Vmware-Infrastructure

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: ...

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* ...

Well, after my co-worker switched the VirtualCenter certificates with one produced by our RA a few days ago, I can’t clone anything using a customization specification anymore. Unable to decrypt passwords in customization specification Guess, we’re shit outa luck. At least both of those linked VMTN discussions don’t contain any (that is for us) workable solution (well besides storing the password in cleartext in the spec – which ain’t sooo good). Gonna bug him tomorrow to open up a VMware support request, maybe that’ll help somewhat. I sure hope so.

As we’re finally at the point, where I only need to bother with HP hardware (which in itself is troublesome enough), I wanted to use HPs vibdeposit with our Update Manager. The whole purpose of the repository is the integration of HPs custom vibs (download able on each hardware under VMware ESXi 5.0) into the VMware Update Manager. That makes it easy to integrate, say the nmi-sourcing driver, into the VMware built ESXi images. ...

I’ve been meaning to post this, but never actually got around to doing that. When installing vCenter 5.0, an instance of ADAM is installed, which stores all the configration data for Linked Mode. It basically boils down to running this script and rebooting the box: 1 2 reg DELETE "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /f reg ADD "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /t REG_DWORD /d 0000027c /f This is no new invention of myself, just writing it down for myself from here or here.

We’re currently thinking about automating Windows Updates and the involved disaster snapshot-copy to a degree, where we don’t need to intervene anymore. Right now, we already have a rudimentary scheduler in place, which does the reboots for some (200 ..) systems already. Now, we’d like to extend it to also cover the bi-weekly Windows Update spree. Since PowerShell (and PowerCLI) work quite well with vSphere automation, I cooked up the below script to first shutdown a virtual machine (for snapshot consistency reasons), then take a snapshot and power on the virtual machine again afterwards. ...

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. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 <!-- <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. ...

Well, as I am in fact running a german Windows XP, the VI Client started displaying all menus and operations in German when I updated to 2.5u2. Normally, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with that, but recently it started to annoy me, since the translation is a bit off from the real meaning of much of the operations. So today, in the morning I started looking for ways to revert the VI Client back to displaying everything in English. And guess what. There’s no way to switch the language from the VI Client itself. There’s just a workaround. ...

Well, today the support request came back. Seems one of the originally linked VMTN dicussions really is the only way: Export the customization specification Edit the XML file Import it again The related part inside the customization specification should then look like this: 1 2 3 4 <type>vim.vm.customization.Password</type> <plainText>true</plainText> <value>Password01</value> </password> So if you ever think about switching the default VirtualCenter certificate (for whatever reason), make sure you use the above workaround. Otherwise VirtualCenter is gonna fail miserably during the customization phase of the cloning process.

Today I was moving a pretty standard SLES10 virtual machine to another host, when the migration dialog showed me this: fault.MemorySizeNotRecommended And if you now think, the virtual machine is something special take a look at those settings: Virtual machine configuration I don’t know what to think about that error message. Googling for it doesn’t reveal that much about it. If anyone out there got an idea, I’m open for suggestions.