I was involved with a customer support issue today where multiple ESX hosts were experiencing random restarts. Although I did not personally get to troubleshoot the servers, the customer was confident that the RAM, all ordered at the same time, was the issue and probably a bad batch. This scenario is extremely difficult to troubleshoot, and extremely costly when multiple guests are hosted on a production ESX server. Of course, best practice when building new ESX hosts is to thoroughly test for bad memory before hosting VMs, but there is also a utility installed with ESX made for RAM testing in the background too. This post covers both options. Memtest86 should be used before an ESX host is in production while Ramcheck can be used if a problem develops after hosting running virtual machines. (more…)

VMware Communities: Vmware-Server, RC1, Firefox 3.0.1, … is a popular thread right now. Here’s the scenario. If you are running VMware Server 2.0 RC1 and using Firefox to administer guest VMs, when you upgrade to Firefox version 3.0.1 the VMware Remote Console plug in is no longer compatible and is disabled. You get a message very similar to “VMware Remote Console Plug-in 2.5.0.100265 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 3.0.1“.

After reviewing the forum thread linked above and several other sources I have settled on what I think is the easiest work around - Add the Nightly Tester Tools Firefox plug in and force the incompatible Remote Console plug in to run.

I am running Ubuntu 8.0.4 and upgraded Firefox when I was prompted to install the latest distribution updates. Of course, hold off on the Firefox upgrade if you can and wait for the next release of VMware Server 2.0. Let’s assume (and hope) that the Server 2.0 team anticipates the frequent update cycle of Firefox moving forward and designs the plug in to survive upgrades if possible.

You can review the thread for a few other work arounds, but here’s the info on the Nightly Tester Tools plug in from the Firefox Addons web page:

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VMware, following through on Paul Maritz’ promise from last week, officially announced today that ESXi is now available for free. The icing on this “virtual cake” turns out to be that the latest version, Update 2 released Friday 07.25, offers new features and functions than previously available.

Read the press release - VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free.

Get the download at www.vmware.com/products/esxi/.

Click the image to the right to go to VMware’s ESXi 3.5 web page to learn more.

Concentrating on the technical reaction and excitement from the news, here are some links from various posts I found interesting in the virtualization blogisphere. (more…)

Without any official announcement, email, or news release VMware made ESX 3.5 Update 2 available for download on Friday (July 25). I found out about it after checking Planet v12n where I saw that VMBlog.com,  Yellow-bricks.com and NTPro.nl had new posts about the release. Update 2 ushers in new features as well as several bug fixes. Check out the new ESX 3.5 VMware Infrastructure 3 Release Notes at VMware’s downloads page. Follow the previous link to read all of the release notes, but the following are some of high lites for me:

• Enhanced VMotion
• VSS Quiescing
• Hot Extend a running VM’s virtual disk
• More SAS array support
• 10Gb iSCSI and NFS support
• Service Console update to RHEL 3.0 U9
• Full support for individual VM HA fail over.
• Live Cloning of VMs
• All patches prior to this release are included
• New VC Alarms
• HA no longer requires DNS resolution (no longer have to manually modify /etc/hosts)

It’s good to see positive and exciting news from VMware (and definitely needed if you have been watching the stock price!) Update 2’s release combined with ESXi 3.5 being available for free download should make next week very intersting.

I’ve copied some details from the release notes about the features listed above in the rest of this post.

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I’ve previously posted about Indeed.com and the growing salaries for VCP and virtualization professionals, and I am revisiting this topic again with updated information as of 07.25.08 in this post. Back in April the average annual salary for a VCP was $78,000. It’s good to see this figure continue to grow!

The following screen shot shows a comparison of VCP related positions. Note that Indeed.com has positions posted for “VMware Engineer” which have a higher average annual salary than positions titled “VCP”. (more…)

When Tripwire released ConfigCheck for ESX 3.5 back in June, the product was an instant success and downloaded by tens of thousands of VMware administrators. The free security hardening tool, jointly developed by VMware and Tripwire, could not be used on ESX 3.0 versions, however. On July 21 Tripwire announced the availability of Tripwire ConfigCheck for ESX 3.0 thus now allowing the same security assessment capabilities for the still widely deployed previous version of ESX.

I received a courtesy email about the new version from Kim Blogren of Tripwire’s Public Relations. In the email Kim explained the following about the reason for releasing the new version: (more…)

Rick Vanover keeps posting great articles about the various features of Sun’s xVM VirtualBox over at TechTarget’s Server Virtualization Blog. Picking up where I left off on my previous summary post of Rick’s work, check out the following new VirtualBox features articles. (more…)

There is no official announcement from VMware yet, but according to various sources from the virtualization community new VMware CEO Paul Maritz announced during the July 22 Q2 Earnings Call ESX3i will be available for free as early as July 28, 2008 (next week). Although predicted to potentially be released as a free hypervisor, ESX3i, now named ESXi, has been available from VMware since September 2007 for $495. A cheaper option for purchasing ESXi as of today is available by ordering select new server hardware models to ship with the hypervisor embedded. However, offering the bare metal ESXi for free in the future to VMware customers will certainly increase the number of installations in data centers of both small and medium businesses and enterprise organizations world wide.

In my opinion, this is a timely and needed move to counter Microsoft’s Hyper-V release and marketing hype touting Hyper-V as free add-on to Windows Server 2008.

According to virtualization.info’s article, VMware will not restrict any (more…)

In my post 730 Days Later - Replace The VirtualCenter Default SSL Certificate I pointed out the SSL certificate installed by VirtualCenter expires after 2 years. I did not document how to replace the default cert, but instead I linked to VMware’s guide for readers to explore. Thank goodness Leo Raikhman has picked up where I left off on his Leo’s Ramblings Blog! Leo has created 2 great “how to” posts for replacing certificates using OpenSSL that are much easier to follow then VMware’s guide.

In the post VirtualCenter CA Configuration Leo covers replacing the default certificate with a stand alone OpenSSL version that expires after 10 years. However, in his post More nonsense with VirtualCenter certificates - part 2 he provides instructions for using a domain enforced Windows Certificate Authority.

Read Leo’s posts in their entirety at the links above, but I am copying his instructions here for my personal knowledgebase. As a matter of fact, I recommend adding Leo’s RSS feed to your reader and bookmarking his site. He has been consistently creating posts relevant and helpful for virtual administrators.

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Catbird, makers of the V-Security solution for VMware, has announced a new virtual infrastructure security certification. The CVSP certification is designed to train individuals with skills necessary to assess virtual infrastructure for security risks and compliance. A description of the program is found in the Computer Technology Review article Catbird announces Certified Virtual Security Professional Program.

“The CVSP program is designed to enable security engineers, along with IT audit and compliance professionals, to conduct security assessments and implement virtual infrastructure security measures to
maintain compliance with regulatory and internal standards. Graduates of the course will have the ability to analyze the efficacy of their existing virtual security protocols, as well as the know-how to take proactive measures to enhance their existing security.

Upon completion of the CVSP program, students are eligible to sit for the CVSP certification exam, consisting of a practice deployment and a multiple choice test. A background in VMware ESX Server 3.x, Virtual Center 2.x, Linux networking, and network security concepts is recommended for participants, as is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.”

Catbird’s slogan, “Don’t Run Naked”, is definitely the eye opening marketing needed to draw attention to virtual security. From the Catbird web site: (more…)

I’ve written about using 2X ThinClientServer at home for free VDI already, so it’s public knowledge that I like the thin cient management product available from www.2x.com. Now, 2X and Virtual Iron have announced a partnership to provide VDI to small and medium businesses (SMB). The combination of these two vendors results in a solution where 2X ThinClient Server brokers user connections to virtual desktops hosted on Virtual Iron’s Xen based virtual servers. Not a bad solution for the SMB needing to host a small group of desktops.

I haven’t covered Virtual Iron much on VM /ETC partly because I haven’t had the opportunity to implement it, but mostly because I hear and see more about the other Xen based virtual host. Here’s some quick info from the Virtual Iron web site about this virtual infrastructure solution: (more…)

Download pre-built, complete Linux virtual machines for Sun xVM Virtualbox from veeDee-Eyes.com. More from the web site:

“About:
veeDee-Eyes.com was created to provide users with complete, functional Open Source Virtual Computers.
We download the distribution ISOs. Try and follow the installation instructions. We attempt to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. VirtualBox VDIs that have the Guest Additions installed are noted on the VDI page.

Build Notes:
Unless noted in the “Build Notes” there are

• No additional packages added.
• No update performed.
• Only default options are used when ever possible

The goal is to create a CLEAN virtual computer. You get exactly what the creators of the “Operating System” designed in a STANDARD installation. From there you can make it your own.”

To use these VDI files you just need to do the following: (more…)