Vmware-Infrastructure 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*

More VirtualCenter troubles

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:44:54 +0000

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.

Using HPs vibdeposit with VMware Update Manager

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:34:28 +0000

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.

Empty Port SSL after ADAM installation

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:43:56 +0000

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:

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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.

Create an offline snapshot of a VM

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:11:25 +0000

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.

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.

VI Client: Changing the language from the system default

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:12:45 +0000

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.

More VirtualCenter troubles (fini)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:03:46 +0000

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:

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<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.

Yet another VMware error

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:00:49 +0000

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.

Extending VMotion compatiblity (continued)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:41:40 +0000

Remember my last post about cpu masking ? Well, turns out that you can do it to a “template”.

The only point you don’t need to do, is to mark the VM as a " template". You still can clone it and move it around and all that other stuff, but the good part is, that the cloned VM keeps the cpu mask set to the " template" 🤷

open-vm-tools for Debian Etch

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:16:29 +0000

Well, after a loooong time of trying to get the modules and all the other stuff (read: init-script for the guest daemon and modules) working, I think I’m about there.

I finally fixed a long-standing issue, with the postinst/prerm scripts, and the tools should be about ready. Gonna try and send it Daniel Baumann’s way (that is the Debian Maintainer), for proper inclusion into Lenny.

I (successfully) tried splitting the Xorg parts from the " normal" open-vm-tools, as I usually don’t want Xorg installed on any of my virtual machines. Thus leaving me with open-vm-tools, open-vm-modules and open-vm-toolbox (and open-vm-source) as a list of packages one could install.

Been a while

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 08:53:16 +0000

Well, it’s been quite a while since most of the people last heard a word from me. The last few months I’ve been extremely busy with work-related tasks (and as a side-effect of that, didn’t want to spend much time in front of the computer after 9 hours of work). I also started spending more and more time in the gym, like nearly two hours every Tuesday and Thursday.

I finally fixed our replication issues, we do now have a working! MySQL Multi-Master ( 1. Node, 2. Node -- bear in mind, this boxes are only serving MySQL and nothing else, so don’t use these configurations on mixed setups) Replication Setup as database back end for our TYPO3-vHosts.
all the web nodes are now serving the content from a clustered, shared SAN volume (is that a good thing ? 😛 - don’t know yet …)
our VI environment is getting more and more acceptance (even if you hear some complaints now and then, like “awww, damn that crap my 4GiB RAM, 2x3.0GHz Windows 2008 is running soooo choppy” - simple answer, don’t use Windows Server 2008 and/or Windows Vista!)
I finished prepping our VM templates (at least the Windows ones)
we’re still putting together the plans on whether or not invest into a VDI solution.

The next few weeks are gonna be as frantic as the weeks before, I still have to migrate a lot of TYPO3 installations to our new cluster (which sadly needs time, as we need to wait for DNS changes to propagate). Honestly, I might be ending up extending the SAN volume for the MySQL data storage, as even with only three somewhat busy sites, the binary log of the last 5 days is about 2GiB in size. And we still have ~ 20 other busy sites on a separate box.

Windows Server 2008

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:41:11 +0000

Well, as it is Saturday and I’m having lots of time (whereas I’d usually spend it working), I thought I’d give Windows Server 2008 a try. What interested me most, is the Windows Server 2008 " Server Core Installations", as it’s supposed to lower the security risk (as there is no Internet Explorer, no Explorer nothing running by default, only a simply cmd.exe).

As one of my co-workers requested me to upload the Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter DVD (which he got through our Microsoft Select 6.0(?) agreement) to our ISO’ VMFS, I had the DVD already at hand. As for that, I really love the feature set of VMware.

Deploying VM templates

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:38:03 +0000

Ok, so after my first day yesterday after a rather long vacation I today wanted to look at the problem that the Administrator password isn’t changed when using VirtulCenter’s clone customization functionality (which relies at least for Windows on sysprep).

After a short googling, I stumbled upon this.

Simple problem short … Don’t specify an Administrator password for the template. Then you should be able to change the Administrator password when cloning the template. It’s " should", as the VM’s are still updating.

Waiting

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:58:05 +0000

We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that really need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366).

Mood sucks

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 06:50:04 +0000

christel, you remember the mood-swings we were talking about ?

I think I’m undergoing just another 😞 I’m currently pretty much pissed. Basically everything is pestering me currently (except #gentoo-dev and Gentoo work).

Work just ripped another piece of me (hah, thanks VMware & BigBlue). I started the day with a ice cold shower (if I’m talking about ice cold it was ice cold), they’re currently replacing our old gas heating and unfortunately that means no warm water at all! arg

Live sucks (again)

Sun, 21 May 2006 10:46:25 +0000

Now is again such a time in live, where you have the motivation or wish to just fade away.

I’m just listening to Fort Minor - Where’d you go and thinking about the stuff Mike Shinoda is singing …

I want you to know it’s a little fucked up, That I’m stuck here waitin’, no longer debatin’, Tired of sittin’ and hatin’ and makin’ these excuses, For while you’re not around, and feeling so useless, It seems one thing has been true all along, You don’t really know what you got ’til it’s gone.

LinuxTag - part 2

Mon, 08 May 2006 09:26:16 +0000

I’m sitting in the S8 to Frankfurt Airport where I’ll switch to the ICE to Stuttgart to visit my cousins and my aunt. Linux Tag was quite amazing, I finally met some of the people behind OpenVZ (Kir and Kirill), saw a bit of Andrew Morton’s Kernel FAQ (Kir told us that) and met some people including Bertl, doener, derjohn, zeng, foo, … of the linux-vserver community. Both workshops were quite interesting and I learned a lot of things about openvz and it’s userland tools and linux-vserver (finally I understood the CPU Tokenbucket system).