any blogger is that your information is wrong and you have made a fool of yourself by giving out the wrong facts.
So if you enjoyed any of my blog postings please link the information to your friends and colleagues and even better if you link to my blog postings via your own blogs if they have helped you this is obviously a brilliant way of getting more traffic to my site and more so bringing my solutions higher in search results so that more people can be helped by them.
Congratulations to all the vExperts again and hopefully I’ll be one of you next year.
I’m fairly pleased that these summaries of the things that have caught my interest in virtualisation have been getting so much traffic and even more pleased is that even though I didn’t post anything massive in particular I got my highest number of viewers last month to this blog with a week still to go which is always encouraging as hopefully some of the stuff I write about helps someone like so many of the websites I read have helped me.
First is the imminent announcement of the vExperts for 2010. I would obviously be extremely honoured if I became one but I think I’d be in shock a lot more though as there are some really top people in the field.
Next is a posting by Gabrie van Zanten (@gabvirtualworld) all about the default installation settings he does when setting up a vSphere 4 host. Some of the tips he mentions are ones I never thought about or knew so I’ll definitely be referencing his posting as well as Duncan Epping’s response to Gabrie’s posting all about his best practices/recommendations. I always enjoy finding these kinds of postings as sometimes these kinds of things you only learn having done many high level environment deployments etc and are also great tips for thoughts for my builds for my future VCDX attempt.
Duncan has also done a two part blog posting with Frank Denneman all about swapping in your VMware environment and what metrics actually show performance degradation and how they are worked out. Franks posting gives more of a description on how the memory is calculated and describes the reasons for swapping happening in your environment and how to try avoid it happening and thereby impacting your servers performance.
A few people have blogged about this but the first i saw it was on Virtualization spotlight a blog by Patrick Redknap. VMware have published a video KB on how to power off an unresponsive VMware ESX virtual machine. This video is a really useful one as quite a number of times I’ve battled to get a vm to shutdown correctly even after having tried rebooting services it stayed hung.
Frank Denneman has also posted a really good posting all about setting up memory reservations in your resource pools and how they work. This posting ties in really well on the little known (at least to me and a number of people I have spoken to /asked about memory reservations) about how a vm’s reservations will hoard memory if it has been used by the virtual machine once. Frank describes it well in the part “Even if the virtual machine becomes idle, the VMkernel will not reclaim this memory and return it to the free memory set. This means that ESX can start swapping and ballooning if no free memory is available for other virtual machines while the owning VM’s aren’t using their claimed reserved memory.” Recently while doing some testing for the HA setup in my environment I noticed from a vCheck report I ran that HA stated there were no spare slots in my HA cluster, so I did some research and came across Duncan Epping’s Slot sizes posting and onto his HA deepdive posting in which he describes how the slots are worked out :
“To calculate available resources and needed resources for a fail-over HA uses a concept called “slots”. Slots dictate how many VMs can be started up before vCenter starts yelling “Out Of Resources”!! Normally each slot represents one VM.
A slot is a logical representation of the memory and CPU resources that satisfy the requirements for any powered-on virtual machine in the cluster.
In other words a slot size is the worst case CPU and Memory reservation scenario in a cluster. This directly leads to the first “gotcha”:
HA uses the highest CPU reservation of any given VM and the highest memory reservation of any given VM. If no reservations of higher than 256Mhz are set HA will use a default of 256Mhz for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead for memory.
If VM1 has 2GHZ and 1024GB reserved and VM2 has 1GHZ and 2048GB reserved the slot size for memory will be 2048MB+memory overhead and the slot size for CPU will be 2GHZ. “
So I went through all of my vm’s and found a few stragglers that had memory reservations that had been switched off for a while. Once i cleared these our empty slots went from zero to 85 due to two of the switched off machines having six gb’s of ram reservations. Eric Sloof has also recently posted a great posting all about adding resource pools and how these can impact the performance of your vm’s even if you think they aren’t.
Speaking of VMware clustering options Cody Bunch has done a brilliant posting in the math behind the DRS stars. The math is a bit over my hear personally but math always has been so nothing new there. It’s very interesting how they work all these things out and a great bit of information for your setting up your DRS cluster.
Whilst i was doing my HA testing i had a few questions of how HA works and due to our environment being a test lab it’s also an integral part of our work as a consultancy so I couldn’t test what happened for the differing options you can select for HA. So I asked on twitter and Kendrick Coleman (@kendrickcoleman) not only replied to me among other people but went and tested it out for me in his test lab and posted a very nice blog posting all about it. Glad I gave him an idea and thanks for the results Kendrick!! It’s much appreciated and is one of the reasons being on twitter is priceless if you work in IT.
If you want to comment about my blog either leave me a comment and I’ll make sure I respond to you or add my on twitter via @greggrobertson5. Also congrats to the imminently crowned vExpert’s for 2010.
I thought I’d stick up a quick posting about this seeing as today it’s the second time the problem has come about and this time i made sure i did it really carefully just to make sure it wasn’t my fat fingers the first time.
A user requested me to extend one of their windows server 2008 vm’s c drives by 20gb. Standard practice is to make sure there are no snapshots attached (was reminded to make sure of this painfully recently),edit the settings of the vm and increase the size/value of the drive you wish to be increased,log into the vm,go to storage>disk management and rescan the disks. the new space should now show up and then you just right click on the drive to be extended and select extend and increase the space. But after extending it a error came up saying “invalid parameters”, after which the disk showed as the new size at the bottom of the disk management panel but in windows explorer and the top part of the disk management pane it still showed the original size.
What i had to do was shrink the drive i wanted to increase by the free space still left on the drive(this value will be automatically shown in the shrink drive wizard), rescan the disks by which it shows the drive shrunk by the free space and the free space of the shrunk drive added to the space you added earlier. Now you just extend it again like normal and it all works as it should.
If you want to know how to extend your drive via Windows Server 2003 Jonathon Medd has detailed it in a blog posting along with the steps I did above.
Just a very quick posting as so many of the top bloggers out there have covered it so well that VMware have released their new Exam set the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – VCAP.
Simon Long has posted a blog all about the VCAP side and what will be required for the administrator and design exams here
Duncan Epping has posted all about the VCDX 4 (VCDX4-DCD) side of things here and details the steps now to become a VCDX4-DCD. Quite disappointed they had to add the DCD part personally as all it’s doing is adding to the long winded acronyms some of us carry at the end of our mail signatures/business cards.
Eric Sloof also posted all about the VCDX4-DCD here and gives a brilliantly detailed break down of the VCAP here. I’ve already signed up to receive an email alert when registration opens (yes I’m seemingly that sad)
I plan to update this blog in the coming days/weeks as more information becomes available. Hopefully to the person who came across my blog a week back by searching “I’m a vcp4. Now what” has an answer 🙂
The past two weeks have brought some really great news and views in the virtualisation arena.
On the 6th of this month i was able to attend the London VMware User Group for the second time. There were some very interesting discussions and presentations. I wrote up a blog posting on the day here if you’re interested. I would firmly recommend anyone interested in this field to find out where and when your local VMUG is happening and get your spot as conversing with fellow virtualisation administrators can increase your knowledge on new things very quickly and easily. Hopefully the content from the user group will be uploaded to the normal location soon.
If you somehow haven’t heard about it yet the features due to be in vSphere 4.1 were “leaked” a few weeks back now. There are quite a few new features I’d welcome with open arms like support for up to 4 vMotion concurrent live migrations in 1GbE networks and up to 8 concurrent live migrations in 10GbE networks and Support for 8GB Fibre Channel HBAs. As the article says there is no guarantee that the features will actually be in the public release. I say “leaked” as personally i think if they didn’t want it getting out it wouldn’t have got out, i think it’s just a perfect way of judging people reactions to the features mentioned and see see how they can make some minor changes before making it available.
One of the people i got to meet in person at the London VMUG was Ricky El-Qasem of Veeam. As I’ve said numerous times before I’m hoping to better my powershell/PowerCLI skills as at the moment they are terribly basic and therefore are in dire need of bettering to enable me to script portions of my work to save me time and hopefully prepare me for the lack of the COS in possibly vSphere 4.1. Ricky has posted a few blogs all about his journey in learning PowerCLI in PowerCLI lessons and the resources he has used to grow his skills. Embarrassingly i still haven’t forced myself the time to sit down and get through all of the posts but after speed reading most it it looks like it is going to be highly beneficial to me when I stop being lazy and start working at it.
EMC world that ran from the 10th to the 13th of May brought some really interesting news.The most interesting to me was the announcement of the VPLEX which will enable “VM teleportation”. I won’t try and describe what the technology does and enables you as Chad Sakac has done a brilliant blog posting all about it and what it enables you to do. I can’t wait to be able to play with VPLEX once it’s available. There is also a very interesting KB article all about Enabling long distance vMotion with EMC VPLEX here
Last week the Call for Papers Public Voting opened up for VMworld 2010. Quite a few of the guys I’m friendly with on twitter have made the cut and their sessions have been made available to be voted on. I’m quite amazed by the massive amount of cloud sessions that have been selected. I’m really hoping that VMworld isn’t overshadowed(pun kind of intended) by all the cloud talk. I’ve cast my votes some of which were for fellow UK virtualisation friends and others obviously for ones i really want to be able to see/attend. If you’re like me and gain loads of information and help from Alan Renouf’s PowerCLI scripts then I would recommend a vote for his and Luc Dekens’ “ PowerCLI is for administrators! “ session. There are also sessions by Simon Seagrave of TechHead fame with “Building A Successful vSphere Lab” and “Network Segmentation in a Virtualized Environment ñ Best Practices and Approaches” by Nicholas Weaver of Nickapedia fame to name but a few. So go vote if you’re going to make it to either of the events and hopefully we’ll have loads of really great sessions. If you haven’t registered to attend VMworld then you can still register and get a $250 or €200 early bird discount.
![vBeers[7]](https://i0.wp.com/www.techhead.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/vBeers7.jpg "vBeers[7]")
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation… 
TheSaffaGeek 