VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘virtual center’

VMware engineer Michael White’s post 64 bit is almost here – are you ready? on the Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity) Blog foretells of the future 64 bit requirement of both vCenter and SRM (Site Recovery Manager). White writes:

“I wanted to remind everyone, of what I have already seen floating around the internet, but still important enough to remind.  Our next release of SRM is going to require a 64 bit OS.  This is the same as our next release of VC as it too will require a 64 bit host OS.  This change is required to support the increased capabilities of our products.  As we scale our products to match our customers needs, generally 1 – 2 years in advance of where they will need all the capabilities of a given product we have had to use a 64 bit OS.  This will show itself in increased numbers in things like more simultaneous vSphere client connections.”

To me these new operating system (OS) requirements mean we will see even more instances of vCenter as a VM (virtual machine). It only seems logical that a least path of resistance is to virtualize the management server in order to upgrade, especially considering all have already invested in 64 bit hardware for their hypervisors if they decided to upgrade to vSphere 4 in the first place. To go a step further, I’m willing to argue that it will be more common for an IT Department to justify the cost of additional ESX hosts, even if only dedicated for management, then it will to deploy new servers for physical instances of vCenter.

The looming transition to a console-less ESXi eventually means more management virtual appliances in the future too. Solutions which will continue to need a ESX console or similar will have to substitute their own appliance to operate with ESXi. This means even more justification for additional ESX/ESXi hosts and thus greases the decision to virtualize vCenter as well. I expect to see management clusters of ESX hosts become more common in the future than even the use of management networks today.

ESX hosts have bigger and badder hardware now than ever before allowing for higher consolidation ratios and larger applications to easily run in virtual machines, but it will be interesting to see if the vCenter as a VM best practices change over time. I personally feel that continuing to separate the database from the virtualized vCenter will continue to be a smart choice. Running a separate, and even virtualized, SQL instance ensures not only better performance of vCenter as a VM but enhances DR scenarios. In fact, those that already have the vCenter database on a remote instance will likely have a safer upgrade to the 64 bit vCenter.

The new 64 bit requirements will no doubt make for an interesting migration scenario, and I’m sure we will see some positive and negative opinions. Let me know your thoughts on a 64 bit vCenter as a VM in the future!

VMware made upgrading to vSphere 4 easy enough, but there are still a few things that can go wrong. One example is that admins must consider the patch and version levels of VirtualCenter and ESX  to begin. After the vCenter upgrade specific  compatibilities between vCenter 4 and ESX 3.x must be understood if a mixed mode environment will exist during the span of the upgrade.

vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Check

Although the Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Utility was introduced last Fall when VMware released vCenter 4 Update 1, I had not come across a situation where using the tool identified problems with ESX upgrades. Judging by several other blog posts that demonstrated the utility on the web already, most all of these bloggers showed “pass” scenarios as well. For me that was the same result until this week. In fact, the vCenter Pre-Upgrade Check proved it’s worth to me in a huge way.

For those not familiar how to use the Pre-Upgrade Utility, just start the autorun.exe in the vCenter 4 U1 .zip file or from the install DVD. At the bottom of the vCenter Installer menu is the option to start the pre-upgrade check. See the image to the right of this post.

Once the tool starts point it at the VirtualCenter 2.5 server. After less than 5 minutes

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is just a quick how to reference for manually changing the VMware Update Manager (VUM) patch repository download location. Admins usually need to do this when the vCenter server is low on disk space on the partition that VUM was originally installed on, but there is a second partition that has enough capacity. To move the VUM patch repository follow the following steps found in the VUM Administrators Guide:

When you install Update Manager, you can select the location for downloading patches. To change the location after installation, you must manually edit the vci-integrity.xml
file.

Procedure

1. Log in to the Update Manager server as an administrator.
   
2. Stop the Update Manager service.
   
   1. Right-click My Computer and click Manage.
      
   2. In the left pane, expand Services and Applications and click Services.
      
   3. In the right pane, right-click the VMware Update Manager Service and click Stop.
      
3. Navigate to the Update Manager installation directory and locate the vci-integrity.xml file.
   
   1. The default location is C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager.
      
4. Create a backup copy of this file in case you need to revert to the previous configuration.
   
5. Edit the file by changing the following fields:
   
   1. yournewlocation
   2. The default patch download location is: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Update Manager\Data\
      
   3. The directory path must end with \.
      
6. Save the file in UTF-8 format, replacing the existing file.
   
7. Copy the contents from the old patchstore directory to the new folder.
   
8. Restart the Update Manager service.