VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmtn’

John Troyer recently rounded up 3/4 of the Infosmack family for episode 122 of his VMTN Communities Roundtable Podcast.

Join Greg Knieriemen, Rick Vanover and I as we reminisce about podcasts past from 2010, and then make some virtualization and cloud predictions for 2011. As always, John’s show is live, so many others join in the fun.

Listen to the episode in the embedded player here, or go to the Talkshoe page to get this great episode.

I was notified by Nava Davuluri of VMware Product Marketing that a new VMTN community site and blog has been created for the purpose of centrally organizing freely available VMware product scripting and code samples. In Davuluri’s words:

“These sample codes are related to products such as the new vSphereCLI, vCLI, Perl toolkit, Java Webservices SDK, etc.

I’m trying to involve the entire developer community in using(sharing/contributing) this site more.“

On the VMware Code Central Blog he explains Code Central “is intended for VMware community developers and system administrators who use VMware infrastructure and would like to have IT control through automation.” Apparently, the Code Central Blog will update what’s new on the Code Central Community Page on a weekly basis.

After quickly checking the CodeCentral Community page one can see the potential for this to become a great site for VMware administrators and developers. For example, Davuluri already has featured links to the following, well known community contributions :

• lamw: Backing up VMs in ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.x in vSphere SDK for Perl
• lucd: Guest Provisioning System in vSphere PowerCLI
• alanrenouf: Report into MS Word in vSphere PowerCLI
• esloof: Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator in vSphere PowerCLI
• tzamora: VMware Infrastructure Power Documeter in vSphere PowerCLI
• stumpr: FindDatacenterByHostname in vSphere SDK for Perl

Update your bookmarks and RSS readers. I’m sure the Code Central Blog and VMTN Community will become a great resource.

John Troyer has announced that the VMware website has been updated to reflect new product line names first introduced back in September at VMworld 2008. In the VMTN post Do they smell as sweet? New product line names: vCenter, View, John explains that the VirtualCenter and VDM products have are now referred to as vCenter and VMware View. Several VC add ons such as Update Manager and Converter are included along with Site Recovery Manager (SRM), Lab Manager, Lifecycle Manager, and even the file system VMFS now have slightly new names.

John provides a complete list of all products impacted by the name change which I have copied here. Read the rest of this entry »

I received notice today about a project implementing ESX on IBM Blades and using System i for shared storage. After first doing a double take to make sure I read the email right, I did some quick research and found the following from the VMTN Communities:

VMware Communities: ESX on the IBM System i

“So how does VMware fit in with the System i? Well in a nut shell – The System i (which a lot of big companies have) can act as an iSCSI SAN, and you can boot IBM BladeServers and IBM System x Servers from this SAN, and have your shared storage too! Why is that so great? Because the IBM System i is one of the most reliable pieces of hardware on the planet! Because your company probably already has one! Because you can have a great backup and recovery platform!”

In case you are wondering what IBM System i is exactly, Read the rest of this entry »

I ran into another ESX configuration issue this week that seems to continue to hang around even though it was identified quite a long time ago. After a fresh install of two different ESX 3.5 Update 2 servers (installed from the 110268 build .iso), I was configuring NTP time sync from the VI Client (installed from the VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3 119825 build .iso) and was unable to change the NTP server. The error message window told me “failed to change host configuration”. Most frustrating to me is the fact that I have been able to change the NTP configuration from the VI client in past versions of ESX 3.5.

I was able to manually change the NTP configuration by digging out the related recommendations from the VMTN Communities thread VMware Communities: ESX 3.5 – Time Configuration = “Failed …. I have summarized my resolution steps in the rest of this post. Note that I did not have to modify all of the files and settings (steptickers, esx firewall) as previously required (and scripted) when manually changing NTP sync in ESX version 3.0.X.

Early in the VMTN thread was the advice: Read the rest of this entry »

Being that it is the end of the week and I have fallen a day or so behind in keeping up with the VMware updates for the August 12 time bomb bug, I decided that I would post the remaining emails I received from VMware. I’m also including an update from John Troyer from the VMTN Blog providing some clarity on version number information differences between the install media and the express patched ESX/ESXi 3.5 versions. Read the rest of this entry »

I just ran across this rapidly growing thread in the VMware Community forums. Apparently, the date August 12, 2008 is literally a bug in ESX 3.5 Update 2. If you have already upgraded be prepared to experience the following issues as described at VMware Communities: BIG bug in ESX 3.5 Update 2 – If you’re … (check this thread for the latest as it is updating frequently as of this posting):

The bug:

Starting this morning, we could not power on or VMotion any of our Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”.

Further digging lead us to messages like this one in /var/log/vmware/hostd.log, and the log file for any virtual machine we tried to power on or VMotion:

Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx| http://msg.License.product.expired This product has expired.
Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx| Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
Aug 12 10:40:10.792: vmx| There is a more recent version available at the VMware Web site: “http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4″.

A call to tech support confirmed this as a known problem with a temporary workaround.

The work-around: Read the rest of this entry »