Archive for the ‘KB’ Category

This new KB article caught my eye from VMware today… At first I thought it might be an answer to my disconnects to ESXi when was doing the upgrade to vSphere 4.0 Update 1. It’s entitled:

“Adding an ESXi 4.0 host to vCenter Server 4.0 fails with the error: Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Unknown installer error.”

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014554

My favorite bit was the part on how to resolve this problem – which stems from lack of memory on the ESXi host:

This issue can occur if the ESXi host is low on RAM. The host can be low on RAM either because it does not have enough physical memory allocated to it, or because too many virtual machines are consuming RAM at the same time.

If the host does not have enough physical memory allocated to it, you can allocate more physical RAM:

1. Power off the virtual machines on the host.
2. Power off the ESXi host.
3. Allocate more physical RAM to the host.
4. Reboot the ESXi host.

Priceless, huh. I literally laughed out loud when I read it. Especially the step by step instructions!

Well, here (yet) another blog from VMware, one that flags up new KB articles as they released. I notice the VMTN blog sometimes aggregates these – and you can get 20-30 new posts from VMTN which are reproductions of KB articles. Perhaps now we have this dedicate place this will be the forum to watch if you want to keep abreast of these things:

http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/

Richard Garsthagen (Technical Marketing Manager EMEA for VMware) has written a cool VMotion CPU Compatiability Tool for ESX 3.x using the SDK for VirtualCenter. As Richard puts it:

“This application gathers information from all physical hosts about the CPUs installed and what features they have. This is then reported in one single overview (that you can copy-and-paste into excel) and know easily if you have any vmotion problems” 

Link:

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=153

Here’s a cluster of the choicest threads of the last week. Admittedly, most of them are question from students, posted on the Forum on their behalf. So some are largely of acedemic interest whereas others are more telling.

Does VMware support Microsoft Clustering on Service Pack 1 of W2K3?

The short answer is no. The ball is in M$ court to “fix” this. But many forum members say it works reliably (well, as reliably as MSCS is!) but there’s no “offical stamp of approval. Apparently, people have been waiting and waiting…

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59684
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2021
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=488350

An Old favorite, ESX disk alignment

Does ESX 3.x suffer from disk alignment issues? Does disk alignment effect VM’s using RDM’s to store data? Is this an non-issue or something to worry about? It’s all here in this handy thread

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=54419
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59509

“VMotion: A general system error occured: Time out waiting for migration data”

This week I had this problem in my class. My students ended up doing a reboot of the ESX server that was affected. Not something I recommended, as I try to aviod reboots at all costs. I think the problem is with a fault in the NIC driver or in the physical media. The operative word is “time out” which must infer a network problem – as VMotion is essentially a network event. Anyway, I hit the forums looking for people who had similiar and this is what I found:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=502178

Disabling “web-access” on the ESX 3.x server

Interesting question which at first I misunderstood. My student doesn’t just want to stop the “Web-Access” service (the kinda of end-user, no need for the VI client front-end) but ALSO any web-activity (even the welcome page that gets you the link to web-access but also a link to download the VI client and so forth)

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=59508

This week Michael Knight (of M&S and the Forums) brought my attention to this forum thread. Apparently, guest customisation using the 64-bit version of sysprep in 64-bit guest WON’T be support until VirtualCenter 2.1 (yes, not VirtualCenter 2.0.1 but VirtualCenter 2.1)

For now I guess you will be forced to run sysprep inside the VM prior to making into a template – and use sysprep.inf to automate the usual annoyances - I mean questions…

Link:

http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=498516

A couple of weeks ago a student on one of my courses asked why the maximum single VMFS volumes is limited to 2TB (without using VMware VMFS extents). I decided to ask the forum and Thor Donbaek, of VMware (Denmark) gave this very interesting answer

Link:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=56361

Well, I’ve been away from the Forum for a couple weeks. Busy doing things such as earning a living. But here are sample of some of the best forum posts of recent weeks

• iSCSI patch available for ESX 3.0Forum member, Paul Lalonde has written his own patch for iSCSI in ESX 3.x. Not one for the corportates I guess. You’ll get your patches from VMware. But of acedemic interest…
• Migrate (Relocate) Virtual Machine between ESX 2.5.2 hosts This thread – unearths some cold migration problems between ESX 2.x to 3.x – routed in DNS.

• Vmotion and CPU compatibility VMware haven’t gone out of the way to document the new “CPU Mask” Advanced button… I guess they are trying to make sure people call VMware Support – before they go about “monkeying” with the potiential difficult area. Some enterprizing VMware Forum members have tried work it out for themselves

• This thread discusses whether ESX 3.01 and VirtualCenter 2.01 is on its way – and whether there will be any improvements on upgrade pathhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51755
• This thread discusses “Proper vmfs3 sizing and best practice for ESX 3.0″http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51453
• This thread was started by forum member asking about vmotion compatiability. It quickly moves on to a discussion about the new CPU mask feature in ESX 3.x. VMware is quite tight-lipped about this feature – recommending you liase with VMware Support. Forum members here discuss their experienceshttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=50828

This week I have been spending time doing development time on the new course from VMware called “Virtual Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure”. It’s a equivilent of the older Vi-1 course based on ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x – and will lead to a VCP status for the new product.

While doing this development I spents sometime on the VMware Forums.

• This thread begins its life discussing the possibility of run ESX 3.x on PC hardware, but it quite quickly turns into a discussion about the limitations of using some “software” based iSCSI Targets such as iSCSI Enterprise Target many people use in OS like Fedora Core 5http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455002
• This thread is about some hassles people have had with the naming and renaming of datastores and volume labels in ESX 3.xhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455000
• This thread is about a PSOD issue caused by the HA Agents in ESX 3.x. A situation can arise where Service Console memory is sapped and swap activity goes through the roofhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=48234
• This thread became a length debate about how big the Service Console memory should be and as a consequence how big the the swap file should be. It has some interesting overlaps with the previous thread. There is a tension in the community about old best practises and whether they are applicable in Vi-3 – and whether VMware’s recommendations can be taken at face valuehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455009
• Some guys on the forum have cracked the Active Directory setup with ESX 3.x – not something which is especially well documented. I intend to add this configuration to my Service Console guide in the near future but until then this thread should be very helpfulhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51145
• This thread discuss that old chestnut: do RDM’s in a virtual machine cluster HAVE to be on local storage. It’s been around this debate since ESX 2.x days – and doesn’ seem to want to go away. Personally, some of the comments made by VMware employees offer one the best explainations of why this is the case I have seen anywherehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51258
• This thread discuss how memory is assigned, consummed and controlled is ESX 3.xhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=48409
• This thread is one my own questions. One thing that bugs me in ESX 2.x is if I have change the volume label or switch labels – all my virtual machines VMX files need manually updating. This is less so in ESX 3.x where the volume labels are no longer problem – the switch problem persists though. Fortunately, my hardware is so Jurassic I can’t run many VM’s – so I don’t normally have that many VMX file to modify. But its always worried me – what I was running 30-40 VM’s or what if I had 80+ VM’s registered (but not powered on) how would I script a change like that. I’m no scripting guru, so I asked others on the Forum how they would do it. This was their responsehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=50916
• This thread is about changing a VM’s MAC address to be static in ESX 3.x. VMware’s own Brian Rice steps into help out. In case you don’t know Brian is one of VMware’s top guys in VMware Education. I’ve met Brian once or twice – very nice guy – and has wonderful way of explaining stuff will out bamboozingly people with technical jargon. That said, you get the feeling if you wanted to he could!http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=438652
• This is a very long thread. In fact its one of the most posted too and read threads of the week. It’s all about “Cross LUN file operation performance”. OR put another way some poor guy is finding copying data from one LUN to another is very slow. To be honest I’ve not read this thread fully yet – but from the bits I’ve seen in my inbox (I watch entire forums) it makes very interesting readinghttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=49154

Well, that’s it for Forum Posts of the Week. I am on development this week coming too… but I’ve turn off some of watches – because quite frankly it was getting in the way of development. I was getting some 200 emails a day. Ouch!

I’ve been taking a break from teaching for the last couple of weeks – which has left me time to finish of my guides – and also hit the forums very heavily. I’ve kinda stopped hanging out on the ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x forums – in preference to ESX 3.x and VirtualCenter 2.x. I still keep an eye on the P2V Forums as well.

I know you guys are busy – and might not get to the forums very often. So here is a sample of some of the most interesting threads this week

Virtual Disk Formats
esxcfg-vmknic command
Why did VMware change the swap?
Taking a poll of the manual partitions people are using for ESX 3.0
Upgrading to VMFS 3 fails witherror code 38
VMFS Block Sizes
vmware-cmd and the path to VMX file
LUNs and VMFS volumes
Proposed Finding: SQL Authentication required for successful VC Upgrade
Cold Migration from ESX 2.x from 3.x