VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘yellow-bricks.com’

VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

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It hasn’t happened to me yet, but enabling the Converter Enterprise plug-in apparently can crash your VC 2.5 Server. VMware Communities: Enabling Converter Enterprise Plugin … is a forum thread about the problem with some troubleshooting attempts and the resolution. From the VMware forum:

I had exactly the same problem and this was caused by a dll file confict, in my case I had an old version of the ssleay32.dll file in my windows\system32 directory. I removed the file and it now works correctly.

Yellow-bricks.com also reports on the problem with 2 posts and an alternative fix in the follow up – Part II post: Read the rest of this entry »

Yellow-bricks.com posted a quick article today about successfully p2v-ing a SLES server. (Yes, I know that’s redundant but it just doesn’t sound right saying “p2v a SLES”). The post was of interest to me because I briefly attempted to do the same back in December without success.

In my experience we attempted to use the VMware Converter Cold Clone CD but got a message similar to unrecognized operating system. I do not remember the exact error message, but the VMware Converter Live CD was unusable . The customer then used Ghost to make an image of the physical server, and restored that image to a “bare-virtual-metal” VM. When booting the SLES VM the boot volume was not found, or unmountable. Since this particular VM Read the rest of this entry »

The report from yellow-bricks.com that I posted on last week of a new VMware beta product called Stage Manager has officially been announced. I just received an email from VMware:

Dear Rich,

We’re pleased to announce the availability of VMware Stage Manager 1.0 Beta, the first management and automation system for pre-production infrastructure and operations.

VMware Stage Manager 1.0 allows IT organizations to visualize release processes, manage resources and system configuration changes, ensure consistency, and streamline the transition of IT services and business applications between life-cycle stages and into production.

VMware Stage Manager 1.0 empowers IT organizations to: Read the rest of this entry »

 Yellow-bricks.com reports on a new VMware product beta that starts this month. From the post VMware Stage Manager:

VMware starts a new beta program the 21st of January, the product is called Stage Manager. Stage Manager seems to be some sort of Lab Manager spin off. But it goes way beyond what Lab Manager can do.

• You can easily boot shadow production servers
• Create test environments for infrastructure changes
• Build complex pre-production environments
• Systematically propagate complex system changes through development, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing systems into production
• Get a better grip on your change, configuration and release (CCR) management processes

Since many companies implement VI for the purpose of Dev, Test & QA environments, this sounds like a great product to help automate administration.