VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘management’

Managing and troubleshooting ESXi 4 can be a little alien when an administrator is used to the Service Console of ESX Classic. Specifically, troubleshooting remote connectivity to the ESX management interface after adding a second NIC involves local esxcfg-vswitch commands on ESX, but with ESXi the esxcfg commands are only available via the RCLI. Problem is you can’t use the RCLI if you lost remote management connectivity! Luckily, the local ESXi GUI lets you reconfigure your mistake and re establish remote connections.

Hit F2 on the ESXi Console and enter the System Configuration Menu

  Choose to Configure Management Network > Network Adapters

Read the rest of this entry »

David Marshall has written a post on his Virtualization Report Blog on Infoworld.com titled 10 free tools to help with your virtualization environment. While writing this post David asked me for my input on what free tools I use on a regular basis. You may be thinking “great, just another blog post about the same free virtualization ecosystem tools”, but I commend David for sticking with a slightly different approach to this topic.

When I responded I applied the idea of “what free tools I actually use the most on a day to day basis.” Sure, there are a lot of “the same virtualization ecosystem tools” I mentioned earlier in my list, but in reality what I depend on the most and show my clients are utilities designed for physical server environments too. For example, burning ISO files, remote desktop connections, remote access and file transfer, and server operating system status information tools get used just as much as the specific tools developed to administer the virtualization hosts.

David also polled fellow vExperts Stephen Beaver and Jason McCarty as well, so check out the post in full for a great list of tools and links to download them. Marshall is a vExpert himself by the way, and his VMblog.com (one of many he writes for) is an awesome source of virtualization news, press releases, and opinion.

Image via Wikipedia

With all the recent talk about the software from Rove and VMware that provides mobile device access to managing VMware Infrastructure, administrators now need to consider how they will actually connect mobile phones to vCenter and ESX hosts behind the firewall. Fortunately, a thread from the VMware vCenter Mobile Access Technology Preview Community sheds some insight on how VMware actually tested the vCenter Mobile Access virtual appliance (vCMA) with several different mobile devices.

From The official “how will I connect to this thing” thread: Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the new automation and life cycle management technology for both XenServer and Hyper-V announced today by Citrix will be provided by an integration of VMLogix LabManager and StageManager products with Citrix Essentials. This partner feature integration follows a similar strategy used by Citrix in the past with Marathon Technologies to provide High Availability for guests on XenServer hosts. VMLogix LabManager and StageManager are very similar in name to VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products that provide basically the same automation and management features.

In the official announcement today, VMLogix explains: Read the rest of this entry »

Along with the news of a free XenServer, Citrix has officially announced Citrix Essentials – a new product line that will provide lifecycle management, storage integration, and automated provisioning features for both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. In the press release Citrix states, “The new solution helps customers transform virtualized datacenters into more dynamic “delivery centers” with capabilities like lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration and seamless integration with leading storage systems.” Citrix Essentials appears to help close the current feature gap between Citrix and the virtualization market leader VMware by providing much of the automation already available for the VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products.

The announcement provides the following outline of Citrix Essentials features:

“While some features vary based on the underlying virtualization environment, the Citrix Essentials product line consists of five broad categories of capabilities:

• Automated Lab Management streamlines the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering applications on-demand throughout the full application lifecycle, from development labs to production servers.  Because this functionality supports all of the leading virtualization platforms, customers can even run development and testing environments on one virtualization platform, and seamlessly move those applications into production on another platform.
• Advanced Storage Integration featuring Citrix® StorageLink™ technology fully leverages all the native power of third-party array-based storage systems making it easy for customers to manage advanced storage features directly from their virtualization management environments.
• Dynamic Provisioning Services reduce costs and optimize datacenter infrastructure by letting customers manage common sets of master workload images centrally and stream them on-demand to both virtual machines or physical servers.
• Workflow Orchestration enables users to automate key management processes across their virtual infrastructure using common task libraries and a graphical workflow canvas.
• High Availability delivers a broad range of powerful high availability options from automatic restart as the result of host or virtual machine failure to intelligent placement of virtual machines across resource pools based on resource availability.”

Citrix has released a separate announcement for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V that explains the extended partnership between Citrix and Microsoft now known as “Project Encore”. This press release also describes Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to attend a live demonstration of the new Hyper9 virtual infrastructure search and monitoring tool this week, and as a result a limited number of VM /ETC readers will be lucky enough to have access to the currently closed Hyper9 beta program in the near future. Stay tuned to VM /ETC for information on signing up for access to the exclusive beta program, but for now, this post provides a first look at some of the features demonstrated to me. I’ve also been given permission to provide some screen shots.

Hyper9 was announced publically back in September, and then caught the attention of many VMworld 2008 attendees. Scott Lowe, Edward Haletky, Eric Siebert, and Keith Ward are some of the many that have already written about their impressions of this tool’s capabilities. In general, Hyper9 is a search based management tool that promises to “rock your world” of virtual infrastructure management. Hyper9 can be used to query for information at the hardware, hypervisor, and VM operating system levels.

So, what exactly is Hyper9 and what’s so special about a tool that can search against all objects in your virtual infrastructure? Read the rest of this entry »

The Hyper-V Server 2008 installation was easy. Figuring out what I had to do to create virtual machines and remotely manage the free Hyper-V version was frustrating. To make a long story short I needed the Hyper-V Manager MMC, and to get started using this tool requires Windows Vista or Server 2008.

I did not already have a computer running one of the latest OS versions from Microsoft, but this was an understandable requirement. It was easy enough for me to build a new Server 2008 system. After that first set back, I began to lose patience because of having to continue to figure out how to make additional configurations that I thought would have been pre-set for this specialized, virtualization version of Server 2008. When you are ready to build VMs and you have to spend more time figuring out what else you need to enable it makes you mad.

Granted, part of my problem was because I was using servers in a workgroup and not a domain, but having to open the Server firewall to allow a connection from the Hyper-V Manager? I would have thought that Microsoft could have anticipated how administrators would need that configuration already in place. Besides, you can use a web browser for remote management of Virtual Server 2005, so why is this missing in Hyper-V Server 2008?

Anyways, the following are my steps and notes for installing the Hyper-V Manager MMC on a Server 2008 member server. Hopefully this post will benefit others who are setting up remote management for Hyper-V Server 2008. Read the rest of this entry »