VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘esx’

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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Earlier this week the VMware VI Team Blog reported that as of ESX version 3.5 Update 1 Storage VMotion is now officially supported for iSCSI SANs. This means that administrators can reorganize virtual machines without down time in order to match any storage needs. The Storage VMotion and 10Gb Ethernet support for iSCSI SAN’s post explains:

“Although Storage VMotion is designed to work with any type of storage, it was initially supported only with Fibre Channel SANs. As of Update 1, Storage VMotion is supported with iSCSI SAN’s for moving virtual machine disk files in the following scenarios:

- From iSCSI SANs to other iSCSI SANs

- From iSCSI SANs to FibreChannel SANs

- From FibreChannel SANs to iSCSI SANs

In addition, we now support the use of 10Gb Ethernet for iSCSI in a VMware Infrastructure environment.”

In my experience Storage VMotion has worked great, but be careful with VMs that have higher I/O utilizations. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular topics of discussion in the virtualization community has always been about installing ESX on a whitebox server. Two of the most popular posts on VM /ETC have been ESX home lab hardware shopping list and Cheap ESX solutions for testing which are both about finding and using hardware not on the VMware HCL that can run ESX. Now, with VMware announcing new relationships with ASUS, Gigabyte, Tyan, Inventec, and Supermicro, ESX 3.5 and ESXi will be certified, supported, and even ship embedded on more server platforms than ever before.

VMware provides a timeframe of availability in the official announcement linked above:
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updated 013010: several commenters indicated an issue with trasfering large files via the datastore browser. As of VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6, VMware has fixed this issue. So, be sure to upgrade! More on this here.

Running the latest version of ESX3.5 enables a lot of usability enhancements in the VI Client. Many of the administrative tasks and configurations previously performed on the Service Console or by third party tools are now accessible as new options directly from the GUI. For example, you previously could not use the Datastore Browser to upload files such as ISOs to the ESX hosts, but instead had to use a tool such as WinSCP or other similar methods. With the ESX3.5 VI Client you can now transfer files right from the client. What makes this native ability even cooler is the fact that you no longer have to enable remote root access or create a special user. If you connect the VI Client to VirtualCenter as a local administrator, or if you connect to the ESX host as root you can use the VI Client to upload files without any other configurations.

The following screenshot of the VI Client is showing the Summary Tab of the ESX host.
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I ran into an issue today with the open console command from the VI Client. I was already connected to a stand alone ESX3.5 host. I had just finished creating a new VM, configuring the virtual CD to use the OS install media .iso, and I had powered on the new virtual machine. When I right clicked on the VM and selected “open console” I got the following error message:

“error connecting: can not connect to host x.x.x.x: a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.”

Once again the VMware Communities forum came to the rescue. Read the rest of this entry »

While attempting to clean up unnecessary virtual hardware after several P2V migrations this week, I was unable to remove the virtual USB Controller from new virtual machines. I got an uneditable device warning pop up window that said “Internal problem: The system information reported by the host for ‘VirtualUSBController’ is inconsistent. This device cannot currently be edited.”

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