Eric Sloof

The Dutch VMUG conference which took place at the Nieuwegein Business Center today turned out to be a great success. On the 12th of December over 600 enthusiastic VMUG members have enjoyed a day full of virtualization, with lots of sessions and workshops. I uploaded the video impression.

Dutch VMUG 2008 from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Virtual Machines may unexpectedly reboot after a VMotion migration to an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host OR after a Power On operation on an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host, when the VMware HA feature with Virtual Machine Monitoring is active. A virtual machine may reboot itself when the following conditions exist. Virtual Machine is running on ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host, either by virtue of VMotion or a Power On operation, and a host has VMware HA enabled with the "Virtual Machine Monitoring" option active.

Virtual Machine monitoring is dependent on VMware tools heartbeats to determine the state of the Virtual Machines. With ESX Server 3.5 Update 3, after a VMotion or Power On operation, the host agent running on the ESX server may delay sending the heartbeat state of the Virtual Machine to the Host. VMware HA detects this as a failure of the Virtual Machine and attempts to restart the Virtual Machine.

The Dutch VMUG conference which took place at the Nieuwegein Business Center today turned out to be a great success. On the 12th of December over 600 enthusiastic VMUG members have enjoyed a day full of virtualization, with lots of sessions and workshops. I really enjoyed presenting the PowerShell session and I’m glad all the demo’s worked. Just uploaded the first pictures to a newly created flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/dutchvmug2008/

This morning I presented my “Managing VI3 with PowerShell” session for an audience of 300 people at the Dutch VMUG event in Nieuwegein. The total number of attendees is over 600!!! This presentation focuses on the tools that are currently available for PowerShell. It also gives you an insight on the VMware PowerShell extensions and presents a short introduction to PowerShell as a scripting language. You’ll get an insight look at PowerShell integration in the viClient and a lot of other tools like AdminScriptEditor, PrimalForms, PowerGUI, PowerShellPlus, PowerScripter and PowerGadgets.

VI3-PowerShell.pdf

I’m ready for it. Today the Dutch VMUG event will take place at the Nieuwegein Business Centre. In a short time over 600 attendees will pick up their badge and are going to enjoy several sessions divided into three parallel tracks. Like always I’ll capture some video footage here and there and at Saturday the 13e (my birthday) most of it will be online at Vimeo. At 11:30 I’ll deliver my “Managing VI3 with PowerShell” presentation, by 12:30 the presentation will appear online.

The voice over in "Dutch VMUG Video Trailer" is done by the famous Dutch disk jockey Jeroen van Inkel who recorded this jingle for my radio show “The Twilight Zone" which was broadcasted for over 10 years on a few local radio stations in the Netherlands.

Dutch VMUG Video Trailer from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

The new online compatibility guide provides a single point of access for all VMware hardware compatibility guides. The new search tool streamlines the HCL posting process and offers advanced search capabilities and the ability to save the guide(s) or search results in a .PDF or csv format.

The new hardware compatibility guide replaces the following legacy PDF-format HCLs:

• VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version Systems Compatibility Guide
• VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version SAN (storage) Compatibility Guide
• VMware ESX 3.0.x and above version I/O Compatibility Guide
• VMware View Client Compatibility Guide

I must admit, I don’t use the maps that often. Especially in a large VI3 environment the maps are turning into a big black star. But checking VMotion compatibility with maps can be a time saver. Just select the virtual machine and hit the map tab. What I didn’t know is that there are several grades of green presented behind your ESX servers. The grades are showing up if your ESX servers are VMotion compatible. If one of your ESX servers is under a heavy load it’ll show a light green colour. On the other hand, when one of your ESX server is not CPU intensive at all, it will show up dark green. Here’s the proof.

Hugo Peeters over at PeetersOnline.nl created a really cool PowerShell script which checks how much disk space you’re wasting inside your VM’s but also on your VMFS. I’m going to edit my PowerShell presentation (the one for next Friday) for the last :-) time and try to fit in a page with this script.

Using VMware seriously requires a lot of (shared) storage. This kind of storage (on a SAN for instance) is quite expensive. So you might want to check if you are wasting a lot of this space. When you look at the storage in VMware, it consists of multiple abstraction layers. A virtual machine has one or more Logical Disks, which are indicated by driveletters. You can use WMI to determine the amount of used and free space (Win32_LogicalDisk). One or more logical disks are contained in a partition. One or more partitions reside on a physical disk. That physical disk is really a virtual disk, a vmdk file to be precise. One or more vmdk files reside in a Datastore, which can be found on a LUN on your SAN.