VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘yellow-bricks.com’

In a fashion that I’m sure makes Eric Seibert of VMware-land.com proud, Duncan Epping has posted a page full of VMworld Europe 2009 links. Since my coverage slackened after Day 1 of the conference last week, I appreciate Duncan’s list of links too. The list is organized into several sections:

• Keynote 1 wrap us
• Keynote 2 wrap ups
• Announcements
• Hands-on Labs
• Sessions
• Various

Duncan’s links are to the 4 blogs of VMworld Europe attendees who he thinks provided the best coverage and includes  photos, videos, and text summaries.

Eric published a summary list of VMworld 2008 links last fall.

health_check.sh script report .html

If you are looking for a free and quick method to document your ESX 3.0.X  and ESX 3.5 server configurations without installing a scripting environment then don’t forget about A. Mikkelsen’s ESX Healthcheck script. An oldie but still a goodie, this script is simply transferred to your ESX 3.5 Console and then just run manually or via a scheduled job. The end result is a .html report that is saved on your ESX host, or if you utilize the optional send_smtp.pl script the report can be mailed to you automatically.

I’m not providing any new information in this post. In fact I am way behind  as Duncan Epping has covered this script on his blog at Yellow-bricks.com. Duncan first posted about the esx healthcheck script in January 2008 and recently mentioned it again in his post about his tools he uses when conducting customer Healthcheck services. The comments thread on Duncan’s January post walk through a year’s worth of feature development and support.

Download your copy of the script at  SourceForge.net: ESX Healthcheck Script

Once downloaded, the .zip file contains several helpful text files along with the script. The rest of this post walks through the install and configure steps and then explains how to run the script when ready. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody talks about running VMware ESX on VMware Workstation, but how come we don’t see more about running ESX on VMware Server 2.0? I’ve tried and been semi successful. This post is sort of a “how to” and kind of “need help” post about this topic.

First, Duncan Epping over at yellow-bricks.com made a quick post to remind himself of the configurations necessary to run ESX/ESXi 3.5 on VMware Workstation 6.5. There are numerous other posts about how to do this, but the post ESX in Workstation contains just the basic information to remember. If you’ve never done this before and you need pictures and a good explanation then I recommend the .pdf from Xtravirt.com titled VI 3.5 in a box.

Trying to take this a step further, I have moved the ESX 3.5 VMs I created on Workstation 6.5 to a VMware Server 2.0 running on a 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. I can start the ESX server VMs just fine, but unfortunately I can’t run the VMs (hosted on the ESX VMs). It’s still a convenient option for learning, testing and configuring the latest builds and features even without running VMs.

Using basically the same configuration settings I’ve also been able to install and run Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V on both VMware Workstation and VMware Server 2.0. Here is a screenshot of my VMware Server Summary tab. Click on it for a larger view. Read the rest of this entry »

I first heard that the new VMware Administrator Portal (VCAP) for consolidated management of multiple VirtualCenter Servers (VC) would soon be released as a free product during VMworld 2008. True to their promise, VMware provided a technology preview version for download at the end of last week. I found out it was released when Yellow-bricks.com posted about it and then the VMTN Blog and Mike D posted about the Yellow-bricks.com update. So, I downloaded the virtual appliance and did some basic testing this weekend. Although I do not have multiple VCs or a lot of VMs to test with, the following is a summary of my notes and thoughts while setting it up. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware, following through on Paul Maritz’ promise from last week, officially announced today that ESXi is now available for free. The icing on this “virtual cake” turns out to be that the latest version, Update 2 released Friday 07.25, offers new features and functions than previously available.

Read the press release – VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free.

Get the download at www.vmware.com/products/esxi/.

Click the image to the right to go to VMware’s ESXi 3.5 web page to learn more.

Concentrating on the technical reaction and excitement from the news, here are some links from various posts I found interesting in the virtualization blogisphere. Read the rest of this entry »

Duncan over at yellow-bricks.com has posted a very helpful VMware HA troubleshooting tip. Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA deals with fixing HA issues that arise after changing the ip address of ESX hosts. In summary, Duncan was helping a colleague that was having trouble reconfiguring HA on an ESX cluster, and even though all the standard steps for resolving the issue were followed the HA feature could not be enabled on the cluster. Duncan was able to to identify that the issue was caused because a HA agent auto-generated file still contained the wrong ip address information. Specifically the /etc/FT_HOSTS file was the culprit.

Read the yellow-bricks.com post for the full details, but I am copying the t-shooting and resolution steps here for my future knowledge base. Read the rest of this entry »

Duncan’s post Show VMware Tools version with BGInfo at yellow-bricks.com not only taught me something new about using BGInfo with virtual machines, but it also inspired me to expand on how useful this tool is when administrating your virtual infrastructure. The utility is not new. Most administrators already know about BGInfo and many use it on both physical and virtual servers. However, I too often find the tool is installed but not correctly configured to update the desktop data correctly. In this post I will explain how to make sure that BGInfo updates the data on the desktop every time an administrator logs on, and I will also explore how to mass deploy a customized configuration.

First, for those that may not know about BGInfo, Read the rest of this entry »