vSphere

VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting

This lab-intensive course focuses on providing system administrators with the advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in troubleshooting the VMware vSphere™ virtual infrastructure. In this course, you will spend most of the time diagnosing and rectifying configuration problems created on VMware® ESX™/ESXi hosts and VMware vCenter™ Server systems.

QLogic announced that its 2nd Generation, Single Chip, 8100 Series 10Gb Converged Network Adapters are now certified by VMware for ESX/ESXi 4.0. This is key because a number of end users have been waiting for VMware to announce certification for 2nd Generation CNAs since QLogic announced the industry’s first 2nd Gen CNAs in June 2009 with support for only Windows/Linux.  EMC, IBM, and NetApp are already supporting the 8100 Series CNAs today. The combination of QLogic second generation CNAs with VMware vSphere 4 enables customers to attain a higher degree of data center efficiency -- an Intelligent Converged Data Center.

The 8100 Series 2nd Gen CNAs are the first 2nd Gen CNAs to be listed on the vSphere 4 HCL. This is key because the 2nd Gen CNAs (in comparison to currently shipping 1st Gen CNAs in the market) offer:

• 150% higher performance
• 1/3rd the power consumption
• Standard PCI Express form factor which enables the adapter to be deployed in most leading rack/tower servers.
• Compatible with the latest released standards for FCoE

This video provides a detailed overview of deploying VMware Site Recovery Manager with the Shared Recovery Site feature.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0 is a disaster recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another. Shared Recovery Site (also called N-to-1) is a new feature of SRM 4.0. This feature allows the management of multiple SRM environments by a single vCenter 4.0 instance on the recovery side. Each environment is identified by a custom plug-in named extension.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014640

During the delivery of my VMware training courses I really enjoy interacting with the students using the whiteboard. It should contain just enough information to demonstrate understanding and students are encouraged to participate in the discussion. Here are some examples from this week’s vSphere Fast-Track training.

For provisioning of ESX hosts, vCenter leverages a technology called Host Profiles, these profiles can be associated with a cluster so when you add capacity to your cluster, the host profile is automatically applied to your new host. It also facilitates compliance monitoring and remediation.

But it can also be used for disaster recovery. A host profile captures the configuration of a specific host. This profile can then be used to configure a newly added host based on the profile of your crashed host. The first step is to create a profile for every ESX host, this means that every host will function as its own reference host. After creating all the host profiles,  the individual  profiles can be customized. In this step we’re going to customize every individual host profile and change the setting where a user is prompted for an IP address, these prompts must be replaced with a specific fixed setting. The prompts are typically found at for instance the service console and the kernel port group.  When one of your ESX servers is broken you just have to add an empty host to the cluster and make it compliant with one of your disaster recovery templates. There’s also the possibility to export the disaster recovery host profile to an VMware Profile Format XML file. Steven Jans thanks for the inspiration.