Posted by Brian on Apr 13, 2010 in View, VMware, vSphere | 0 comments
Today I was able to visit the VMware Express truck and meet some new VMware contacts. I meet both EMC vSpecialists from Chicago region, one of which I had met already. I took a couple of pictures and enjoyed a nice lunch from EMC while I waited for my turn to listen to the tour.
The truck was pretty impressive given that its a semi trailer. The inside was decorated much like an office or meeting room. There was 3 different presentation areas, a conference room and a datacenter area in the truck. I was not able to get a picture of the server rack because my batteries died. The rack had a vBlock setup in it, which consisted of Cisco UCS servers, EMC storage and Cisco for the networking. The tours were running about every 15 minutes and the turnout for the day was around 80 visitors.
The picture below was used to demo 3 different presentations. The first was follow the desktop the example given was a nurse that travels between rooms and wants her desktop to move from end point to end point without having to login each time. The rep used a smart card solution with auto login. The 2nd demo was called Access Across Boundaries, this just showed the different end point devices you can use to access view. Some that were shown were a netbook, iPhone with Wyse Pocket Cloud client installed and last was a monitor with hardware PCoIP installed. The last demo in this area was around VMware thin app. they used Acrobat 5 as a demo and showed it running on a Windows 7 VM.
The last section of the tour was centered around connecting multiple monitors to your View desktop. Currently VMware View supports up to 4 monitors. The picture below shows the multiple monitor display, I was a little shaky when I took the picture.
Overall there was nothing for me to learn at the truck but that’s not why I went anyways. It was a good chance to check out the VMware truck and network with different VMware and EMC contacts. You can see the scheduled dates for the truck in your area here, be sure to check often. I received an email with dates in my area that were never published on the site.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Apr 9, 2010 in Troubleshooting, VMware | 4 comments
This is something that I have to do on Windows boxes all the time, but less on our ESX boxes. In the past we used to just run the vm-support to collect the support logs and turn those over to the storage team. They no longer are happy with those and since EMC now has a grab that supports both vSphere and VI3.5 it’s hard to deny them now. In case you do not know what a grab is, it’s a log collection utility that will provide the storage admin with all of the details about WWN’s, paths and which LUN’s a host can see. They can use this for planning upgrades and troubleshooting issues.
First thing you will need to do is to download the proper EMC grab version to support your hosts. At the time of writing this its a version 1.2.1 and is supports both ESX 3 and 4. Proceed on over to http://powerlink.emc.com and download it from the support programs area.
Once you have the file you will need to upload it to your host with something like WinSCP. I always upload it into the /tmp folder and unzip it there. It will create a folder called “emcgrab”. You can use the following command to do the unzip in case your not familiar with what to do.
tar -xvf emcgrab_ESX_vSphere_v.1.2.1.tar
Next thing is to move into the emcgrab directory that was created. From within there you will need to execute the following command. If you read the help file included in the directory it will explain some options to supress some annoying confirmation screens about the licensing and such.
./emcgrab.sh -nomsg
Once the program starts to run depending on the options you used it will prompt you to confirm and read the licensing. After you pass that part it will ask you a string of questions about your contact details and some questions about your environment. These are not necessary to complete it you are using these grabs in house. If you plan on sending these to EMC then I would advise to fill them out.
Once the script completes it will ask you if you want to run vm-support to collect the VMware support logs along with the EMCgrabs. This is up to you, if you have a need for them go ahead. Once the script finished it will place the zipped up file in the Output folder and you can pull off the file with WinSCP.
In closing it’s not necessary to be running Powerpath on your hosts to collect these grabs.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Apr 9, 2010 in Scripts, VMware | 0 comments
If your running clusters with a bunch of hosts in them you probably had the need at one point for a script like this. So what does this puppy do? It will look at your clusters and then the hosts and verify if each host can see the datastore. You might have one host that cannot see a particular datastore and is causing you issues with migrations or DRS. You other option is to do this manually by looking at each host and checking the datastores via the vSphere client.
I would recommend you save yourself a bunch of time and gray hairs and use this great script that was written by LucD. You can get some more details about this script and download it from his blog here.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by mike on Apr 5, 2010 in VMware | 4 comments
So I successfully passed the VCP for vSphere. The test was a bit harder than I thought it was going to be, and showed me some of the things that I did not study as hard as I should have. Overall though I’m pleased that it’s all over with, as I can let my brain rest a bit.
My next goal is to rebuild the lab to work with view 4. I believe that VDI is going to be very prominent over the next few years and it will be important to have a firm grasp.
- Mike
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Posted by Brian on Apr 2, 2010 in Guides, Tools | 10 comments
I recently setup a HP MSA 2300 series storage array. It was the SAS model with 4 enclosure trays. I have to admit that I have not setup one of these with Fiber or iSCSI but they are very similar other than the assign to host part. In the setup guide I cover how to configure the management interfaces, create Vdisks, create volumes and then assign them to hosts. It covers different ways to setup your hot spare drives.
After reading this short document you will be able to get that new MSA array up and running quickly. I set my array up to talk to a small 3 node vSphere cluster but the setup would be the same if you were using for a Windows cluster or most other uses.
You can download the PDF of the document How to Setup MSA array here.
Update 1-10-2011
I saw that someone else has created a Best practices document for the P2000 series. It’s not an official document but worth a look for new users. Have a look here.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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