Virtualization is an awesome technology. Last weeks I visited a customer and we took a walk through their data centers. While standing in one of their data centers I thought: Imagine that all server, that they are currently run as VMs, would be physical?. I’m still impressed about the influence of virtualization. The idea is so simple You share the resources of the physical hardware between multiple virtual instances. I/O, network bandwidth, CPU cycles and memory.
Today I stumbled over a nice workaround. While installing a CentOS 6 VM, I needed to install the VMware Tools. I don’t know why, but I got an error message, regarding a non accessible VMware Tools ISO.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
I remembered a blog post I read a few months ago, about a VMware online repository, from which VMware tools can be installed. You can download the repository information here.
In April 2014 was a bug in vSphere 5.5 U1 discovered, which can lead to APD events with NFS datastores.iSCSI, FC or FCoE aren’t affected by this bug, but potentially every NFS installation running vSphere 5.5 U1 was at risk. This bug is described in KB2076392. Luckily none of my customers ran into this bug, but this is more due to the fact, that most of my customers use FC/ FCoE or iSCSI.
Today I observed a strange behaviour of several VMs at a customer. Several VMs in a cluster showed an alarm, but neither on the alarm tab of the VM, nor the alarm section at the bottom of the C# client showed an error.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
The customer still uses vSphere 5.0. An upgrade to 5.5 is on the roadmap. The symptoms:
not all VMs in the cluster were affected all, except one VM, were running on one specific host the alarm on a VM disappeared after a vMotion no trigger for the alarm could be found vSphere HA status “protected” The similar behaviour could be observed, if a VM is moved to another cluster using VMware vMotion technology.
Yesterday I received the following tweet:
@vMario156 Yes, this was stated in an older version of the best practice guide. 1 IO is currently best practice, not only for 3PAR.
— Patrick Terlisten (@PTerlisten) June 5, 2014 Later Craig Kilborn joined the conversation and I decided to clarify this 100 or 1 IOPS myth the next morning.
@Craig_Kilborn @vMario156 I check this tomorrow at the office. I don't know why this was changed, but it has changed from 100 to 1 IO.
One of the tasks that I finish before I present the first Virtual Volumes (VV) to hosts is to discuss the need of a custom SATP claimrule with the customer. Requirement for a custom claimrule is usually, that the active and optimized path should be switched after each IO and not after 1000 IOs. Duncan Epping wrote a nice blog post some years ago. I recommend to read it.
Some basics The Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP) is responsable for array-specific operations, like health monitoring of physical paths, reporting of path state changes and path failover.
Yesterday I stumbled over a forum post in a german VMware forum. A user noticed after a vSphere 5.5 update, that a newly updated ESXi 5.5 hosts wasn’t able to mount some datastores. The host was updated with a HP customized ESXi 5.5 Image. The other two hosts, ESXi 5.1 installed from a HP customized image, had no problems. A HP P2000 G3 MSA Array with iSCSI was used as shared storage.
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) stands in one line with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud or other cloud offerings. I don’t want to compare the different provider with vCHS. To be honest: This article is more a summary for myself, than really new content. I just want to summarize information about the IaaS offering of VMware. If you want a comparison of vCHS and AWS, I recommend to read this article written by Alex Mattson (AHEAD).
I faced today a really nasty problem. I have four HP ProLiant DL360 G6 in my lab. This server type has two 1 GbE NICs with the Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 chip onboard, which are usually claimed by the bnx2 driver. While applying a host profile to three of the hosts, one hosts reported an error. Supposedly the host hasn’t a vmnic0 and because of this the host profile couldn’t be applied.
In addition to the benefits that VMware grants to vExperts, a couple of vendors grant also benefits to vExperts. This includes free licenses, subscriptions or other offers. This is only a loose compilation of vExperts benefits.
Vendor Offer Link Solarwinds Virtualization Manager NFR http://bit.ly/1gYJtBB Veeam Backup & Replication NFR http://bit.ly/1esRaFn Pluralsight Annual Plus Subscription http://bit.ly/1esTa0o Tintri Polo Shirt http://bit.ly/1eJqgE2 Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager 1y NFR http://bit.ly/1iRVXfm Login VSI VIP program http://bit.
