vsphere

VMware vSphere Web Client & Internet Explorer 10

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Being adventuresome and/or an idiot, I upgraded Internet Explorer to version 10. I can report two things: 1. I like it as a speedy web browser, and the vSphere Web Client performance feels vastly improved over IE 9. That’s actually been one of my complaints about the web client, that it’s pokey. 2. The remote console plugins don’t work. I have tried fidgeting with a bunch of the security controls and reinstalling the Console Helper, but it continues to report “Remote Console plugin is not properly installed.” For now, IE 10 joins the ranks of Apple Mac OS X users with no console access. I’ll post more information as I mess with it… I’m not really a Windows guy so …

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Changing vCenter Operations Manager vApp IP Addresses

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I needed to renumber one of my VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 instances and it’s not immediately clear how to do it. It isn’t like the other virtual appliances VMware delivers. Here’s how I got it done, with some encouragement from Matt H. in VMware Support. It also seems to me someone wrote this up recently, but I could not find it. If that was you please leave me a comment with a link to your work. 1. Shut it all down. Take a snapshot of the individual VMs. I ended up having to revert to the snapshot, so that was nice. Remember that if you revert it reverts the VM config, too. 2. Edit the properties of the vC …

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VMware vSphere, LLDP, and Juniper EX Switches

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One of the vSphere environments I support uses Juniper EX4200 switches for networking. Juniper switches don’t support Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). I love CDP because I can tell exactly what switch & port I’m attached to, and see other information like VLANs, etc. CDP removes a lot of human error from our operations, too. I love it for situations like when two cables are mysteriously labeled as heading to the same switch port or I’m sitting at my desk and I need to refer to a physical port 200 miles north of me. It also means that I don’t need to maintain a document of the switch ports, I can script a dump of the information if I need an …

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VMmark 2.5

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Oooh, a new version of VMmark is out. From Bruce Herndon on the VROOM! blog: I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in performance and power consumption when designing datacenters or evaluating new and emerging technologies, such as flash-based storage. A long time ago I was pretty skeptical of yet-another-benchmark, but it’s been useful to help compare physical hosts with virtual workloads. Unlike most benchmarks, the results from previous versions are still relevant to the new version. I …

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3 Reasons These VMware vTax & Licensing Rumors Are Great

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“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.” – Mark Twain I have to say that, if they’re true, I’ve got three reasons to be happy about the VMware licensing rumors that CRN is leaking. First, you may remember from the vSphere 5 launch that I was one of the folks pointing out that due to the fact that you can pool your vRAM licensing it was likely to have little effect in the short term, and shouldn’t stop anybody from upgrading to vSphere 5. The pain would come in the medium-term for folks that practice the “fewer, bigger machines” approach to virtualization (a practice I promote). Thirteen months is definitely “medium-term” …

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VMware Engineering, Are You Fixing Anything?

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I was just reading Josh Andrews’ account of a serious bug still present in the latest releases of VMware vCenter 5.0 (5.0b): This bug has been known for a while and while U1 contained some mentions about fixing it – we now have U1b and the problem still exists…. Make sure you have a cluster with HA and/or DRS turned on…. Enable VM Storage Profiles… Now return to your cluster summary to verify HA and DRS have been turned off and all settings have been lost. This is epic bad stuff here, because if there’s one good way to mess a lot of things up it’s to disable DRS. Especially if you have a vCloud Director setup, since if you shut DRS off …

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Can't Change Virtual Disk Formats When Targeting a Datastore Cluster

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As I work more and more with vSphere 5 I am finding a few anomalies. One of them appears to be a bug where you cannot switch a VM’s disk format during a storage vMotion, when you target a datastore cluster. To be more precise, it looks like you should be able to, but it doesn’t end up happening. The workaround is to disable Storage DRS for that VM, target a datastore directly, then edit the Storage DRS settings afterwards to re-enable DRS for that VM. This is what it looks like when I try. I select “thin provision” from the virtual disk format, choose a datastore cluster (in this case it’s my “Tier 2” cluster), and click next:   …

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Change the Default PSP in VMware vSphere 5

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One thing I do to my VMware ESXi hosts is set the default Path Selection Policy (PSP) for certain Storage Array Type Plugins (SATPs) to do the right thing. This eliminates my need to reconfigure each datastore’s multipath settings on each host, and helps guarantee that a new LUN added by someone other than me will function correctly from the start. Consider it part of my “make it easy to do the right thing” sysadmin mantra. This has been covered by others at various points for older vSphere versions, but the vMA & esxcli changed some with version 5, so here are the commands I use. I have two different arrays, one that is active/active without a specific SATP (so …

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Use 'for' Loops with the vSphere Management Assistant

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The VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) claim to fame is that it has a UNIX shell and the vSphere CLI installed, making it handy for a lot of things, and makes cutting & pasting comands real easy when it’s paired with a decent SSH client. One of my favorite ways to use it is with ‘for’ loops in the shell, to make the same change to all of my ESXi hosts. Let’s say you have a list of servers you want to make a change to, like using esxcli to set the HBA queue depth. My list is a text file I create in nano or vi (see my post on installing nano on the vMA), one host per line: …

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Install the nano Editor on the VMware vMA 5

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The VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) is a handy appliance for interacting with your environment via the Linux command line. I use it a lot, and I’m starting to get more of my team to use it. The problem is that it only ships with the vi text editor, which, described politely, is sort of arcane. Being a UNIX guy I’m used to it, but for others that just want to edit a file it’s overkill. For those situations I like nano, a simple open source editor. To install it on the vMA issue the command: sudo zypper install nano If you’re prompted for a password use the one you set for vi-admin (or whoever you’re logged into the vMA …

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