Entries from Eric Sloof

Usually, when you need to use any USB device (like scanner, flash-memory, etc) you plug it into USB port of your computer. But for all that, the device is accessible only for the computer it is plugged into. And what if someone else needs to use the same USB device? Or if you want to use it in a virtual machine. FabulaTech has resolved this problem in a different extraordinary way. They've created USB over Network which allows to work with remote USB devices over a local network or Internet. All you have to do is to install USB over Network Server on the PC where USB devices are plugged in. USB over Network Client must be installed on the VMs you want to give access to those very USB devices you've already plugged in. That's all.

Replicate Technologies has announced a new software update for its flagship product, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer™. The new release, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA) 1.2, expands its best practices library to add IP Knowledge Modules that increase the innovative product’s ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues, provides enhanced notification capabilities and drill down diagnostics, offers an easy-to-use user interface with advanced navigation and an updated dashboard, and supports VMware ESX 3i.

RDA 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:

New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.

Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.

Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.

Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.

Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.

Registration for VMware Partner Exchange 2009 is now open! This year's much anticipated event will be hosted April 14-16 in Orlando, Florida. The theme is The Power of Partnership – VMware's partners are the cornerstone to their success and the annual event is especially designed to provide their global partner community with unparalleled educational and networking opportunities to accelerate business with VMware.

As a provider of news, analysis, reviews, events, and education on information technology, Network World has compiled “Top 10 Companies to Watch” lists across a variety of technology categories for over a decade. With virtualization gaining adoption in both large and small businesses, Network World distinguished BlueStripe for its innovative approach to application service management, highlighting its capability to automatically discover application interdependencies, follow an application through physical and virtual environments and detect performance problems.

Continue reading "Network World has selected BlueStripe as one of..." »

In my VMware home lab, I want to use one NIC for the production data generated by my Virtual Machines and the other NIC exclusively for the Service Console. This setup also could work if you want to combine your management network with a VMotion Kernel Port Group.  I created one vSwitch with two NICS and two Port Groups and then used the “Overriding Policies for a Port Group policy” to bind the Service Console to vmnic0 and the Virtual Machines to vmnic1. On top of that, I still have redundancy. If one in the NICS will fail, both the Service Console and the Virtual Machine Port Group will use one NIC exclusively. Load is balanced by selecting a different Active Adapter for each Port Group. Select an other active and standby adapter for both Port Groups. In a failover situation, standby adapters activate in the order specified below.

 

 

Override vSwitch failover order and select active and standby adapters for the Service Console and Virtual Machine Port Groups. In a failover situation, standby adaptors will become active. 

I encountered a little issue when restarting my Windows 2003 server hosting both VirtualCenter and the internal SQL 2005 Express database.  SQL wasn’t fully started before VirtualCenter tried to logon and generated the following failure.

SQL Server is not ready to accept new client connections. Wait a few minutes before trying again. If you have access to the error log, look for the informational message that indicates that SQL Server is ready before trying to connect again.

Just e few events further Virtual Center was shutting down on me.

Forcing shutdown of VMware VirtualCenter now.

I know you can set a dependency on the VirtualCenter service so it would wait until SQL was fully running and till my great surprise, my old friend Andrew Kutz already has written an article about it.
You just need to add a value to the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpxd and edit the DependsOnService property  (REG_SZ_MULTI) and add the MSSQL$SQLEXP_VIM value.

Dear ESX 3.5 Customer,

Our records indicate you recently downloaded VMware® ESX Version 3.5 U3 from our product download site. This email is to alert you that an issue with that product version could adversely effect your environment. This email provides a detailed description of the issue so that you can evaluate whether it affects you, and the next steps you can take to get resolution or avoid encountering the issue.

ISSUE DETAILS:

VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 U3 I/O failure on SAN LUN(s) and LUN queue is blocked indefinitely. This occurs when VMFS3 metadata updates are being done at the same time failover to an alternate path occurs for the LUN on which the VMFS3 volume resides. The effected releases are ESX 3.5 Update 3 and ESXi 3.5 U3 Embedded and Installable with both Active/Active or Active/Passive SAN arrays (Fibre Channel and iSCSI).

PROBLEM STATEMENT AND SYMPTONS:

ESX or ESXi Host may get disconnected from Virtual Center
All paths to the LUNs are in standby state
Esxcfg-rescan might take a long tome to complete or never complete (hung)
VMKernel logs show entries similar to the following:
Queue for device vml.02001600006006016086741d00c6a0bc934902dd115241 49442035 has been blocked for 6399 seconds.
Please refer to KB 1008130. Continue reading "VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Alert" »

Lostcreations.com has been relaunched with the hot-off-the-build-server release of the first beta for Virtualization Manager Mobile! Monitor and manage your VMs from the palm of your hand. Well, as long as there is a mobile device in your hand. But what has happened to the old software section and where's the sVMotion Plugin?

This picture is (C) Viktor van den Berg. Story via Carlo Costanzo over at VMware Info

Update : I received an email from Andrew, the plug-ins are back online. :-)

SAP provides a range of enterprise software applications and business solutions to manage  and run the complete business of a company. Companies that have deployed such products  depend on information and processes managed by SAP solutions, and continuous availability  of the SAP system is essential. An integrated architecture of VMware® Site Recovery Manager  with NetApp® storage and data management solutions provides an effective disaster recovery  (DR) solution to address these business continuity requirements.
 
This paper documents the configuration and validation of an SAP DR architecture using Site Recovery Manager and NetApp storage and tools. The infrastructure was installed and verified at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in Palo Alto, CA and was jointly deployed by NetApp, SAP and VMware staff. Continue reading "Technical Whitepaper DR Validation for SAP..." »

I discovered a great weblog called Get-Admin, it was started by Glenn Sizemore, who asked Andrew Sullivan to join a few weeks afterward.  Since then they have focused on IT operations, administration and automation, with a more specific focus on virtualization in the enterprise.  They occasionally post other topics (databases, POSH related to non-virtualization tasks), but they are both passionate about virtualization and automation of administration tasks.

Andrew Sullivan works for a very large IT contracting company as a virtualization administrator.  He has a Linux and Solaris background, consequentially he tends to focus on managing the ESX hosts directly by leveraging the VI Perl Toolkit to accomplish automation tasks.  Previously he has been a PHP developer for enterprise web applications.

Glenn Sizemore works for the same company.  He is a very talented Windows administrator with a networking background.  His primary interest is PowerShell and evangelism of its benefits, but the focus of many of his posts is on how PowerShell can help to quickly and effectively automate VI administration.

http://get-admin.com/blog/