VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘storagevmotion’

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 hands on labs I attended at VMware Partner Exchange was the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) lab. In the lab I was able to get a good understanding of the technical details of how the yet to be released product is configured. The lab then walked us through the fail over process and workflow. This post is a high level summary of what I learned. This post is not intended to be a detailed how to, but instead just a logical overview about what it will take to set up SRM.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some buzz was generated today when Andrew Kutz of Lostcreations.com announced a new svmotion plugin in the VMware Community forums. From http://communities.vmware.com/thread/126141:

SVMotion is a VI 2.5 client plugin (the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact) that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations. This plugin is not supported by VMware. In fact, the plugin is not anywhere close to supported by VMware because it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins.

Read more about SVMotion and download it here http://www.lostcreations.com/code/wiki/vmware/viplugins/svmotion.

Replies to the post in the forum so far are positive.

Another improvement alternative to the cumbersome storage vmotion feature has been made by the user community. I am assuming (and hoping) that one day soon we will all be announcing (and celebrating) the patch that includes the native VC 2.5 ability to call and configure storage vmotion from the VI Client, but until VMware does that the user community can be counted on to continue to make the process easier.

Graphical Front-End for Storage VMotion – blog.scottlowe.org is where I found out about Alexander Gaiswinkler’s post in the VMware Communities announcing his GUI for SVMotion. Installation instructions from Alexander’s post: Read the rest of this entry »

While doing some research to get ready to implement the new ESX 3.5 storage vmotion feature I came across some helpful blog posts, and a script that will be a real time saver.

Unlike the vmotion we are used to, you can not right click on a vm in the vi client and initiate a storage vmotion. You have to download VMware-VIRemoteCLI and install it. The VIRemoteCLI can be downloaded as:

* a virtual appliance
* a windows installer
* a linux installer

Once the RemoteCLI is installed in Windows for example, Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately I slept late Thursday morning. Waking up at 7:30 am in Hayward, CA meant that there was no way short of a helicopter I was going to make it to San Francisco before 9. I’m pretty sure my company would not let me expense a helicopter so I decided to catch up on some email from the hotel until traffic burned off. I also had “Smash Head” from the party Weds night!

blog.scottlowe.org has some great notes on this session. Here’s my thoughts on what I missed. Read the rest of this entry »