Comments on: What I learned today – HA Split Brain, USB “Support”, Fix Broken OVF Exports…

By: Mike Laverick

Mike Laverick — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:12:44 +0000

That is a BRILLIANT example. If I’d known this it would have gone in the book!

By: Marcello Golfieri

Marcello Golfieri — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:59:20 +0000

USB controller vHW was fundamental for some win installers of certain HP equipments on our finance VDI deployment. Even if we wanted to net install some printers, we kept receiving the “no usb found” error, therefore we had to add it. Being multifunction ones and me not being win-skilled at all, not going the installer way was a pain in the a**….

So far that’s the only cool use I’m aware of…

By: Mike Laverick

Mike Laverick — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:41:53 +0000

BTW. Thanks Eske. I’ve been thinking about the export/import process I’m wondering more and more if it is something to do about how I build my VM before the export. I think its me, not VMware. First I create a dummy VM called uda20-beta. Then from the COS I delete the .vmdk file. Then I download the UDA from Carl’s website (ultimatedeployment.org), and import it using vmkfstools -i. Then I create the OVF file. I have sneaking suspicion that the round the back manipulation of the vmdk, is meaning the VMX file still thinks the “old” disk is there and reports the old disk size rather than imported disk size. I will try building the VM in different way next time… The repeated error doesn’t necessarily indicate a bug as such, but perhaps me creating the same problem in the same way…

By: Re: RTFM “What I learned today – HA Split Brain” » Yellow Bricks

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:41:20 +0000

[...] 2009 Published in Server I’m going to start with a quote from Mike’s article “What I learned today…“: Split brain is HA situation where an ESX host becomes “orphaned” from the rest of the [...]

By: Eske (@vmware)

Eske (@vmware) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:18:50 +0000

Hi Mike.

I think it was me helping out in twitter. The problem was as I remember it that the values in the vmdk disk was changed “behind” the back of the VM by using vmdk-tools. The running “object” do not reread the values in the vmdk values except you tell it to by using vimsh tools:
vimsh -e ‘vmsvc/reload VMID’
you can get the VMIDs by running:
vimsh -e ‘vmsvic/getallvms’

If you do that and then export the OVF by either using ovftool or the UI in the client you should be OK.
To change the values vmdk or vmx files are not recommended everyone should use the API

By: duncan

duncan — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:52:53 +0000

it’s the das.failuredetectiontime -2 seconds Mike. (so in your example it’s the 13th second…) I’m writing an article on this subject right now…

Duncan

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:14:54 +0000

save a few keystrokes by using “ll” instead of “ls -l” :0)

By: Mike Laverick

Mike Laverick — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:47:59 +0000

@Carlo. Yes, but… View already has a USB redirection service… and any USB calls in side a VDI VM would have to be redirected to a network layer to be accessible remotely. Sticking my neck out – the USB controller might become part of VM Direct Path… which allows “direct” access to the underlying PCI bus of the ESX host – thus allowing people to virtualize stuff with hardware that the VM doesn’t provide. I might in the future serve some kind of security function – where the VM talks the USB security dongle, on a ESX host locked in a cage – a scenario where VMotion wouldn’t be desired….

By: Carlo Costanzo

Carlo Costanzo — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:42:07 +0000

@Mike – Regarding the USB support; I wonder if this has to do with future VDI support in VMware View possibly?

Carlo.

By: Josh A.

Josh A. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:33:35 +0000

I have not yet tested USB on ESX4 as you’ve described but even when using USB over IP you have to remember to provide drivers for the guest OS. When installing Windows OS on VMware this file is not installed. This may be where you’ve run into trouble.

For Windows VM, Copy over the usbd.sy_ file from I386 folder on the OS disk to \system32\drivers\usbd.sys directory. Give the guest a reboot and then try connecting the USB device.

I hope this helps. If not I hope it helps someone else if they have trouble with a USB-over-IP device.

Thanks for all the great posts.