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Unless you have been under a rock ,you will know the biggest news recently in the virtualisation arena, which has filled most of the top blog posters blogs is the release of vSphere 4.1. For all the news and latest features ,I posted a blog posting last week all about the best resources to get yourself up to speed here this should cover it all for you and most of the blogs are constantly being updated. There no real point to say anything more seeing as the people i linked to have done and currently still are doing such great jobs covering it all
Duncan Epping posted a very interesting article all about the the changes to the snapshot “delete all” mechanism. I still think they should change it to Commit All but it is a very good change that should allow better and faster committing of the data to the virtual machine.
Chad Sakac aka VirtualGeek has posted all about thin provisioning and if you should do it in vsphere and or the disk array and the reasoning to his recommendations as well as a brief lesson on the differing formats of virtual disks and what theses choices will mean for you and your storage utilisation. David Davis of Trainsignal fame posted a very interesting video all about the new feature in vSphere 4.1 ,Windows Active Directory Authentication-the ability for ESX/ESXi servers to “join” a Windows Active Directory (AD) domain. The video is really good as you would expect from David’s in depth expertise in creating technical videos. also have a look through the site as David has posted up some really good videos and has put up the first vChat with Simon Seagrave from Techead. Chris Dearden has blogged all about the second volume of the Trainsignal vSphere Pro series. I actually have a set of these with my name on it at our main offices but haven’t been able to collect them due to work constraints, plain laziness in part and the person who has them for me being a very busy person himself. If these videos are anything like the first volume then i can’t wait to get my hands on them and better my knowledge especially as i plan to have assimilated as Chris said in his blog posting all the information into my head amongst many other resources before I attempt the vcap exam/s. Cody Bunch has started his infamous Brown Bags for the VCAP-DCA exams and the first one is today/tonight(depending on your time zones) I’ve made a few of Cody’s brown bags before and they are brilliant for asking your fellow administrators questions about things and covering the topics you are required to know to pass. Cody also does brown bags for the VCP4 exams so i would HIGHLY recommend getting yourself registered for them and watching some of the past ones if you are writing soon or looking to sit the VCAP-DCA exam at some point like myself. Well that’s it, I’m sure I've missed a few nuggets this past week but most of the news is obviously about 4.1 and I’ll leave that in the more capable hands of the people I mentioned in my blog posting. If you’re interested in working for EMC Consulting like myself and being a part of this ever strengthening arm of EMC, then drop me a message via the blog and I’ll more than happily pass your information onto our recruitment people. Some roles going at the moment are: Senior Solutions Architect/Exchange Senior Solutions Architect/VDI DW Architect FYI: all of EMC Counting's hiring is done through direct contact. We don't use recruitment consultants, so don’t waste your or my time if you are one. Gregg Robertson
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Well after the not so quiet news about vSphere 4.1 being due for release, shock and horror it’s been released. As there are a multitude of people that have had the the opportunity to play and use the RC for a while and therefore have a better understanding of all the new technologies and features I thought I would just summarise all the postings that explained all the new features to me and interested me as there’s sadly a very large number of the RC-enabled bloggers that have almost just cut and pasted the same information from a What’s New news release/PowerPoint slide deck into their blog posts. -
Eric Siebert has posted I think the best resource and posting of all the features and all the changes since the last release/s. It has all the detail you could need and it is being constantly updated by him on the new features. This is what I hoped many more of the top RC-bloggers to have done. -
Eric Sloof has posted all about the KB articles pertaining to this release. These links are always a great way of learning the best practices for installing and or upgrading your environment to the latest level and warning of possible problems. This is a page I have set a bookmark to for future reference. -
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One of the big changes in vSphere 4.1 is licensing has changed for a number of the management tools/products that come with the suite. Erik Scholten has detailed this in his blog posting here -
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Maish Saidel-Keesing has posted up screenshots of the PowerPoint presentation a lot of people are reposting the information of the new release from but has done the New features and enhancements for ESXi 4.1 side of it so it is an interesting read to see how VMware believe ESXi is good enough to push all their current full ESX customers to ESXi. I still can’t see it happening and no matter what anyone says I think they’ll make plans to accommodate people who don’t want to change as not everyone can change over their whole environments in a short space of time and I know a few people who are still to upgrade to vSphere and they are all very large corporations. -
On the training side Scott Vessey has posted that there will be a new Install Configure Manage course for vSphere 4.1. I asked if the new VCAP and the VCP4 exams will now be related to 4 Update 2 and 4.1 on twitter and Scott replied with loads of information as per usual. -
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Keep an eye on Scott’s blog for all the latest information about all the training courses and exams here Well that’s all the best bits and information I’ve come across, I'm sure there will loads of postings in the coming weeks and months about it all. I’m already downloading it to test out in my lab. Hopefully they don’t bring out 4.1 Update 1 too quickly as it feels as soon as I've patched and upgraded all my hosts a new update or version comes out. *UPDATE*
Eric Siebert has done an INSANE list off all the links and news for 4.1
on his site here.
:) Killed my list by miles.
Gregg
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Yes I decided to get rid of the roman numerals and go with the old trusty numbers from now on as I think it looks better and it’s more user friendly for the five people who read these posts :) It’s been two weeks since the last All things virtual posting due to work constraints and my studying for my MCITP: Enterprise Administrator exam. Unfortunately the exam was cancelled unbeknownst to me so I've had to reschedule for a few weeks time (i know loads of people are going to think I just failed and don’t want to say it but I’d honestly say it if I had). Anyhow since it’s been two weeks since the last version there has been loads of really top class postings and information to have come up in the virtualisation arena. Firstly as I said in my posting yesterday the second vBeers is happening TOMORROW,July the 1st. I was fortunate enough to have made it to the first one and it was awesome to meet and chat to loads of the guys I follow and chat to via twitter,their blogs(My blogroll holds my favourites) the VMware Community forums or in the VMware community roundtables. If you’re near the London area tomorrow evening I’d highly recommend going along. Next is a brilliant posting by Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks all about troubleshooting and recognising is a vm is swapping and if so how to work it out as it isn’t as simple as looking and seeing if the SWCUR value in esxtop is giving out values. As I stated in my blog posting a few weeks back I’m learning to use ESXTOP and better my skills in using this tool to manage my environments and be able to spot these kinds of things via this tool. Eric Sloof blogged all about the release of the Maximum vSphere book. The book was written by Simon Seagrave of Techhead fame and Eric Siebert of vsphere-land.com fame. Simon wrote the chapters on ‘Performance in vSphere’ and ‘Building Your Own vSphere Lab’ and Eric wrote all the remaining chapters. John Troyer has also written the forward for the book. I haven’t personally read Eric’s VMware® VI3 Implementation and Administration book but these guys are top of the industry and their blogs are some of the best out there so you know the content is going to be amazing. Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of this once it’s released. As I blogged almost a month ago now about the latest versions of vCentre and vSphere having been released, Update 2. Chad Sakac of Virtual Geek fame posted a brilliant write up all about the release also and has added some very helpful fixes to issues that may arise from updating to update 2. I’ve managed to update most of my home test environment to update 2 but unfortunately haven’t had the time to fully play with /break it yet. Talking of new versions William Lam of Virtually Ghetto fame has posted a very interesting posting all about the possible imminent release of vSphere 4.1. If rumours are true then this release will be the non COS release. Kind of crazy to put an update out then release a new version in my opinion especially for all of us that have to keep environments up to date whilst not breaking anything in the process. Jason Boche of Boche.net did a nice little posting all about how a simple Google search gives plenty of proof that the COS is going away.Duncan Epping also posted that DRS sub clusters are supposedly due tin the next version also. A fair number of the guys and I’m friendly with and/or follow on twitter were fortunate enough to have been invited to take the VCAP-DCA beta exams over a week ago now . Jason Boche, William Lam and Chris Dearden are a few that I noticed who blogged about it and from their comments and rants it sounds as if the exam is going to be a real test and that to pass this you are going to need to have used,played,configured and fully understand all the technologies and features that the vSphere family of products have to offer. Even though this means I’m probably going to end up spending innumerable hours playing around with my lab(which i kind of do out of nerdy fun already anyways) and also means that people can’t just learn answers to questions from cheat sites and post 500 out of 500 scores even though they misspell VMware and will hopefully also help me to increase my skills and knowledge which is what all exams/certifications should do for you. One of the biggest banes of any VMware administrators life is the managing and controlling of snapshots especially if you allow them to be created by the users of the vm’s as i have to in our environment. I’ve posted before all about the great ways I use to ease the management and monitoring of VMware Snapshots. Last week Mike Bean posted a brilliant guest posting in the VMware communities blogs all about VMware snapshots and what they are meant for and what they are not meant for and how they are created and maintained. I’ve saved this one to my favourites as it’s got all the reasons you need to explain to a user in why they can’t have five snapshots on one vm and keep it for months on end. Duncan Epping posted all about the new SIOC (Storage IO Control) feature due to released in most likely the next version of vSphere. I had seen this video before the posting as it was obviously all over twitter very quickly and I’m really excited and pleased that this feature is coming. Last but not least a big congratulations to Simon Long in his announcement that he is joining VMware as a Senior Consultant. Wow if memory serves me right that takes him from being made redundant and looking for a role to being a VMware employee in 12 months!! Congrats Simon! Gregg Robertson Technorati Tags: SIOC, Storage IO Control, snapshots, VMware, VCAP-DCA, VCAP, twitter, Virtualisation, vSphere 4.1, virtually ghetto, Update 2, swapping, vBeers, VMware Communities Roundtable, MCITPdel.icio.us Tags: SIOC, Storage IO Control, snapshots, VMware, VCAP-DCA, VCAP, twitter, Virtualisation, vSphere 4.1, virtually ghetto, Update 2, swapping, vBeers, VMware Communities Roundtable, MCITP
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Yep the third vBeers is just around the corner and I’ll be making a concerted effort myself to make this one. If you’ve never heard of vBeers before here is the “official” definition of vBeers: vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It's a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people. 
The following is quoted from Simon Seagrave's Website :
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers! ![vBeers[7]](http://www.techhead.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/vBeers7.jpg "vBeers[7]") Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”. The London vBeers meet-up is held at the lovely ole English pub, ‘The Cittie of Yorke’. Details and directions below: 
When & Where The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks. Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London Address: 22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane Date: First Thursday of every month Time: 6:00pm Ye Olde Map: (click to enlarge) 
Gregg Robertson
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Having seen a recent VMware communities posting with someone having the same problem I had I thought I'd write this up. Almost a month back now while doing some routine maintenance on some of our then ESX3.x virtual machines we decided to expand the primary hard drive of a windows 2003 virtual machine due to it running out of space. As I’m sure you’ve guessed from the title of this posting we made the critical and very embarrassing mistake of forgetting to check if the virtual machine had a snapshot attached to it(What an idiot). Unlike vSphere, ESX3.x allows you to extend the hard drive with a snapshot attached so once we had done the extending of the drive and reattached it to the vm again (this is the way I liked to do it and I do know there are easier ways which after this problem I’ve made sure I know how to do). Once we powered the vm back up we received an error stating: “Cannot open the disk
‘path to the .vmdk file’ or one of the snapshot disks it
depends on.
Reason: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was
created’ This kind of error I had seen before after cold migrating a machine with a snapshot and the CID then being different from the number in my VMDK. So I went through the steps as mentioned in this Knowledge Base article to try see if this error had anything to do with my problem.(*NB* Follow steps below before trying this) Now as to make this posting structured to try help someone fix this problem if they have done it themselves I’m going detail the steps you should/ i myself did follow. Firstly I have to warn you that before you follow these steps I can’t promise you will get your snapshot data back nor can I promise it won’t corrupt your vm but having done this process with VMware support for this problem this is what they would make you follow also. First is make a clone of the machine we're trying to fix just in case Next is the fun part due to you expanding the drive and therefore the snapshot has a different RW value than your vmdk.So you need to use putty and edit the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file in notepad and look for RW **number** VMFS “VirtualDisk-000001-delta.vmdk” . WRITE THE NUMBER AFTER RW DOWN.This one is what the drive was before the expand Next open the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file and look for the RW **number** VMFS "VirtualDisk-flat.vmdk" value. What we are going to do is make it look as if the expand never happened. So edit the “VirtualDisk.vmdk” file and put in the FIRST number from the “RW **number** VMFS “VirtualDisk-000001-delta.vmdk” into the VirtualDisk-flat.vmdk line and save it. Secondly as I said one of the problems could be down to your CID for your VMDK being different from your snapshot/s so follow this Knowledge Base article. After making sure the CID's match then "delete" the snapshots. If your snapshot manager shows no snapshots(like mine did) then create one called test or whatever you like, let it create, then go to snapshot manager and click delete all and this should apply/"delete" the snapshots. Gregg Robertson
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Lately I’ve noticed more and more people referring to stats and figures they have collected on their environments via ESXTOP/RESXTOP. I learnt about esxtop for my vcp exams but I have to be honest I haven’t really used it in my environment and recently I felt that I was surely denying myself and thereby the possible performance advantages for my environments by not using this tool to try find and fix any performance problems my vm’s/hosts may be experiencing. I thought I would try write up a blog posting detailing everything I had learnt but as is normally the case some of the top bloggers out there have already beaten me to it and done such amazing jobs of it there’s no real reason for me to to do it. So instead I have collated all the information I have used to strengthen my knowledge on this tool and how it can help every virtual infrastructure administrator and or user to get the most out of their virtual machines and servers, especially with the imminent removal of the COS. First is the ultimate resource for reference and learning what is possible with esxtop(I’m still amazed how much this tool can do and with update 2 there’s even more functionality). This VMware communities document has everything you could ever want to learn and know for esxtop and is staggeringly detailed whilst still being updated to include new functionalities and options. I’ve only managed to absorb some of the information off this document so far as it’s so much to learn and take in. Next is a brilliant posting by Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame all about the usage of ESXTOP and how he has utilised it with perfmon to retrieve all the desired data he needs for troubleshooting problems. Jason Boche has also done a posting all about the capabilities of drilling down through the performance metrics to get very specific results. Forbes Guthrie has done a brilliant vReference card for all the performance metrics you will see in your performance troubleshooting and monitoring. A very helpful “print out” capable card for quick reference as the same implies :) Simon Long of The SLOG fame has done a very interesting posting all about using ESXTOP with VMware ESXi and is a very interesting look and example of how to do this monitoring once the COS is gone and ESXi is the only dominant host type. This kind of example is one of the main reasons I knew I needed to brush up my ESXTOP skills. Kedrick Coleman pointed me to a very nice tool by
VMware labs called ESXPlot which "is a GUI based tool that lets you explore
the data collected by esxtop
in batch mode". I am yet to test this out but it looks like a very
helpful tool in getting your performance data into once easy to monitor
and even better to show to the boss/upper management the performance
statistics of your environments/specific machines
Hopefully some of the resources help people strengthen their knowledge of ESXTOP/RESXTOP. Gregg Robertson 
  
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Just a very fast posting to notify that the blueprint for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacentre Administration blueprint has been released. As I've said I'm really looking forward to this exam as hopefully it will enable me to differentiate myself from the multitude of vcp’s that qualified recently and hopefully also teach me and hone my skills for preparation for my VCDX someday in the future. The Blueprint is here and it looks like a very good exam and loads of really interesting and testing things in it. I look forward to learning more about it in the coming weeks and months. Gregg Robertson
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The whole community has been buzzing with the news of the vExpert’s for 2010. As I said in the last all things virtual I didn’t think I was going to become one and I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t become one. I wrote a blog posting about the reasons I feel I didn't get it and how I think of I keep trying hopefully I will be selected as one. One encouraging part from this past week was a twitter message from John Troyer the leader/owner of the vExpert community saying he thinks I’m off to a great start on my way to becoming one. Thanks John it really means a lot to me :) 
Scott Lowe whose book Mastering VMware vSphere 4 was a massive help for my in my preparation for my VCP4 posted a very thought provoking posting all about blogging for the right reasons. This isn’t virtualisation per se but it does relate well to people blogging just for the sake of possibly becoming a vExpert or for getting a new job/role. Speaking of Scott’s book his book is now available as an Ebook. Maish Saidel-Keesing alerted to the fact that in the latest workstation 7.1 build the icon for the VMware tools has changed. It is now obviously due to the release of vSphere Update 2 and vCentre 4 Update 2 and with this the new version of VMware Tools (Build 261974). Arnim van Lieshout posted all about the latest release of the vEcoShell and the new features it has. The vEcoShell is a brilliant tool and is one I'm trying to strengthen my knowledge on due to the great customisations you can do with it and the power it has for running scripts via PowerCli in your virtual environment. VMware have also released the latest version of the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam Blueprint Guide. These blueprints are amazing and are the best way I feel in making sure you know and have the required knowledge and skills to pass the VCP4 exam.
VMware have also announced that there is now support for VMware SDK’s via the support team tasked with this support. Mike DiPetrillo has written a blog posting all about this release and what it means for people like himself helping people prepare their applications and services for the cloud. Rick Scherer has posted a blog posting all about EMC’s new technology EMC VPLEX. This was released at EMC world and allows the infamous long distance vmotion. I won’t try describe it capabilities as Rick has explained it great in his posting and the video from EMC world in which Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) had a major role in setting up and making sure it ran smoothly. The video is below Jason Boche has posted up how to win yourself a free pass to this years VMworld.I’m sure a staggering amount of people are going to be entering as most companies are still weary of spending money on these kinds of conventions so this is a great way for someone to make it. I’ve been given the nod to make it to this years one which I'm extremely excited about and hopefully I can generate some really good blog postings while there like the ones I read so much for last years one. While catching up on my VMware Communities Roundtable podcasts I was listening to the podcast from a few weeks back about the VCAP exams and was very pleased to hear that live labs are going to be a large part of the exams to stem the tide of people using “braindump” materials. Colin Steele was the first person I saw to have posted a blog on an error is saw pour in at the VMware communities about a Microsoft patch that was preventing vSphere client logins. VMware have also created an official knowledgebase article on the problem and how to fix it. Lastly a friend of mine who also works in virtualisation Kivian Johnson of First Rand Bank alerted me to a very helpful and possibly integral free tool by Foundstone a division of McAfee’s VIDigger. The tool is “designed to help administrators check the configuration of ESX server and the virtual machines hosted on ESX server against the VMware Infrastructure Hardening guide and other best practices.” I am yet to fully try it out in my lab environment but if it really does do all the things they say it will be a brilliant tool for any virtual infrastructure administrator. Gregg Robertson
Flickr Tags: vExpert, VPLEX, VMworld 2010, VMworld, VCAP, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, SDK, VCP blueprint, VMware, vSphere, VMware Update Manager, Update 2, vSphere update 2 released, vCentre update 2, vsphere 4.0 update 2, vsphere 4.0 update 2 released, VMware Communities Roundtable, viclient doesn't log in after microsoft patch Technorati Tags: vExpert, VPLEX, VMworld 2010, VMworld, VCAP, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, SDK, VCP blueprint, VMware, vSphere, VMware Update Manager, Update 2, vSphere update 2 released, vCentre update 2, vsphere 4.0 update 2, vsphere 4.0 update 2 released, VMware Communities Roundtable, viclient doesn't log in after microsoft patch
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As of last night VMware have released VMware vCentre 4.0 Update 2 & VMware vSphere Update 2 All the patches that were released and their build numbers are:
vCentre Server 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
vSphere Client 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
ESX 4.0 Update 2 (Build 261974)
VMware Tools (Build 261974) The new features with the latest release of vSphere are: -
Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors. -
Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors. -
Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors. -
Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s,MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency). -
Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide. The new features with the latest release of vCentre are: Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems: - Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
- SLES 11 (x32 and x64)
- SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)
- Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)
Check out the VMware vCentre 4 Update 2 Release Notes here and VMware vSphere Update 2 Release Notes here for all the resolved issues and all the fixes from previous bundles and how to update your environment. You can download the latest update from the VMware download page here. Gregg Robertson
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I’m fairly pleased that these summaries of the things that have caught my interest in virtualisation have been getting so much traffic and even more pleased is that even though I didn’t post anything massive in particular I got my highest number of viewers last month to this blog with a week still to go which is always encouraging as hopefully some of the stuff I write about helps someone like so many of the websites I read have helped me.
First is the imminent announcement of the vExperts for 2010. I would obviously be extremely honoured if I became one but I think I'd be in shock a lot more though as there are some really top people in the field.
Next is a posting by Gabrie van Zanten (@gabvirtualworld) all about the default installation settings he does when setting up a vSphere 4 host. Some of the tips he mentions are ones I never thought about or knew so I’ll definitely be referencing his posting as well as Duncan Epping’s response to Gabrie’s posting all about his best practices/recommendations. I always enjoy finding these kinds of postings as sometimes these kinds of things you only learn having done many high level environment deployments etc and are also great tips for thoughts for my builds for my future VCDX attempt.
Duncan has also done a two part blog posting with Frank Denneman all about swapping in your VMware environment and what metrics actually show performance degradation and how they are worked out. Franks posting gives more of a description on how the memory is calculated and describes the reasons for swapping happening in your environment and how to try avoid it happening and thereby impacting your servers performance.
A few people have blogged about this but the first i saw it was on Virtualization spotlight a blog by Patrick Redknap. VMware have published a video KB on how to power off an unresponsive VMware ESX virtual machine. This video is a really useful one as quite a number of times I've battled to get a vm to shutdown correctly even after having tried rebooting services it stayed hung.
Frank Denneman has also posted a really good posting all about setting up memory reservations in your resource pools and how they work. This posting ties in really well on the little known (at least to me and a number of people I have spoken to /asked about memory reservations) about how a vm’s reservations will hoard memory if it has been used by the virtual machine once. Frank describes it well in the part “Even if the virtual machine becomes idle, the VMkernel will not reclaim this memory and return it to the free memory set. This means that ESX can start swapping and ballooning if no free memory is available for other virtual machines while the owning VM’s aren’t using their claimed reserved memory.” Recently while doing some testing for the HA setup in my environment I noticed from a vCheck report I ran that HA stated there were no spare slots in my HA cluster, so I did some research and came across Duncan Epping’s Slot sizes posting and onto his HA deepdive posting in which he describes how the slots are worked out :
“To calculate available resources and needed resources for a fail-over HA uses a concept called “slots”. Slots dictate how many VMs can be started up before vCenter starts yelling “Out Of Resources”!! Normally each slot represents one VM.
A slot is a logical representation of the memory and CPU resources that satisfy the requirements for any powered-on virtual machine in the cluster.
In other words a slot size is the worst case CPU and Memory reservation scenario in a cluster. This directly leads to the first “gotcha”:
HA uses the highest CPU reservation of any given VM and the highest memory reservation of any given VM. If no reservations of higher than 256Mhz are set HA will use a default of 256Mhz for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead for memory.
If VM1 has 2GHZ and 1024GB reserved and VM2 has 1GHZ and 2048GB reserved the slot size for memory will be 2048MB+memory overhead and the slot size for CPU will be 2GHZ. “
So I went through all of my vm’s and found a few stragglers that had memory reservations that had been switched off for a while. Once i cleared these our empty slots went from zero to 85 due to two of the switched off machines having six gb’s of ram reservations. Eric Sloof has also recently posted a great posting all about adding resource pools and how these can impact the performance of your vm’s even if you think they aren’t.
Speaking of VMware clustering options Cody Bunch has done a brilliant posting in the math behind the DRS stars. The math is a bit over my hear personally but math always has been so nothing new there. It’s very interesting how they work all these things out and a great bit of information for your setting up your DRS cluster.
Whilst i was doing my HA testing i had a few questions of how HA works and due to our environment being a test lab it’s also an integral part of our work as a consultancy so I couldn’t test what happened for the differing options you can select for HA. So I asked on twitter and Kendrick Coleman (@kendrickcoleman) not only replied to me among other people but went and tested it out for me in his test lab and posted a very nice blog posting all about it. Glad I gave him an idea and thanks for the results Kendrick!! It’s much appreciated and is one of the reasons being on twitter is priceless if you work in IT.
If you want to comment about my blog either leave me a comment and I’ll make sure I respond to you or add my on twitter via @greggrobertson5. Also congrats to the imminently crowned vExpert’s for 2010.
Gregg Robertson
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I thought I'd stick up a quick posting about this seeing as today it’s the second time the problem has come about and this time I made sure I did it really carefully just to make sure it wasn’t my fat fingers the first time. A user requested me to extend one of their windows server 2008 vm’s c drives by 20gb. Standard practice is to make sure there are no snapshots attached (was reminded to make sure of this painfully recently),edit the settings of the vm and increase the size/value of the drive you wish to be increased,log into the vm,go to storage>disk management and rescan the disks. the new space should now show up and then you just right click on the drive to be extended and select extend and increase the space. But after extending it a error came up saying “invalid parameters”, after which the disk showed as the new size at the bottom of the disk management panel but in windows explorer and the top part of the disk management pane it still showed the original size. What i had to do was shrink the drive i wanted to increase by the free space still left on the drive(this value will be automatically shown in the shrink drive wizard), rescan the disks by which it shows the drive shrunk by the free space and the free space of the shrunk drive added to the space you added earlier. Now you just extend it again like normal and it all works as it should. If you want to know how to extend your drive via Windows Server 2003 Jonathon Medd has detailed it in a blog posting along with the steps I did above. Gregg Robertson
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Just a very quick posting as so many of the top bloggers out there have covered it so well that VMware have released their new Exam set the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – VCAP.
Simon Long has posted a blog all about the VCAP side and what will be required for the administrator and design exams here
Duncan Epping has posted all about the VCDX 4 (VCDX4-DCD) side of things here and details the steps now to become a VCDX4-DCD. Quite disappointed they had to add the DCD part personally as all it’s doing is adding to the long winded acronyms some of us carry at the end of our mail signatures/business cards.
Eric Sloof also posted all about the VCDX4-DCD here and gives a brilliantly detailed break down of the VCAP here. I’ve already signed up to receive an email alert when registration opens (yes I'm seemingly that sad)
I plan to update this blog in the coming days/weeks as more information becomes available. Hopefully to the person who came across my blog a week back by searching “I’m a vcp4. Now what” has an answer :)
Gregg Robertson
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The past two weeks have brought some really great news and views in the virtualisation arena. On the 6th of this month i was able to attend the London VMware User Group for the second time. There were some very interesting discussions and presentations. I wrote up a blog posting on the day here if you’re interested. I would firmly recommend anyone interested in this field to find out where and when your local VMUG is happening and get your spot as conversing with fellow virtualisation administrators can increase your knowledge on new things very quickly and easily. Hopefully the content from the user group will be uploaded to normal location soon. If you somehow haven’t heard about it yet the features due to be in vSphere 4.1 were “leaked” a few weeks back now. There are quite a few new features I’d welcome with open arms like support for up to 4 vMotion concurrent live migrations in 1GbE networks and up to 8 concurrent live migrations in 10GbE networks and Support for 8GB Fibre Channel HBAs. As the article says there is no guarantee that the features will actually be in the public release. I say “leaked” as personally i think if they didn’t want it getting out it wouldn’t have got out, i think it’s just a perfect way of judging people reactions to the features mentioned and see see how they can make some minor changes before making it available. One of the people i got to meet in person at the London VMUG was Ricky El-Qasem of Veeam. As I've said numerous times before I’m hoping to better my powershell/PowerCLI skills as at the moment they are terribly basic and therefore are in dire need of bettering to enable me to script portions of my work to save me time and hopefully prepare me for the lack of the COS in possibly vSphere 4.1. Ricky has posted a few blogs all about his journey in learning PowerCLI in PowerCLI lessons and the resources he has used to grow his skills. Embarrassingly i still haven’t forced myself the time to sit down and get through all of the posts but after speed reading most it it looks like it is going to be highly beneficial to me when I stop being lazy and start working at it. EMC world that ran from the 10th to the 13th of May brought some really interesting news.The most interesting to me was the announcement of the VPLEX which will enable “VM teleportation”. I won’t try and describe what the technology does and enables you as Chad Sakac has done a brilliant blog posting all about it and what it enables you to do. I can’t wait to be able to play with VPLEX once it’s available. There is also a very interesting KB article all about Enabling long distance vMotion with EMC VPLEX here Last week the Call for Papers Public Voting opened up for VMworld 2010. Quite a few of the guys I'm friendly with on twitter have made the cut and their sessions have been made available to be voted on. I’m quite amazed by the massive amount of cloud sessions that have been selected. I'm really hoping that VMworld isn’t overshadowed(pun kind of intended) by all the cloud talk. I’ve cast my votes some of which were for fellow UK virtualisation friends and others obviously for ones i really want to be able to see/attend. If you’re like me and gain loads of information and help from Alan Renouf’s PowerCLI scripts then I would recommend a vote for his and Luc Dekens’ “ PowerCLI is for administrators! “ session. There are also sessions by Simon Seagrave of TechHead fame with “Building A Successful vSphere Lab” and “Network Segmentation in a Virtualized Environment ñ Best Practices and Approaches” by Nicholas Weaver of Nickapedia fame to name but a few. So go vote if you’re going to make it to either of the events and hopefully we’ll have loads of really great sessions. If you haven’t registered to attend VMworld then you can still register and get a $250 or €200 early bird discount. Gregg Robertson
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Just a very quick posting about a problem we were experiencing on the weekend while doing some VMware upgrades and what the solution was. We were upgrading our virtual centre and esx hosts to version 4, we had upgraded the esx hosts to the latest version of ESX3.5 prior to upgrading the virtual centre sever as this is a prerequisite for the agent to communicate with virtual centre 4. We upgraded the Virtual Centre server without any problems and rebooted the server. We logged back in and started to now try migrate vm’s from one of the esx hosts to another so that we could start the upgrading of the ESX hosts to vSphere. We selected a low priority vm initially to make sure vmotion hadn’t been affected and selected migrate,once we got to the destination selection page, as soon as we selected a host to move the vm to the server thought about it for about twenty seconds and then dropped us out of the vicleint session. We tested from differing boxes to others and it was affecting all VMotioning between the hosts. I checked the task manger services tab of the virtual centre as we tried the VMotioning and each time the vpxd service would double in processing then stop thereby kicking us out of our session and a manual restart had to be done. After speaking to a colleague Simon Phillips he mentioned something him and I had done for another of our environments where we removed the hosts from the virtual Infrastructure and re-added it so that the agent could reconnect after we had done upgrades. We tried to do this but there was an ESX3.x cluster in place. Luckily it had no configurations so we removed the cluster with the hosts included from the environment(as this is obviously unavoidable unless the hosts are put in maintenance mode) and re-added the hosts one by one without any problems. Once we had done this we tried the migrations again and they worked perfectly. So it was either down to the old 3.5 cluster causing problems now that virtual centre had been upgraded or the re-adding of the hosts to the environment helped upgrade/reconnect the host agents and allow VMotion. We did scour the web for anyone or any page mentioning this but we never came across it so hopefully this helps someone save some time or a call to VMware. Thanks to Simon for his reminder of what we did before and for jumping online to help us and Gabe Martinez for sitting with me till 1am completing the upgrade Gregg Robertson
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For only the second time I made it to the London VMware User Group (VMUG) yesterday. The day was very interesting and the most exciting part for me was I got to meet some of the top VMware people i follow and chat to on twitter. The day started off nicely with my colleague Simon Phillips and I attending the optional early presentation by Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) . His session was all about the VESI and how he has used it to create a whole load of scripts he uses in his daily life. He also announced that his “Virtu-Al.net PowerPack” has now been re-launched as the VMware Community PowerPack to allow anyone to add their scripts to the powerpack he had built up and it already has contributors from the likes of Jonathan Medd (@jonathanmedd), Armin Van Liesenhout (@avlieshout) and Luc Dekens (@lucd22) to name but a few. The VESI application is one I unfortunately haven’t had a very large amount of time to play with but it is now higher on my list of things to learn and play with and hopefully I can contribute a script or two to it once I have honed my PowerCLI skills. A very funny point of his presentation was his slide with a hypnotising pattern on it saying VMware works better on EMC products. We then had a lunch break and then the “real” VMUG started. Alaric Davies welcomed everyone and detailed the itinerary and then we got right into the first presentation by the sponsors RES Software.The product they spoke of and demoed was a was highly interesting one called PowerFuse. To not say the wrong facts etc I would highly recommend downloading the introduction guide from here and reading through it yourself. Next was a presentation by Colin Styles from Prudential all about his experiences of migrating his servers from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4 while also migrating to a new HP blade system. His experiences were very interesting and it’s always invaluable to hear some of the problems he came across as if VMware do actually follow through with removing the COS in version 4.1 then the migrations to ESXi will be inevitable. One thing I’m glad about was that I don’t have an HP blade setup as hearing Colin and many of the other attendees numerous problems they have had with them it’s pretty scary especially seeing as how much of the market they dominate. Then Peter Polkinghorne of Brunel University spoke all about his environment and the challenges and lessons he has learnt and why he chose specific VMware technologies to storage technologies. The discussions that came off of his presentation were very interesting especially the discussions around SNMP monitoring and how he battled once he migrated from 3.5 to 4. We then had a very quick refreshment break as we were already 40 minutes overtime and then Simon Gallagher (@vinf_net) spoke all about Virtualising Terminal Server workloads and his experiences in doing it. I was quite impressed with the results he noticed from doing this and the idea is one I've never thought of doing before but is a perfect example of the capabilities of VMware and that even tier 1 applications are perfectly safe to be virtualised and even made more productive. Then Dave Burgess from VMware spoke about VMsafe and the features it is due to bring. I’ve personally never used VMsafe before but was very impressed by what Dave said it could bring to your environment. I had only briefly read about VMsafe before so the session was very interesting. I won’t try cover what was said as I'm sure I'll explain it wrong so check out the page for it here Simon Townsend also from VMware then presented and discussed VMforce as it seems not many people watched the webcast from last week all about it. I won’t embarrass myself by trying to cover everything he said as there are some brilliant blogs and nice demo of it’s capabilities and feature. -
Parker Harris posted a blog posting all about VMforce here. -
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Then there’s the video demo which is a bit cheesy but shows all the features really well We then started the interactive panel discussion. Mike laverick and Stevie chambers discussed the “egg’s in one basket” theories and how the real thing in the end is no one really notices the difference of a highly utilised host but everyone knows when a host goes down. Stevie then invited us all to come see the Cisco UCS environment which is a very exciting idea as it would be amazing to see it all in action and see it’s capabilities. We then finished due to us having overrun and those of us who could make it went down to The Pavilion end pub for vBeers. I hung around a lot longer than I planned to as I ended up chatting with Simon Long (@simonlong_) of The SLOG fame , daniel eason (@daniel_eason) ,Doug Hazelman (@vmdoug) from Veeam software, Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_si) the recent joiner to the EMC vSpecialist team , Matt Roblin (@mattroblin) ,Steve Chambers (@ Stevie_Chambers) from Cisco and Ricky Alqasem (@rickyelqasem) also from Veeam. It was really great to put faces to names and chat to them all. I’m really glad I got to go to it and hopefully I'll make it to the next one on the !5th of July. Gregg Robertson
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