VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘serviceconsole’

This post is a summary of notes from the 1:30 pm VMworld 2008 session titled Managing ESX in a COS-less World. The discussion was about various options for managing ESXi without the Service Console OS (COS). The session was hosted by members of the ESXi team and contained forward looking statements about possible future directions. As always, the disclaimer was discussed with the audience before the presentation began. (Do I need to keep explaining this? Probably the safe thing to do.)

Scott Lowe apparently was in the same session so check his
TA2659: Managing ESX in a COS-less World post for a lot of additional information besides what I have recorded here.  Scott, my 3 finger “peck typing” doesn’t compare to your keyboard skills!

One of the first things mentioned was that the next major release of ESX/ESXi would be the last release of the two products together. I guess this means that ESXi kernel development will be independent of the ESX versions that provide the VDC-OS. We were told ESXi will continue without the COS and that ESX would include a stripped down COS.

There are several reasons VMware needed to remove the COS from ESX. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several ways to determine if you have virtual machines with snapshots. Why you would want to know has been covered In various other posts both here at VM /ETC as well as on the other virtualization blogs. It’s so important that the virtualization community has created different tools and scripts to identify and monitor snapshot files for administrators.  So, when I read the post WWoIT – Wayne’s World of IT: Find VM snapshots in ESX/VC I had an experience that Aaron Delp described as “/HEADDESK” (when he commented on my uploading files with the VI Client post).

It may not be the fanciest of methods, but probably the quickest way to find VM snapshots is to use the ls command from the ESX Service Console. By piping the output with grep to find files with the snapshot extension, .vmsn, and using the recursive switch you can scan all the VMFS LUNs visible to an ESX host. That’s so simple it hurts!

To use the ls command to find snapshots do the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, I have had several clients and peers ask me how to get disk usage and performance statistics from their current virtual infrastructure of ESX hosts and virtual machines . Some needed data for planning and sizing a new SAN, while others needed statistics for upgrading, adding more disks, or for optimizing multi path and VMFS performance. In one case the customer was trouble shooting poor VM performance issues. Regardless of the objectives there are some built in tools in both VirtualCenter and ESX server that can get this information for you. This post explains 2 native methods:

• Using the VI Cleint to access the Performance data in VirtualCenter
• Using esxtop from the ESX Service Console

I have included plenty of screenshots. As always, click on them for larger views. The rest of this post is in an outline format, but should be easy enough to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts. Read the rest of this entry »

A common issue after installing ESX servers that do not have all their NICs cabled is that you can not ping the host. For example, say you have an ESX host with 6 1GB network cards – 2 on board and 4 PCI. You would think that cabling the 2 on board cards would cover network connectivity. Unfortunately the order that ESX recognizes the NICs is not determined in a logical, expected order such as on board and then PCI cards. In fact, if you know how ESX determines how to order the network cards please comment and let us all know! In the meantime, here is how to use a few esxcfg- Console commands to make sure the cabled NICs are linked to the vSwitch that has the Service Console PortGroup (where the ip address is assigned).

Read the rest of this entry »

To clone a virtual machine with VirtualCenter you have to power off the guest, but what if your next maintenance window isn’t any time soon, you can’t afford to schedule the outage, or you just need a copy of the VM during normal business hours? Did you know that making a copy of a running, powered on VM is possible. At a high level the process requires a snapshot to freeze the VM’s original disk which in turn allows you to clone the frozen disk. This is essentially the way VCB, vRanger, or any of the live VM backup products work. Therefore, cloning a powered on VM can be accomplished with a little Console command magic.

I want to acknowledge that researching this method was inspired by the VMTN Virtualization Roundtable Episode 1 Podcast’s coverage of snapshots. Specifically Eric Siebert mentions that using VMware Converter as an alternative to committing snapshots is not the best option and offers the idea of using vmkfstools to do the job. Read the rest of this entry »