VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘esx’ Category

The VMGuy has the scoop on all the VMware releases tonight! VMware has also made available an updated version of the GUI based virtual machine (VM) backup and restore plugin for vCenter 4, VMware Data Recovery 1.1 (VDR). Download it here and check the check the Release Notes here.

VMware is saying VDR has improved performance and progress information during intgregity checks, enhanced CIFS support, and that the previous experimental support status for File Level Restores of Windows VMs has been elevated to full support.

Although I could find no mention of it on the VDR web page, the data sheet, or in the new Release Notes, VDR was originally targeted for virtual infrastructure that hosted up to 100 VMs. I’m not sure if this VMware support limitation is still in effect or not.

Still, combined with the already built in de-duplication of VDR VM backups, SMBs have a great VCB alternative that continues to improve.

It was speculated that it might not happen until next week (Monday 11/23), but VMware engineer Dave Lawrence’s post Release: ESX 4.0 Update 1 on his VMGuy Blog confirms that ESX 4.0 U1 is now available for download. The most notable changes in this update include full support for VMware View 4 (expected to be available for download on 11/23), full support for Windows 7 and 2008 R2 in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, and an update to the vSphere Client that fixes the problem when installing on Windows 7 desktops – eliminating the need for the workaround VI admins have had to configure until now.

Go here for the full Release Notes that explain other new changes such as enhanced MSCS support, enhanced paravirtualized SCSI support, improved Distributed Switch performance, increased vCPU core limits, Intel Xeon 3400 CPU support, and several resolved issues.

VMware has also released vCenter 4 U1 tonight with matching support for View 4 along with Windows 7 and 2008 R2. The Release Notes indicate a few other goodies can be found in the vCenter update:

• Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool — A standalone pre-upgrade checker tool is now available as part of the vCenter Server installation media that proactively checks ESX hosts for any potential issues that you might encounter while upgrading vCenter agents on these hosts as part of the vCenter Server upgrade process. You can run this tool independently prior to upgrading an existing vCenter Server instance. The tool can help identify any configuration, networking, disk space or other ESX host-related issues that could prevent ESX hosts from being managed by vCenter Server after a successful vCenter Server upgrade.
• HA Cluster Configuration Maximum — HA clusters can now support 160 virtual machines per host in HA Cluster of 8 hosts or less. The maximum number of virtual machines per host in cluster sizes of 9 hosts and above is still 40, allowing a maximum of 1280 Virtual Machines per HA cluster.

As reported on vreference.com, there is a dangerous default in ESX 4. Before I expand on this potential problem I want to point out that a bug report has been files with VMware for correcting this in future releases, but for now VI admins need to be aware of the issue – If the key combination of Ctrl+Alt+Del is entered at the Service Console the ESX host will begin a shutdown which will stop all virtual machines running on the host in the process. Read the full vreference post for more details.

I tested this on an ESX 4 host running in a VMware Player VM on my notebook and captured the shutdown and reboot in this video.

DON’T HIT CTRL + ALT + DEL ON ESX 4 from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.

Fortunately, there is a manual workaround to disable this default behavior until VMware provides an update. I’ll use the instructions provided in the previously mentioned vreference.com post. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike it’s big brother VMware Workstation 7, nowhere is it published that ESX/ESXi 4 is a supported guest OS of VMware Player 3.0. In fact, ESX 4 is not even among the listed choices in the Version drop down box when building a new virtual machine (VM), nor is it mentioned in the VMware Player Release Notes or Getting Started Guide. I was surprised when I was able to perform an Easy Install of ESXi 4, and just like ESXi 4 VMs running on Workstation 7, VMware Player nested ESXi successfully hosted guests. Best of all, ESXi 4 in VMware Player 3.0 can be run without any additional manual (ESX in a box) configurations (just like VMware Workstation 7).

Interestingly enough, the full Console ESX 4 install DVD is not recognized by VMware Player 3.0 for an Easy Install. However, performing a full ESX 4 Easy Install is possible with a last minute switch of the install media. That is, first browse to the ESXi 4 .ISO, complete the new VM Easy Install wizard, but modify the hardware before booting and change to the ESX 4 DVD .ISO. Watch the video at the end of this post for a demonstration on getting full ESX4 to work.

The rest of this post highlights the important parts of the Easy Install of ESXi 4 on VMware Player 3.0 with screen shots. To get an idea of more of the Easy Install screens check out my post about installing Windows 7 as a VM in Workstation earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

This VMworld 2009 session took place Thurs at 9:30 am in room 134

Points made by the presenter worth remembering.

• Physical failure is unavoidable, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
• There is a 50% chance that pieces of an ESX Cluster will fail and take down critical services and servers.
• You’re not usually staring at a monitoring screen, and you want to be notified as the hardware degrades not afterwards.
• You want as much hardware info about a host, from multiple different vendor platforms, and on a single screen
• Physical failure is a fact of virtual life
• Be proactive about hardware failure and use DRS + hardware monitoring + Alarms

An interesting demo in this session showed the use of  the built in vCenter 4 host hardware temperature status alarm generating SNMP traps as well as automatically putting a host in maintenance mode so an administrator can investigate. This action instigated a VMotion evacuation of the VMs on the impacted host and effectively isolated the hardware issue in the environment with minimal or zero impact.

My key take away of this session is that numerous “out of the box” vCenter event based alarms can be leveraged during the warning phase of hardware failures. This includes alerts covering power, fans, cpus, memory, batteries, etc. The ESX host hardware monitoring feature is detected and available automtically in vSphere 4.

My notes: Read the rest of this entry »

There have been a couple of bloggers this week that, while responding to Microsoft’s competitive analysis on Hyper-V versus ESX/ESXi footprints, have revealed some very interesting and helpful information about what exactly is contained in ESXi installations and on the bootable ESXi flash drive. For reference I’ll summarize a few posts and then link to a VM /ETC post from last year explaining why the ESXi .ISO is so large as well.

First, Nate from Techopsguys.com provides a realistic, and “colorful” at times view of the actual amount of space consumed by ESXi when you install it in Does size matter?. Read his post, but the condensed message and my interpretation of what Nate is saying is “VMware please stop telling people your ESXi hypervisor is so small when so much more space is required to install it.” 

“ESXi v3.5 was unable to boot directly from SAN so I can’t tell with the same level of accuracy how big it is, (”df” says about 200MB) but I can say that our ESXi v3.5 systems are installed on 1GB USB sticks, and the image I decompressed onto those USB sticks is 750MB(VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd), regardless, it’s FAR from 32MB or even 75MB, at best it’s 10x larger than what they claim.”

If VMware ESXi 4 is so small, why is it so big? is a post by Eric Gray that explains why the 32 mb ESXi 3 and the 60 mb ESXi 4 hypervisors on bootable flash drives require a 1 GB drive.

“Not only does a 1GB flash device contain the ESXi hypervisor, it also provides VMware Tools for various supported operating systems and a copy of the vSphere Client which administrators can download and install to their workstations.  These components are not executed by the hypervisor at all — they can be obtained through other means, but it is very convenient to have them right on the host.”

Gray’s post also provides GParted screen shots of showing the partition layout as well as an image of the directory listing of the tools, drivers, and vSphere Client.

ESXi is as small as VMware says it is… by Mike Laverick also similarly discusses the contents of ESXi flash drives. Laverick also points out that for roll back purposes, ESXi installations also maintain copies of the previous installed versions. When an upgrade goes wrong a local copy of the former working ESXi version can be quickly recovered to.

If your curious about VMware’s methodology for coming up with the hypervisor footprint calculations they base their claims on then check out the Virtual Reality Blog post Our position on hypervisor footprints, patching, vulnerabilities and whatever else Microsoft wants to throw into a blog post. Eric Horschman gives you the gorey details on ESXi disk partition sizes as well as direct replies to the several other topics Microsoft has competitive issues with.

“A df -h command will then show you that the total size of those compressed ESXi boot images in the directory corresponding to /bootbank is 59.3MB — somewhat less than the 70MB figure we’ve publicly stated.  The other partitions in the listing are either loaded only in memory (/), or they are excluded per the rules above.  Note that this is not just a stripped down ESXi installation, it is a fully capable ESXi host supporting all licensed vSphere features.”

Finally If ESXi is so small why is the download so big? is a post I wrote after talking to Amir Sharif, VMware Senior Product Manager about the reasons the ESXi .ISO download(s) are over 200 MB. Copying what I wrote in the original post:

Amir explained to me that the VMware ESXi downloads (both for installation media and patches) contain 4 major components.  These components and their approximate sizes are:

• VMware ESXi (32 MB)
• VMware VI Client (48 MB)
• VMware Tools (120 MB)
• Global and regional server vendor value-add customization bits (30 MB)

It’s important to note that there are several versions of the VMware Tools depending on the target OS, and there are two different bundle types for Linux OSes (.rpm and .tgz).  There are multiple versions of server vendor customization bits as well. Therefore, VMware’s completeness to include all of these items in a single download makes for a large .iso file. In case you noticed the math doesn’t match the current version’s download size, that is because the 4 component sizes are approximates and will change from version to version.

One of my popular posts on VM /ETC has been Best Practices for ESX Host Partitions. Now with vSphere, VMware has changed the recommended ESX 4 Service Console partitioning slightly. So, consider this post an update to the first one. As in the past, I’ve taken this information from the VMware Partner services delivery IP available to partners on VMware Partner Central. Specifically I am taking information from the vSphere Essentials PoC delivery guide(s) found in the vSphere 4 Services Kit.

Quoting myself from the first post, some things are still worth mentioning up front:

“Installing ESX is fast and simple. By default you could click through the installer GUI changing only your local time zone and end up with a stable, dependable host. However, there are some recommended partitioning best practices that should be followed in order to make sure you minimize possible future headaches and create a repeatable and scalable environment.”

When you install ESX 4 you should choose Advanced for the installation type so you can delete the default partitioning shown in the following screen shot:

After deleting / changing the default s you can then create custom partitions as recommended.

Read the rest of this entry »