VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘breakout’ Category

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 »

Another session I attended at VMware’s Partner Exchange last week was titled ESX Log Analysis – Tech 207. I did not realize it when I signed up, but this was essentially the same session that I previously attended at VMWorld 2007 last September. I did a quick Google search on this topic to find the VMWorld slides and noticed that Scott Lowe live blogged from San Francisco while attending this very session. Then Searching on the VMWorld.com site I found that this was also a session at VMWorld Europe 2008 titled VI3 Advanced Log Analysis. You can get a copy of the .ppt used at the VMWorld Europe 2008 session on my Files Page.

There is nothing really too new about t-shooting ESX logs here, but the following are my notes from last week. On the other hand, there are some general notes directly related to ESXi logs and using Update Manager included.

I cleaned up my notes a little, but the following is still a raw outline. use These notes and the .ppt mentioned above to hopefully help educate yourself on this topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

As of Monday 12.31.07 Virtualization.info reports that the stand alone version of ESX 3i is now available for download.

Ten days after the much awaited launch of VI3.5 (aka ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5), VMware is ready to release the special version of ESX Server called 3i.

ESX Server 3i completely drops the so called Console Operating System (COS), based on a customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro, and appears as a lightweight 32MB liveCD (no need for hard disk installation).

The new architecture is offered today as a parallel version, but VMware clarified in several occasions that this is the future of ESX Server.

The product was originally planned for OEM distribution only, pre-installed inside Solid State Drives (SSD) by Dell, IBM, HP and others popular vendors, but VMware is now offering it as stand-alone download.

Unfortunately the only two servers which are supported in this first release (build 67921) are Dell 2950 and HP DL380 G5 (experimental support).

The amount of features included in stand-alone ESX Server 3i is limited (just the vSMP and the VMFS support, you’ll need VirtualCenter bundles to get more) but the starting price is very interesting: $459 (without support). Any VirtualCenter 2.5 is able to support and manage it.

Download it here.

I followed the link for download and discovered it is a >200 mb .iso file?! I’m not sure why at this point but will follow up later with what’s on this CD.

Storage VMotion – move VM disks without downtime!

Site Recovery Manager

DR Pain points

• lack of reliable plan
• can’t meet RTO or RPO reqs
• expenses for hardware at DR site

VI3 improves DR

• RTO / Cost / Reliability
• Failover / Planning / testing
  • isolate network for live testing
• Hdw independence / encapsulation / boot from san / drs and resource pools / snap shots & vlans
• instant repurposing

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Anderson – Consulting Architect

Tim Myers – Senior Consultant

This is my third 2 hr sesion today. I had to get coffee and refuel. I’ve sat in the same seat in the same room since 10:15 …. except for lunch.

Dan Anderson is the drill sargeant of VCB. If you’ve attended one of his sessions you know what I mean. He should keep me awake.

VMConverter 3.01 can now be used to restore from VCB images – that is huge!! You can restore to ESX, VMServer, workstation. This is the first “ton of bricks” concept that has hit me this week. Makes the restore process for full VM backups much more feasible.

Notes and questions from session:

Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Kishi – Product Manager – VLA

What is VLA? Questions and notes from session

Shared VM library

• stores vm configurations in state as a unit
• uses a fraction of the storage normally required – 16 mb files called differencing disks
• runs identical copies of vms simultaneously on the same network
• leverages central pool of virtualization resources

Does VLA need VC2? – not today, but next version will use VC2

Rapid provisioning

• deploy as needed
• web based

transient configured infrastructure Read the rest of this entry »

Session discussion questions: 

Replicate using EMC SRDF

manually change ip addresses of replicated machines?

Use F5, dynamic dns to self update or auto update ip addresses.

Host based replication

Replistor

Double take

Must have vm or host at both the primary and the secondary site for HBR. Must also pre-setup the networing, etc.

VMware is doing more with the SAN based relication

Site Recovery Manager will be able to interface with the replication product’s manager server 

Read the rest of this entry »