VMware | TheSaffaGeek

April 30, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

All things virtual IX

It’s been a very interesting week in the virtualisation arena and a number of really great resources and news has come out.

First is the news that VMworld registrations are now open. Since following every bit of last years VMworld via twitter to peoples streaming videos to peoples blogs I’ve been excited that this year I’ve been given approval to attend the conference and hopefully i too can give back some top blog postings like so many of the people i read last year did. Richard Garsthagen (@the_anykey) has posted a great blog posting all about what you can expect to see and be able to do at this years VMworld. I’m personally really excited to play with quite a few of the labs and increase my knowledge on some of the technologies and features i haven’t had a chance to test drive/learn about yet. That and nerdy as it is to hopefully meet and “Chinwag” as Mike Laverick would say(I would highly recommend listening to Mikes chinwags as they are remarkably interesting and helpful to hear what other top virtualisation people are doing and what their views are on things happening in the virtualisation arena). Richard also posted some ways of winning your way to VMworld as the cost for it is obviously very costly especially if you work for a small company or are self employed.
Next is the news of the names of the new VMware exams. I posted all about it a few days back and how I feel this is a very helpful idea and necessary step by VMware to help people grow their knowledge and bridge the gap between the VCP and the VCDX. Have a look at the links I’ve mentioned in the posting..
Steve Jin posted a very interesting article about how to use HTTP with the vSphere Client. As he says in the posting the video by Carter Shanklin (@cshanklin) is where the “trick” is shown and is a brilliant video for anyone wishing to learn more about Onyx. This trick is really great and very helpful. Luc Dekens (@LucD22) also posted a very interesting article all about using fiddler as a onyx alternative. I’ve used fiddler a few times before to try work out why certain things weren’t running or what ports an application/server was trying to reach and it’s a very helpful tool, i haven’t had the time to try out Luc’s idea but if it works like he says it does this will be a very good trick and tool in every virtual administrators tool belt.
Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) posted all about the vSphere Resource Kit a book that will have all the things the Microsoft Resource kits had but obviously covering everything vSphere. If the chapter names of the book are anything to go by this book is going to be the bible for vSphere. Check out the webpage of the book here.
Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) has done a great posting all about his use case for using VMware Data Recovery and all the positives and negatives of using it. We personally use it here for some small backups and the software is brilliant and very simple to use and understand and is a great tool for small businesses looking for a backup solution for the virtual environment.
The hardening guide for vSphere 4.0 has finally come out. For those of you that haven’t used or seen these before they are brilliant guides by VMware for securing your virtual environments by following more than 100 guidelines from ones for your virtual machines to your hosts to the console OS.
VMware have put out a survey/questionnaire all about HA (High Availability) and FT(Fault tolerance) asking about everyone’s experiences of using it. I’ve already filled it in and feel everyone should fill it out as the more people that fill it out obviously the better VMware can understand everyone’s needs and make the products better. The survey is here
Next week Thursday is the London VMUG and I’ve just received my confirmation that I have got myself a seat so really looking forward to meeting up with a load of fellow south UK virtualisation geeks and then getting to vbeers afterwards. If you haven’t requested your spot then get a mail sent as the more the merrier. Also Doug Hazelman from Veeam (@VMDoug) is coming to the user group so should be very exciting.
A big welcome to Simon Seagrave (@Kiwi_Si) on joining EMC. That’s two of the top virtualisation guys i look up to that have joined EMC now with Alan Renouf also having joined EMC. Hopefully I can work my way into being able to be around these guys and tap into their amazing knowledge.
Duncan Epping posted all about the availability of the VCDX application form. As I’ve said in previous postings I’m hoping that one day i have the expertise and knowledge to gain this accreditation. The application form is also a great view into the kinds of things that will be necessary for you to do the defence and so is helpful to anyone planning to do it and wanting to gain the knowledge necessary.

Gregg Robertson

April 16, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

It’s been a very busy but also a very rewarding productive few weeks for me. Even though it came down to a relatively simple solution the working of my VMware Update Manager was a massive weight off my shoulders and a lot of lessons learnt from it which is always something valuable.

On the virtualisation news side it’s been a very interesting couple of weeks with some brilliantly written blogs and articles.

Vladan Seget (@vladan) did a very good posting on setting a static MAC address in VMware. This is something you learn when you’re studying for your VCP but is something that personally I’ve forgotten really easily but is a very helpful feature especially if you have a vm with software on it that requires a licence to be attached to the vm’s MAC address but you still want to be able to migrate the vm around for either HA or DRS capabilities.
Next is the VMware Support Toolbar by Rick Blythe (@rickblythe) aka VMwareWolf. The toolbar is a very clever idea and the only reason I’ve linked Vladan’s posting on it is that he details all the features it has and how to set it up etc and seeing as Rick linked to it at the top of his posting about the toolbar it seems he’s happy with the posting being used for his toolbar. I’ve only partly played around with the toolbar but it’s a great example of how professionals are thinking of new ways for a VMware administrator to be able to keep up to date and easily search for VMware knowledge base items.
Cody Bunch (@cody_bunch) of http://professionalvmware.com has been doing some really great VCDX brown bag sessions on all the things you should know for you VCDX and obviously as the name alludes to they are discussions amongst fellow professionals about the topics you will need to know to do your defence. A “study group” is another way of describing it. Cody was nice enough to reply to me on twitter when I enquired about the ability to watch/listen to the previous brown bag sessions and I was pleased to find out they have been recorded and the second brown bag session is already up. I’ve always found discussions amongst fellow professionals about a common technology highly beneficial as sometimes i really need someone to explain something in laymen’s terms to me for me to understand it. I’d recommend registering for the next one and to keep an eye out for the future sessions. He’s also done a few VCP brown bag sessions and theses have also been recorded so if you’re looking to write your VCP soon or even like me keep your knowledge fresh then these are perfect for this.
Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame did a very informative posting all about aligning your VMs virtual hard disks. I spoke partly of this in one of my blog postings a few weeks back and Duncan has added some great information to this discussion and is one i learnt quite a few things from so is well worth the read. Duncan also did a very helpful posting on where to find pre-windows 2008 sysprep packages for those who are battling to find them.
Eric Sloof (@esloof) posted two great articles these past few weeks. The first one was a very interesting interview with one of the attendee’s of his VMware vSphere Design Workshop course and his opinions of how the course went and how good it was. After watching it it’s made me even more keen to attend the course and gain the knowledge they you can gain from it especially from fellow VMware professionals. The other is his announcing of the upcoming vSphere 4 Automation course. It shows the growing need and trend of VMware professionals to have the knowledge and ability to automate some of the tasks performed in their VMware environment as well as a great course for gaining the knowledge you will require for managing your environment in ESXi.
Talking of ESXi and the push by VMware for people to migrate from ESX to ESXi, Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) of http://vmware-land.com/ posted a very very good blog posting all about how VMware’s desire for people to adopt ESXi isn’t going as well as they may have hoped and how VMware are going to need to fix a number of issues that ESXi has that ESX doesn’t before the change over and how their motivators for the switch aren’t as strong as they make out. The article is brilliant and is especially so to me as I agree wholeheartedly with many of the points in it and myself don’t see nor agree with the whole idea of them moving over to ESXi and scrapping ESX.
There has always been the discussion of scale up versus scale out when you are creating a Virtual environment and over the past few weeks there have been a few great postings from some of the top virtualisations bloggers about this discussion. It seems the whole thing kicked off from a blog posting Duncan Epping did about scaling up due to the release of the new Intel 5600 series that has six cores. Which set off a blog posting by Ian Koenig at http://itsjustanotherlayer.com/ titled scale up or scale out in which he brings up some brilliant check points every VMware administrator should ask when determining whether to scale up or scale out. Scott Lowe then commented on Ian’s posting in his Virtualization Short Take #37 and gave his opinion on the discussion which in turn made Steve Chambers (@Stevie_chambers) write an article about how he feels UCS is the solution to the worry about having “all your eggs in one basket”. His blog posting is also very informative about the features UCS has and how it allows you to have all your machines on one big server. This in turn brought Scott to write a posting describing his opinions in full and how he feels as is always said for anything in IT “it depends” on a number of factors and one model or decision is never the same for every company/environment/situation. Lastly a great blog posting by a twitter friend of mine and top VMware professional Daniel Eason(@Daniel_Eason) about High Density Virtual Hosts gives a great insight into more of the factors you need to consider when building a “Super ESX Host(my own words)”. All of these articles are brilliantly informative and as with any great article they encourage discussion. You make your own decisions and I encourage you to read all the comments below each of the articles as these are as good if not maybe a little bit better than the articles.
This past week the applications for the VMware vExpert award have been opened. The vExpert for anyone that doesn’t know it is “a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who ‘go the extra mile’ and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.” As you can imagine there has been a very large amount of chat in twitterverse about the applications and who may be honoured by the awarding of it. Personally I’d love to become one and hope that with my continued efforts to give back to the community and grow my contributions to the field I’ll one day soon be awarded the title. If you know of anyone that deserves this award then get an application in for them. But be warned that multiple nominations don’t count extra so applying for yourself 100 times and asking loads of people to apply for you won’t help you to win this.
In my Distributed Virtual Switches blog posting i detailed the process of upgrading your virtual machines hardware version to version 7 but Sander Daems (@sanderdaems) posted a very helpful posting on how to downgrade your vm hardware level from 7 to 4 if it is needed to fix an issue you may be having. It always makes me smile when a blog posting like this is posted as I’m always so focused on the newest things and the latest versions of software that i forget that sometimes the need for rolling back to an older possibly more stable version is the option.
Even though this next posting is old it’s one I feel is very important and useful in the growth of anyone’s scripting knowledge. Alan Renouf created a very helpful Quick Reference Guide for the VI toolkit which you can print off and obviously reference whenever you need it.
VMware have recently posted a new white paper detailing performance results of tests conducted of a vSphere 4.0 environment using Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The white paper can be downloaded here.
Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) posted all about the reasoning and some fixes/solutions you can make as to why cloning a vm from a template can take such a long time. Rick’s posting has some great links for IOPS and gives some very in depth solutions and reasons as to why the problem might happen. The posting is very helpful and sheds light on points some people may miss in their aim of making their virtual environment run as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Arnim van Lieshout (@avlieshout) did a great blog posting about how to setup and get running The VESI (Virtualization EcoShell Initiative). If you’ve never heard of The VESI before then i would recommend reading the FAQ before reading and then implementing the solution into your environment. Arnim has detailed every step and installation needed in getting it working and is a massive help for someone trying to get it setup.
Last by definitely not least was a posting by Devang Panchigar (@storagenerve) with the video of the VBlocks presentation at the GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010 in Boston Massachusetts this past week. The presentation was highly informative and a great insight into the solution and is well worth the watch.

As I’ve said before I’m always happy for people to leave a comment below or add me on twitter at @greggrobertson5. If you feel I’ve missed something or not given credit or wrongly described yours or someone else’s posting as this is the last thing i mean to do, please tell me an I’ll change it.

Gregg Robertson

April 13, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store. Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details.

This error has been haunting me for quite some time now. When I tried to setup and get VMware update manager working late last year I came across the above problem. I did some fixes but none seemed to work and due to there being a very large amount of work happening I put it on the back burner. Now if you have read my blog posting about the distributed virtual switches you would have seen the need to keep your servers up to date on the latest patches as well as the obvious reasons of security and bug fixes.

So early March this year I decided I was going to get VMware Update Manager working so I didn’t have to use esxupdate to patch my vm’s. My previous problem I believed were down to me using an older version of VUM and possibly because I had it installed on a highly utilised Virtual Centre Server I decided to build a dedicated server for VUM and do it all to the exact specifications VMware tell you to and install the latest version.

Seeing as I have spent some time trying to get this problem fixed I have found some brilliant blog postings and tips for fixing this problem as well as others that stem from this error.

Jason Nash’s (@nash_j) blog posting was probably my first port of call when I tried to fix the problems I was having last year and I still checked the DNS settings this time to make sure everything was as it should be.
The next one was from a VMware communities posting someone had put up with problems sounding very close to the problem I was having. One of the replies recommended checking that the update manager port is open on the esx hosts firewall which is a very important part to check as by default this isn’t open and so can cause you problems with Update manager.
Next is the one I kept coming across and is the one I felt was causing my problems when I installed it previously. This is the problem where the port information in the vci-integrity.xml file is incorrect. For me this wasn’t the problem as it has now been fixed in Update Manager 4.0 Update 1 but if you are using the previous versions of update manager this is more than likely your problem and the steps should fix your problem. Personally I installed Update Manager 4.0 update 1 Patch 1 to make sure all the bugs I could possibly avoid I would.

There are also so many great resources of how to setup and manage VUM I decided it would be helpful to list the links I used to to set it all up as VMware have done some brilliant videos detailing the processes.

First set of steps I used was the video demo by VMware of how to install vCenter Update Manager 4 Update1. (Warning these are videos that need to be downloaded and you will need Adobe Flash player to view them). I would also recommend using the VUM sizing estimator to make sure you allocate the correct amount of space for the database and patches repository. The first bit I had to/chose to do differently was inserting the ip address of the Update Manager server in the server name filed in the installation to make sure that if there are any problems with DNS the server is obviously still accessible. The next bit was for the creation of the ODBC DSN when creating the SQL server instance for the update manager database. Due to me installing it on a x64 machine I had to create the ODBC via the odbcad32.exe application as in the ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide , on page 72 it is tells you this which I noticed when installing my Virtual Centre server on a x64 server and this “fix” also applies to the database setup for Update Manager even though it doesn’t seem to be included in the latest documentation :

Even though vCenter Server is supported on 64-bit operating systems, the vCenter Server system must have a 32-bit DSN. This requirement applies to all supported databases. By default, any DSN created on a 64-bit system is 64 bit.

Next I used the steps detailed in the video demo by VMware of how to setup baselines and baseline groups to setup my baselines and baseline groups.
Then finally I used the guided tour demo to scanning and remediating with VUM. to do my scans and obviously remediate my esx hosts.

Thankfully now it’s all working correctly and I can finally use Update Manager.

Gregg Robertson

March 27, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

All things virtual VII

There’s been a very good amount of news this week and I’ve really been able to grow my knowledge on things I wasn’t that strong on and better my knowledge on things I think my knowledge is fairly good on.

Firstly a big thanks to Nick Weaver for adding me to his blogroll. Nick is a fellow professional I look up to and to be added to his blogroll means so much to me. Thanks Nick hopefully my blogs make your decision the right one!!

This past week has been dominated by the news and release of veeam’s latest product Surebackup. The features and possibilities of the software have been covered so well by such top people I won’t even try detail it. First person I saw to get a blog posting out for it was Arnim Van Lieshout (@avlieshout) followed shortly by Lode Vermeiren (@lode) with his Veeam unveils SureBackup and there are so many other blogs out there but these two with the official page covered everything I needed to know about the product. I’m planning on testing the Veeam software soon to see if it fits our requirements here.

Eric Sloof let out that VMware are indeed going to be rolling out new certifications to bridge the gap between the VCP and the VCDX. After hearing that there are over 53,000 VCPs, of which over 15,000 are VCP4s (and this was said in early February so I’m sure there are a large amount more now) I’m strongly feeling the need to start trying to build myself up in preparation for the VCDX.

Talking of the VCDX, Eric and Duncan Epping both blogged this month about the release of the new VMware vSphere Design Workshop. Eric explained the course layouts and the dates he will be running the course himself. Whereas Duncan has gone into detail all about the course and what it entails. I’m hoping to get on the course really soon as unfortunately the current dates aren’t possible due to work constraints and planned work.

On twitter recently I noticed Kendrick Coleman planning to run Nested VM’s and hadn’t tried the process myself so I did some researching of it’s possibilities and the changes you need to make and found a great document on the VMware Communities about the changes that need to be done.While on Kendrick’s site I noticed he found the solution to the jumpy mouse problem in Windows 2008 R2. I tried the solution myself and it works perfectly!!! Just a warning though that even though it’s possible to do this for non R2 2008 servers, once you apply the newer driver and reboot the machine your video won’t come back .Thankfully I did a snapshot in case this happened.

One of the consultants here asked me about mismatches between a clients vcentre memory utilisation and the virtual machines task manager values. So I knew a few ideas like checking that the latest vmtools are installed so that performance reading could be conveyed to the virtual centre server correctly but also I had come across a document a while back while having the same problem in my home lab by David Ball detailing a way of fixing the problem.

There has been some major virtualisation news coming out of Microsoft over the past few weeks. Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) covered it so well that I would highly recommend reading his blog posting covering it. The part of “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion really brought a smile to my face.

Mike Laverick of the chinwags fame has recently released a new book he has been working on called Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0. Mike has set an amazing example and has given the book out for free in return of people making a donation to Unicef for the download of the book. So make sure you make your donations and get downloading/printing. I’ve already got my hard copy on the way. Also if you haven’t been listening to Mikes chinwags then i would firmly recommend them as they are great for a bit of news and banter from some of the top names in virtualisation. Virtumania is another weekly/fortnightly podcast that is growing exponentially in the industry for having the hottest topics and discussions. It’s hosted by Richard Brambley (@rbrambley) and is well worth the listen.

Gregg Robertson

March 24, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

How to ease the management and monitoring of VMware Snapshots

Recently I have been doing some cleaning up of old snapshots that users have created and forgotten to delete and have therefore been around for too long and are in danger of either using up all the space on the datastore they are on or corrupting once the snapshot is ”deleted”/applied to the vm. I came across an additional way I can make my management and monitoring snapshot tasks easier and so I though I would write up a quick post of all the tools I use that save me having to manually go through a crazy amount of machines. I have used a few of my fellow virtualisation friends scripts and tools to help me do this.

First and the one i use the most is the SnapReminder script by scripting guru Alan Renouf. Alan’s script is a fairly straight forward one (his words not mine as I’m not at the level yet to be able to write this). The script is simple yet so very effective as it automatically finds the snapshot that meets your time criteria,finds out who created it ,retrieves their mail address from AD and mails them reminding them that they have this snapshot and it is older than a number of days. It’s really great when you get a mail back from a user replying to one of these mails and saying they don’t need it anymore as you know it’s going to make your environment better while you barely had to do anything to remind and alert them to it.
Next is part of the vCheck daily report ,one I have spoken of before which is also created by Alan. The vCheck tool is a brilliant reporter for gathering all the information you need to know to make sure your environment isn’t having any problems and enables you to be proactive so as to stop problems before the arise. The snapshot part of this report is always helpful so i know if people have removed their snapshots after being pestered by the SnapReminder e-mails and gives me a good idea of my progress in minimising the amount of snapshots over the limit.
Last one is one I stumbled across this morning while researching some other things and is one i didn’t think of creating but is one that is a brilliant idea especially for automated monitoring. Sadly i can’t seem to find the name of the guy who wrote up the article and did the video as i like to give credit where i can but good work to them for doing a video of it. The article shows and details how to configure VMware vCenter Server to send alerts when virtual machines are running from snapshots and reach a certain size. I’ve always used the alerts for memory,cpu and hosts errors which are pretty much the standard ones you get with vSphere with the additional and tweaking of a few to customise it for our environment but I’ve never thought of it for alerting me about snapshots.

Hopefully these tips and tricks will help save you some time and heartache with the management and monitoring of your companies snapshots.

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation,snapshots,vcheck,snapreminder

Flickr Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation,snapshots,vcheck,snapreminder

***UPDATE****

As is my luck ,on the heels of me posting this Alan brings out his latest instalment of vCheck, version 5. This new one has some brilliant features and really is an improvement over the last one. I’ve already given it a run over a few of the environments I support and the webpage view it now allows you to view the report in is actually a bit overwhelming with all the data and reporting you get back and has flared up some warnings i didn’t even know were there which is brilliant!

Also a quick congrats to Alan who has now become the latest member of Chad Sakac’s vSpecialists. A brilliant hire there if I do say so myself and very exciting for an EMC employee like myself that someone like him is now part of the team.

March 15, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

All things virtual VI

It’s definitely been a very hectic past few weeks for me and due to this it’s taken me quite a while to get this posting to a post able standard. There has been some brilliant articles and news in the virtualisation arena and some resources that are currently and will in the future help me to make my daily job a lot easier.

First is one that i think is a common mistake among many people when they plan/build their VMware virtual environments.Craig Risinger has posted a guest posting on Duncan Epping’s yellow bricks website all about resource pools and how people need to keep an eye on the amount of resources allocated to a resource pool compared to the amount of machines that are in the resource pool. It does seem a very obvious thing to monitor but I even had to run an eye over the ones in my environment as with the amount of migrations and builds that happen it’s something you forget to check or amend.

Next is a great article I found when trying to explain blocks sizes to a fellow IT friend and about alignments and what both are and what you need to think about in your decision of aligning your data or not. Steve Chambers (@stevie_chambers) wrote the article and is one that I learnt some more from as well as helped me to refresh some of the knowledge i knew but due to not having used it for ages had forgotten some of.

Another posting is stumbled across these past few weeks that caught my interest was a posting by Ian Koenig all about IO DRS. This is a fairly new idea to me as I’ve obviously always done cpu and memory DRS as it’s standard to monitor and make changes dependent on vSphere’s DRS clusters settings but Ian has done a very intriguing and exciting posting all about IO DRS and how it could come very soon to allow you to monitor and make changes dependent on IOPS and details how it would all work. I then did a bit more research on the topic and it seems I’m not alone in my interest and excitement about this feature. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) wrote a blog posting all about it and detailed some of the things that were mentioned about it at this years VMware Partner Exchange.

Fellow Saffa , Rynardt Spies’(@rynardtspies) has written up a very detailed and thought provoking posting all about VMware vCentre 4 Design Considerations and has given all the pro’s and cons he took when deciding 32bit or 64 bit, physical or Virtual and placement of the vCentre database as well as the Update Manager Server and database.

Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_si) has done a very clever and interesting 5 minute video reviewing vkernel capacity view and how it works and looks. An application I haven’t tried myself but a it’s nice to be able to get a quick run through of what it is and does.

The infamous Eric Sloof (@esloof) posted up his vmClient last week. the tool looks amazing is something everyone needs to have a try out of as it has helped me tremendously by allowing me to quickly jump between virtual machines while trying to do loads of things at once. He’s also done a great video run through of how it looks and works

While listening to the VMware Communities podcast about ESXi last week I was reminded of the latest release by trainsignal the VMware Pro Series Training Vol1. As i mentioned in my posting about the resources i used for my vcp4 exam, the trainsignal videos are priceless in your studying and preparing for the exam as well as a very helpful tool if you need to refresh your knowledge on things you may have become rusty on. I’m planning on getting my hands on this latest instalment but if Kendrick Coleman’s(@kendrickcoleman) twitter and blog posting about it are anything to go by it should be brilliant.

Vladan Seget has posted a great little posting on how to add a second service console via cli. This caught my attention firstly because I’m personally trying to do more and more via vma and cli to prepare myself for ESXi as well as very good troubleshooting step by step.

David Convery has done a very interesting posting all about the problems he encountered with his vshield zones and the ways he got around them. I’ve been planning to implement vshield zones into my home lab for a while but haven’t got around to doing it yet, so David’s posting is now one of the pointers and steps I’ve added in my implementation of it.

Over the past week there has been a major buzz all about the release of simdk. Andrew Kutz(@sakutz) is the man behind this creation and what a little creation it is. Andrew has managed to create a VMware vSphere4 simulator which provides vSphere4 API-compatibility. I’m seriously excited to get it implemented and deployed in my lab environment as it should allow me to get so much more of my testing done and hopefully will save me some money in my VCDX lab deployment. I’m also keeping my eye on the official site of the product for any news and update.

Lastly one from my daily troubleshooting. While migrating machines to new hosts we noticed that certain machines network cards were unticking the connected radio box in the vm’s settings

Even if we ticked connected and applied the changes it kept on reverting back to being unticked. My colleague Simon Phillips noticed the solution, that we had created the vSwitches with the standard 24 ports and therefore once we had reached that number of ports used there were obviously no more spare ports and so the machines couldn’t be connected. There were no errors telling us this was the problem but it’s a very good example that early simple planning and configuration would have fixed.

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation

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March 8, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 5 Comments

VM’s can’t ping while on Distributed Virtual Switches VLAN’s

This blog posting has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks now as I’ve been battling and troubleshooting for ages so that I could give the solution to all our Distributed Virtual Switching problems we’ve been having. Thankfully I believe I finally can although I’m amazed that this may be the only blog out there with a solution. I put this down mainly due to Distributed Virtual Switches only being available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere and therefore not many people either feeling the need to get this version or their companies not seeing the need to buy the edition. Thankfully I work for EMC and therefore I was able to procure myself a licence key for this edition and so set myself on the way to many eventual problems.

As I said in my communities open question the machines always seemed to fall off at differing times and showed no kind of patterns. Later on I noticed the machines were for some reason losing their ARP tables. The solution I found was one I am still unable to find a VMware article about.

It all came down to a difference in ESX versions and virtual hardware. Not 3.5 and vSphere(I’m not that thick…often) but the build versions. It seems that ESX servers installed with builds pre update 1 and ESX servers with update 1 installed don’t communicate/lose connectivity between themselves. So for instance when i had five servers on an ESX 4.0.0, 175625 build(pre update 1) and five on an ESX 4.0.0, 208167 (update 1a) build the ten total servers initially will all communicate fine with no problems, but then over time all the machines on the pre update 1 host will lose connectivity to both the machines they are on the same host as as well as the machines on the update 1a host and the outside world(aka the lose all connectivity). The five servers on the update 1a host though won’t lose connectivity to each other (although if the dns server they are using is on the pre update 1 then obviously dns will be lost) or to the outside world.

So the steps i followed to fix the problem were:

Firstly upgrade the hosts to the latest versions. This can be done by VMware Update Manager if you have it setup in your environment or by the way I did it with esxupdate. Now I know loads of you who have been in the virtualisation field for a while will know this tool well as it was the only tool you could use pre esx 3.5 to update your machines and I’m still puzzled why the vSphere Host Update Utility cannot patch or upgrade ESX 4.0 hosts. I was going to write up the steps I use but David Davis @davidmdavis of TrainSignal fame has written up a great step by step guide of how to do this if you’re not familiar.
Once this is done you will then need to upgrade the virtual machine hardware to version 7. Scott Lowe has done a brilliantly detailed posting of how to do this and the changes you need to make to allow you to use the latest networking capabilities. Now i know a bunch of you will think that you don’t need to update your esx hosts to the latest version to be able to upgrade virtual machine hardware but due partly I believe to the problems I was experiencing when I tried I got a very vague error of .Only once I had migrated the machine to the latest host would it let me upgrade the virtual hardware. My colleague Simon Phillips noticed this virtual hardware upgrade was a difference between machine that worked and ones that didn’t so credit is due to him on spotting this and finding Scott’s posting on how to upgrade the virtual hardware.

After these changes the machines all communicated without any problems and almost a week in haven’t shown any of the problems we were experiencing.

Funnily enough while building up this blog posting i came across a load of really interesting articles from fellow virtualisation professionals and i was going to do a wrap up of it all with the thoughts of putting your machine on standard or distributed switches and should you make it a virtual machine or not. But as of this morning Richard Brambley @rbrambley did a great one himself on the virtual centre side ,so definitely have a read. As well as these articles all surrounding the same topics and the problems and opinions some of the top people thought/have come across.

Sadly after finding out these solutions we’re now having to migrate all our machines back to standard switches due to our virtual centre server having database problems and needing a rebuild. I still think I would like to try use Distributed Virtual Switches again in the future but unless you have an enormous environment where you need the DVS’ I feel standard switches are more than adequate and at the moment less the pain.

Also a big thanks to Simon Phillips for all his help in this, Gabrie van Zanten for chatting through loads of it with me on gchat, all the guys on twitter who replied to me with ideas,the people who replied to my VMware communities question and the VMware helpdesk guy I caught unawares with all my questions when he called me about my virtual centre problems.

I’m always open for a chat/troubleshoot if you’re having the same problems so either leave a comment below or add me on twitter at @greggrobertson5.

Gregg Robertson

February 24, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

Location of sysprep files on a Windows 2008 vCentre server.

I recently installed/migrated my virtual centre server to a Windows 2008 server and came across the problem of losing my sysprep files for the usage of configuration wizard as I posted about on my corporate blog quite a while back now (pre any kind of VMware training in my defence). Thankfully Simon Gallagher (@vinf_net) posted about the exact problem I was having this week and has saved me having to fiddle around and look for the solution. I know not the biggest of problems you could face but when you’re deploying the amount of machines I have recently, having to run sysprep on each of them once they are built is a step I’d like to skip.Hope it saves someone else the time like it has for me =0)

Gregg Robertson

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February 18, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

All things Virtual V

The past few weeks have been very busy both personally and in the virtualisation arena. My previous posting on the DNS issues I came across and my still unanswered problem with Virtual Distributed Switching VLAN connectivity(which I will post a blog about when I find a solution better than the long winded work around I detailed in my discussion) while deploying a large number of projects both here in the UK as well as in the US has kept me very busy. As for the virtualisation side there has been a large amount of interesting articles,more employment movements by some of the top people in virtualisation and a very nice bit of coverage of this blog.

Unfortunately even though I work for one of the major VMware partners I wasn’t fortunate enough to make it to the VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas last week. Sadly I didn’t see a large amount of new and interesting news coming out of this either,but the blogs I found very interesting and which covered the events was blogs Duncan Epping(@duncanyb) of Yellow Bricks fame’s blog on the event detailed. From these blogs the points that really interested me were:

VMware’s recently acquired company Zimbra. I would firmly recommend reading up on what Zimbra is and what it does as I have a very strong feeling we’ll be hearing plenty about it in the coming weeks and months.A very interesting acquisition which I’m sure is one they have done to increase their clout in the Cloud Computing arena.
The news and painful lack of definite news on the decommissioning of the service console was of upmost interest to me obviously as we have a large array of esx machines here in my environment that are all using the service console. I’ve still not read any really good reasons for this happening apart from someone at VMware thinking it would be fun to make VMware Systems Administrators have cold sweats at the the threat of it coming in soon and the work that will need to be done as well as the skills that will need to be learnt for this to happen. From chatting to a few fellow virtualisation sys admin’s there is a lot of dissatisfaction with this decision and the reasoning of “minimize the possible attack surface”. This is complete rubbish to me as the trade off of ease of configuration and management compared to the possibility of your systems being attacked is massively painful as with correct security procedures there shouldn’t be any real chance of this happening so why take it away and make my job that much more difficult and complex. Hopefully someone will be able to answer this with better reasoning.Scott Lowe’s first session’s blog comments have detailed part of this and is where my disappointment in the still lack of news is detailed by a few people.
The next part that i did find interesting due to my plans to utilise the software for my works own environment was the talk about VMware Chargeback. Scott Lowe’s blog about this session was the one i got the most out of on the topic and is one I’m currently using as a resource for my roll out of the appliance. Hopefully if all goes well I can post my findings and opinions of what it does and how it has or hasn’t helped me.
If you want a really good overview of the day Chad Sakac of virtual geek fame has posted a very in depth and detailed posting on the event and is a blog i would recommend if you have the time to read(I’m currently still making my way through it)

This week Monday Nicholas Weaver (@lynxbat) posted his latest update to the much tweeted about and highly spoke of vSphere Mini Monitor. I have personally installed the tool and am busy configuring it to suit my needs. It’s a brilliant tool for anyone wishing to monitor their virtual environment in new practical ways(twitter feed especially). Also a big welcome to Nick on his joining EMC. Seems the tide of top virtualisation people joining EMC is carrying on. Nick’s posting on his leaving and his reasons for leaving are something I can relate to as is his desire to constantly learn and push himself and is what I did when I left my then gf,parents,lifestyle and comfy job back in South Africa to move over to the UK just so that I could push myself and become better and hopefully end up working with some of the industry leaders(which I’m very proud to say I am now that I work at EMC and previously Conchango)

After much waiting (almost three months) my VCP4 certificate finally arrived this past week and with it my workstation 7 licence key. The licence is very helpful as I use workstation 7 for a lot of my home testing/workshop testing and work. Eric Sloof(@esloof) posted about the kits being sent out and as well as the new vcp logo which I have now attached to my signature at the bottom to keep in accordance.

In the past two weeks one of my team members and I have now been tasked with the backing up of our virtual machines and so i needed to brush up my knowledge on vcb backups. While asking an open question on this David Convery(@dconvery) pointed me to a blog posting he did detailing a document he wrote all about vcb and how it works and how to deploy it. It’s a brilliant document and one I have saved and have been using to manage our vcb backup environment.

As I have detailed in previous blog postings my aim this year to try better my skills in Powershell so that I can make my life easier in managing my companies virtualised environment. One of the leaders in this field in using powershell for VMware tasks is Alan Renouf(@alanrenouf). Last Monday he posted a brilliant article detailing automated vm provisioning. I have yet to try these scripts out but if these do what they say they can do and are anything like his vcheck tool then I can’t wait to get them to make my daily job easier.

Simon Seagrave from techhead.co.uk posted about the ability to Pre-register now to be notified when you will be able to register for VMworld2010 (i had to read that twice myself to make sure it made sense) I’m planning on going to the European one this year, which I’m extremely excited for for so many obvious reasons!!

While busy working this past week I decided to catch up on all the VMTN podcasts I hadn’t listened to yet as I like to keep up to date on everything happening and unfortunately with the amount of new and information coming out all the time the only time I can listen to these things is while I’m at work. The last one had Mike Laverick of RTFM-ED fame and Stevie Chambers from the UCS team and of viewyonder.com fame. The podcast was extremely interesting to me and I found myself sitting still at points to concentrate on the things the podcast was covering. The podcasts are very informative and I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting to learn and keep up to date with everything happening and due to happen in the virtualisation field.

As I said in my previous All Things Virtual posting the London/South England VMUG is happening next week Thursday. Sadly I’m not able to attend as I stated in the posting which was made even more painful this week when I heard it’s fully booked before my co-workers had registered so now none of us are going and that so many of the top british virtualisation industry leaders are attending. I’ll definitely be glued to twitter during the day and Simon Long of SLOG fame has promised me a detailed blog about the days proceedings.

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation

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December 10, 2009
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

All Things Virtual II

Seeing as so many people read my previous blog posting I thought I would continue with my keeping people up to date with all the things virtual and linked to virtual that i have been doing/working with/learning/reading up on this week so far.

I think the first one should definitely be about the release of esx(i)4 Update 1 a. Duncan Epping(@duncanyb) was the first person I saw talk about it and has done a very detailed blog posting about the update

Recently I had to explain to some people what Distributed V switches were and how they worked. Not wanting to make a fool of myself I went back to an article I used to strengthen my knowledge on the topic before my VCP4 exam and clarified what I was telling the people was correct (which it was thankfully) .It’s a great posting from Barry Coombs(@virtualisedreal) for anyone unsure or confused on what distributed switches are and what they do/are used for.

When I started in IT I always dreamed of working for a big company that was on the forefront of technology. This dream was one of the reasons I moved over to the UK and recently this dream was partly clarified by EMC being in the Fortune 500 list of companies. It’s a small thing in reality as you don’t have to be in the fortune 500 to be at the forefront of technology but 19 year old Gregg would have been impressed I think if I could tell him where he would be working 7 years later

As I’ve said in previous blog postings, I’m trying to grow my knowledge in powershell scripting as I feel this will only help make my daily job easier but it will also enable me to do it better in the future. Jonathan Medd directed me to a great podcast covering the topic called Get Scripting Podcast. I’ve unfortunately only been able to listen to a few of them but my aim is to get through them all before January next year. They are great for anyone wanting to learn ways of making their daily jobs easier and also to learn all the latest going’s on.

EMC recently announced their new storage technology called FAST. I’ve heard it called the DRS of storage technologies and was obviously interested to see what it was(as my knowledge on storage technologies has only started to grow in the past few months so is quite minimal at the moment) and how it worked. Two great pieces of information that came out this week that cleared some it up was Chad Sakac’s blog on the topic in which he goes into amazing detail on the topic and a great YouTube video Steve Chambers(@Stevie_chambers) tweeted a few days back showing Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) on a Symmetrix V-Max

If you’ve read my blog postings on my preparing for the vcp4 exam you would know I used Scott Lowe’s (@scott_lowe) mastering VMware vSphere book. Now he has a new reference guide out called: VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference. It looks like another great reference guide for anybody in the VMware field and is another book I have added to my ever increasing Amazon wish list.

Last but not least a big congratulations to Jonathan Medd(@jonatanmedd) ,Matt Roblin(@mattroblin) , and Maish Saidel-Keesing(@maishsk) on the passing of their vcp4 exams this past week .

Gregg Robertson