vmware

Use Microsoft Excel For Your Text Manipulation Needs

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I’m just going to lay it out there: sysadmins should use Microsoft Excel more. I probably will be labeled a traitor and a heathen for this post. It’s okay, I have years of practice having blasphemous opinions on various IT religious beliefs. Do I know how to use the UNIX text tools like sed, awk, xargs, find, cut, and so on? Yes. Do I know how to use regular expressions? Yes. Do I know how to use Perl and Python to manipulate text, and do poor-man’s extract-transform-load sorts of things? Absolutely. It’s just that I rarely need such complicated tools in my daily work. I often just have a short list of something that I need to turn into a bunch of …

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Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

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I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

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When Should I Upgrade to VMware vSphere 6?

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I’ve been asked a few times about when I’m planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 6. Truth is, I don’t know. A Magic 8 Ball would say “reply hazy, try again.” Some people say that you should wait until the first major update, like the first update pack or first service pack. I’ve always thought that approach is crap. Software is a rolling collection of bugs. Some are old, some are new, and while vendors try to make the number of bugs go down the truth is that isn’t the case all the time. Especially with large releases, like service packs. The real bug fixing gains are, to borrow a baseball term, in the “small ball” between the big plays. …

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9 Things You’ll Love About vSphere 6.0

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vSphere 6.0, finally. It’s been in beta for what seems like an eternity. Betas are like Fight Club, where the first rule of participation is that you may not talk about your participation. But today’s the day that changes, as VMware just announced 6.0. A lot of rough edges were smoothed in this release, and all the limits have increased again (64 hosts per cluster, etc.). Beyond that, though, there’s much to like. Here are nine things I think are pretty neat about 6.0. 1. Centralized Services (PSC, Content Library, Update Manager) VMware has acknowledged that there’s a fair amount of “meta-administration” (my term) that goes on for vSphere. To help curb that they’ve created the Platform Services Controller, which is …

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Latest ESXi Turns Off Transparent Page Sharing, So Watch Your RAM

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Transparent Page Sharing is a technology from VMware that essentially deduplicates memory. Instead of having 100 copies of the same memory segment it keeps just one, and returns the savings to the user in the form of additional free capacity. In a move that further encourages people to never patch their systems VMware has set the new default for Transparent Page Sharing to “off.” They did this in the latest Updates to ESXi (ESXi 5.5 Update 2d, for example). More specifically, in order to use it by default you now need to configure your virtual machines to have a “salt,” and only VMs with identical salts will share pages. To specify a salt you need to manually edit a virtual …

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Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

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I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

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You Cannot Use open-vm-tools to Customize VMs

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Homer Simpson: Kids: there’s three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way? Homer Simpson: Yeah, but faster! My biggest pet peeve with open source is that projects don’t ever solve whole problems. They get 60% of the way to solving a whole problem and then run off to chase another squirrel. The most recent example of this is VMware’s recommendation to use the open-vm-tools packages that ship with modern distributions of Linux. Dumbest recommendation ever. Why? Because the project got to 60% of the solution and stopped, effectively solving no problems for anybody. From what appears to be a VMware employee on the open-vm-tools mailing list archives: > …

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CentOS 7 Refusing VMware vSphere Guest OS Customizations

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So I just spent two hours of my life trying to get my CentOS 7 VM template to deploy correctly with a vSphere customization specification. No matter what I did it would customize the VM, then uncustomize it, essentially leaving me with the template again. I finally asked our oracle and savior, Google, and two amazing things occurred. First, I found the answer. About three weeks ago a fellow named Jeff Burns asked this same question on Server Fault, then answered his own question five minutes later (this is often what happens to me immediately upon filing a support case). He built on something I’d seen in /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log, where the VMware Tools couldn’t figure out what the OS is and …

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VMworld 2014 Session Voting Open

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One of the most interesting things about VMworld is the public session voting, which is now open. Not many conferences allow attendees to have a say in what gets presented at the conference. If you’re planning to attend VMworld 2014 it’s probably a good idea to vote for sessions that interest you. I am involved in two session proposals: 2770 – The Art of Migrating to the vCenter Server Appliance As the vCenter Server Appliance gains maturity, capacity, and functionality it is becoming a serious choice for those running vSphere environments, reducing expense and administration time. This session will be based in first-hand migration experienced and cover what the vCSA is, common use cases and designs, and where the vCSA isn’t …

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Upgrading to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 from Windows vCenter 5.1

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My coworkers and I recently undertook the task of upgrading our vSphere 5.1 environment to version 5.5. While upgrades of these nature aren’t really newsworthy we did something of increasing interest in the VMware world: switched from the Windows-based vCenter Server on a physical host to the vCenter Server Appliance, or vCSA, which is a VM. This is the story of that process. If you aren’t familiar with the vCSA it is a vCenter implementation delivered as a SuSE-based appliance from VMware. It has been around for several major versions, but until vSphere 5.5 it didn’t have both feature parity with Windows and the ability to support very many hosts & VMs without connecting to an external database. Under vSphere …

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