vSphere - 10

Getting a bit bored during the Christmas holiday? I’m going to show you how to manually create kernel panic on your vSphere 4 ESXi server using the vsish shell. First a warning, don’t use the following how-to in a production environment! You probably know how to get access to the ESXi busy box and enable SSH, if you don’t just Google for it. After getting access to the ESXi command line type vsish. You just opened an interactive shell which can be very useful for trouble shouting or making trouble. :-) To view a list of available commands, type help. Navigate to reliability and crashMe. Type set /reliability/crashMe/Panic and take a look at your ESXi console screen, pretty isn’t it.

Continue reading "Lets create some Kernel Panic using vsish" »

VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start after installing or updating the vCenter server. Error messages similar to the following might be written to the Windows System Event log.

The VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0x0). After some investigation, I’ve found the following error in the Apache Tomcat log at C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\logs

[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Procrun (2.0.4.0) started
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Running Service...
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Starting service...
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [994  prunsrv.c] [error] Failed creating java
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [1269 prunsrv.c] [error] ServiceStart returned 1
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Run service finished.
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Procrun finished.

When you’re encountering this error, just run "C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\bin\tomcat6w.exe" //ES//vctomcat

If the path to the Java.dll is empty and C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\jre is empty, download the Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment (JRE),  release JRE 6 Update 17 or later from http://java.sun.com/j2se. Change the install path to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\jre\
After that you have to select the option “Use default” in the Java tab at the VMware Virtual Management Webservices Properties and the service will start and function like a charm.

I’m running a VMware vSphere 4 Install Configure and Manage training course this week and just have deployed the new VMware vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0.1 OVF template onto one of the student's vCenter/ESX Servers.  The installation process is straight forward. Don’t try to log on with the root account, use the ciqadmin account instead.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/

The Cisco Nexus 1000V provides a distributed, layer 2 virtual switch that extends across many virtualized hosts. The Cisco Nexus 1000V manages a Datacenter defined by the vCenter Server. Each server in the Datacenter is represented as a linecard in Cisco Nexus 1000V and can be managed as if it were a line card in a physical Cisco switch.

Cisco Nexus 1000V consists of the following two components:

Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), which contains the Cisco CLI, configuration, and high-level features

Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM), which acts as a Line Card and runs in each virtualized server to handle packet forwarding and other localized functions.

The following software features are new in this release:

• GUI Set Up Following Software Installation
• Layer 3 Control
• Virtual Service Domain
• iSCSI Multipath
• XML API
• DHCP Snooping
• Dynamic ARP Inspection
• IP Source Guard
• MAC Pinning
• Static Pinning

This document describes the features, limitations, and caveats for the Cisco Nexus 1000V Release 4.0(4)SV1(2) software.

ESX 4.0 Update 1 has been re-released with changes to avoid this issue. The installation process checks for running agents and stops them before proceeding.

The re-released ESX 4.0 Update1 is referred to as ESX 4.0 Update 1a and is available via vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and the VMware Downloads site.

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_vsphere_4/4

If you’re running a vCenter server in combination with the free SQL 2005 Express Edition which is installed by default, there are a few drawbacks. The first problem is sizing, the SQL 2005 express database cannot grow above the 4 Gb limit. You can use the database calculator to check if the number of ESX servers and virtual machines will fit into the 4 Gb. The second drawback is the absence of an SQL agent which can be used to create a scheduled backup for your vCenter database. I’ve found a little free tool which is capable of creating a scheduled backup of the vCenter database  even though it’s hosted on the SQL 2005 Express edition.

The SQLScheduler v0.2.0.0 – Beta is a fully functional client/server application written in C# that allows administrators to schedule various SQL jobs for SQL Server Express and other versions of SQL Server. The server component (SQLScheduler.WindowsService.exe) is a Windows service that is responsible for executing jobs and sending success or failure notifications to server operators. SQLScheduler.exe is a graphical front-end that allows to easily schedule different jobs.

This weekend I've picked up the VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting Instructor Manual at DHL in Rotterdam. I did a quick review and it looks very advanced, this is going to be a good one.
Technical personnel who respond to incident reports in VMware vSphere deployments are typically system administrators whose expertise focuses on Windows or Linux system administration. These personnel must be able to rapidly and effectively troubleshoot issues. This new course will help prepare vSphere system administrators to troubleshoot a variety of problems caused by mis-configurations and hardware failures.

The Goals of this new course is to prepare you with the advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in troubleshooting the vSphere virtual infrastructure and to increase your skill and competence in using the command line to analyze and configure VMware ESX and ESXi hosts.

VMware education services has launched a new course: VMware vSphere Troubleshooting

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