Vmware-Esx on BAFM

VMware design rules

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:52:13 +0000

I’m just got back from four days in Rostock over at S&N, where I was attending a VMware design course and here’s a list of questions I did ask the trainer:

What’s the disadvantage of having a 1016 ported vSwitch ?
Any clues on how to exchange the default certificate of the Virtual Center ?
Are there any tools to stress test the virtual system ?
Are there any performance impacts of having more than 10 users in Virtual Center ?
Any clues and/or guides on how to do time synchronization in VMware guests, especially Linux guests ?
What’s the preferred NIC type for Linux guests ?
Any clues to using Raw Device Mappings with VMotion ?
Is there a way of defining CPU masks on a global level ?

Answers:

Extending vMotion compatiblity

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:49:58 +0000

Today I did something horrible. I yet again noticed that I bought the wrong CPU’s (basically I bought Xeon DP’s with four cores). Those have apparently a feature called SSSE3, which makes vMotion with our old Xeon DP’s (dual cores) fail before even trying.

But as we had a cooling outage today (basically ‘cause it broke), I needed to turn off some ESX servers. Thus leaving me with the new ones and one of the old ones. * yuck*

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:46:16 +0000

We’re currently having a really weird problem with our VM’s. Sometime last week, SUSE released a kernel update. Now, once you install it and you reboot the selected VM with a DVD/CD image present, you’re gonna see this:

msg.vmxaiomgr.retrycontabort.unkown

The only workaround so far has been to unmount any cleanse any CD-Drives attached to the VM. And yes, this is reproduceable, even reinstalling from scratch doesn’t change the fact, that after installing the patch the VM quits working.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX (continued)

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:45:36 +0000

Well, after some searching today (we applied the VMware Update 2 today, thus the VMware Tools update too), I finally found out what is causing that problem.

Though the problem seems to be not limited to virtual systems alone, I just browsed through this Novell Forum thread which pretty much describes my problem. I found the same error in the VM’s I tried to mount a CD image.

Using the integrated kickstart generator

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:36:00 +0000

VMware built an kickstart generator into ESX 3.5. You just need to enable it, simply by editing an XML configuration and restarting the webAccess service. Simply edit /usr/lib/vmware/webAccess/tomcat/apache-tomcat-5.5.26/webapps/ui/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml and look for the line saying:

`1`	`<action path="/scriptedInstall" type="org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction" parameter="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/disabled.jsp" />`

This line needs to be commented out (<– and –>) and the lines following, having those comment marks around them needs to be removed.

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<!--
<action path="/scriptedInstall" type="com.vmware.webcenter.scripted.ProcessAction">
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form1" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form1.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form2" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form2.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form3" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form3.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form4" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form4.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form5" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form5.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form6" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form6.jsp" />
 <forward name="scriptedInstall.form7" path="/WEB-INF/jsp/scriptedInstall/form7.jsp" />
</action>
-->

After doing that, you should be able to restart the webAccess service, and after that access your ESX host.

VMware vSphere and templates

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:51:01 +0000

I just converted one of my (old) templates, as I wanted to refresh the updates and the virus scanner. After converting, I was asked about the UUID (no clue why), and expected to be done with it. But after looking at the console, I got the following, completely cryptic message:

Unable to connect to MKS

After digging a bit deeper (that is looking at the vmware.log of the virtual machine, since the message of the GUI is real cryptic), I’m a bit wiser:

Fixing vmkernel symlinks

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:19:32 +0000

Since I do happen to be in the situation pretty often where the kernel inside a VM is newer than what VMware currently has in their tools (as in the SUSE kernel is newer than the binary modules built by VMware), here’s a quick reminder for myself on how to to fix the .ko symlinks.

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for file in /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/*.ko ;
do
 rm $file &&
 ln -s /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/${file/.ko/.o} $file
done