Posts made in July, 2010

Failed Boot Recovery option a new feature in ESXi 4.1

Posted by Brian on Jul 30, 2010 in VMware, vSphere | View Comments

I recently stumbled upon a new feature in VMware vSphere 4.1 that was tucked away in the Virtual Machine options. You can see from the picture below the setting is called Failed Boot Recovery. The failed boot recovery option is listed under Boot Options within the settings of a Virtual Machine. There is not much info available on this feature at this time, I plan to ask a VMware SE about it next time I see one. From what I understand at this point is if a machine fails to find its boot device instead of letting the VM sit there with the error. You can elect a retry boot time in seconds on this screen and it will try to reboot the device and try again. My guess is this is designed towards a VM that crashed on boot up which might be due to a missing VMDK file.

The only details I could find so far are on a scripting related page on VMware site here.

Some cool new features in vSphere Command Line Interface CLI 4.1

Posted by Brian on Jul 29, 2010 in CLI, VMware, vCenter Server, vSphere | View Comments

Now that vSphere 4.1 has been out for a couple of weeks you’ve probably had some time to play with it in a lab. I’m sure you have also spent some time reading the release notes getting up to speed on the large list of new features that were released. After spending time myself getting familiar with many of the new options I wanted to dig in and see what was new with the Command Line Interface in 4.1. Since this is going to play a big part in how you will be managing ESXi hosts once you move your environment over to the platform of the future.

I have grabbed a list of the new commands added to vCLI 4.1, these command will help narrow the gap that had existed between what you could run on the ESX console (COS) and what you could do via the vCLI with an ESXi host. Notice the part at the end where it lists some of the commands that cannot be executed against a vCenter server for a host in lock down mode.

• vicfg-hostops – Allows you to examine, stop, and reboot hosts and to instruct hosts to enter and exit maintenance mode.
• vicfg-authconfig – Allows you to add an ESX/ESXi host to an Active Directory domain, remove the host, and list Active Directory domain information.
• vicfg-ipsec – Supports IPsec setup.

vSphere CLI 4.1 also includes the following new functionality:

• The following options have been added to esxcli:
  • esxcli swiscsi session – Manage iSCSI sessions.
  • esxcli swiscsi nic – Manage iSCSI network interfaces.
  • esxcli swiscsi vmknic – List VMkernel network interfaces available for binding to particular iSCSI adapter.
  • esxcli swiscsi vmnic – List available uplink adapters for use with a specified iSCSI adapter.
  • esxcli vaai device – Display information about devices claimed by the VMware VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) Filter Plugin.
  • esxcli corestorage – List devices or plugins. Used in conjunction with hardware acceleration.
  • esxcli network – List active connections or list active ARP table entries.
  • esxcli vms – List and forcibly stop virtual machines that do not respond to normal stop operations.
• Some of the parity issues between vSphere CLI and the ESX service console have been resolved.
• You can now run vCLI commands using SSPI (--passthroughauth) against both vCenter Server and ESX/ESXi systems.
• Lockdown mode allows vSphere administrators to block direct access to ESXi systems. With lockdown mode enabled, all operations must go through a vCenter Server system. The following commands cannot run against vCenter Server systems and can therefore not be used in lockdown mode:
  • vicfg-snmp
  • vifs
  • vicfg-user
  • vicfg-cfgbackup
  • vihostupdate
  • vmkfstools
  • esxcli
  • vicfg-ipsec

If you want to run these commands against an ESXi system, turn off lockdown mode using the vSphere Client.

Use web browser to view vSphere Configuration and Log files

Posted by Brian on Jul 29, 2010 in VMware, vSphere | View Comments

Sure this nothing earth shattering but it’s just something simple that can make your life easier. With a web browser and some links that I will provide below you can view some of the vSphere configuration files and messages from logs. This is probably the fastest way to get a view into your host with out having to SSH into the server or use another method. This method works for both vSphere 4.0 and 4.1 hosts and it works on both ESX and ESXi hosts.

You can view the VMware vSphere Configuration files from a browser using a link formatted like the following. https://hostname/host From that link you will need to authenticate to your host and then will be able to view a list of files from the host. In the list of files presented with be configuration files and some logs.

There is another page viewable with a web browser that will show you log messages from your ESX or ESXi host. Use the following syntax for the link.  https://hostname/host/messages

Chicago VMware VMUG recap and notes

Posted by Brian on Jul 28, 2010 in VMUG | View Comments

I would like to say a Big Thanks to everyone that attended today and a special thanks to our sponsor Compellent. Compellent gave a nice presentation about their technology and what they have accomplished in their 5 years since they released the first product. I will give a short break down of the different presentations today and if we are able to get the slide decks from the presenters we will publish them over on the Chicago VMUG blog.

In our first presentation of the day Chris Fox of VMware was in and gave an overview of the new features of vSphere 4.1. There were discussions about SIOC (Storage IO Control), NIOC (Network IO Control), VAAI the API’s for array integration were some of the most talked about features. It was also discussed that VMware ESX 4.1 classic will be the last release of the ESX flavor of Hypervisor. Sometime in 2011 there is expected to be the next major release of vSphere and it will only be available in ESXi flavor.

In the second session of the day Russ Taddiken of Compellent talked to us about their storage virtualization technology. Russ gave a presentation that explained many of the features that make Compellent a strong competitor in the storage market. He spoke about Storage Auto Tiering that has been a feature in their product for about 5 years. Some of the other points that stood out to me was CoPilot their support organization and the Portable Volume feature. With portable volume it allows for the initial data replication to be placed on an encrypted USB disk that can be shipped to a remote site that might have a slow link. You will then only have to replicate the changes rather then the entire amount. Russ also mentioned that Compellent will be in the 2nd round of Vendors that will be supporting VMware VAAI API for storage functions.

In the last session of the day Mark from VMware spent time to talk about migrating your ESX infrastructure to ESXi. He covered the different ways to convert your hosts over to VMware ESXi. There was discussion around some of the reasons for the VMware’s decision to move in the ESXi direction. An estimated 80% of patches that VMware released for the ESX classic version were related to the console (COS) due to it’s Linux base that it was built on. With ESXi the COS was removed and the amount of patching required is greatly reduced. VMware is also working in the direction of building the ability to have a stateless hypervisor. Mark spent some time showing some of the commands that are the vCLI versions of the console commands that many are used to using.

We had a pretty nice showing for this meeting and hope that our community continues to grow. We had a couple of higher profile members from the VMware community show up to the meeting. David Davis from Train Signal was in attendance at the meeting. David has created a large number for training videos from Train Signal as well as for his blog VMwareVideos.com. Thanks again to David and the Train Signal team for providing several copies of their VMware vSphere training videos that we were able to give away to our members. Also in attendance today was Justin Lauer of EMC and a vSpecialist from Chad Sakac’s vArmy Team. I’ve knowing Justin for a bit now and it’s always great to chat with him, his involvement in our VMUG community will help many.

Update: We have posted a few of the slide decks from the presentations today here.

Took a couple of quick photos with an iPhone today as I forgot my camera but will do a better job in the future.

VKernel accounces Chargeback 2.0 for vSphere and Hyper-V shops

Posted by Brian on Jul 27, 2010 in Hyper-V, Tools, vCenter Server, vSphere | View Comments

The release also adds support for mixed chargeback models. VKernel Chargeback 2.0 now supports both allocated and actual resource consumption models. By reporting on both measures, infrastructure teams can chargeback for actual resource consumption, allocated resources, or simply show application teams the difference in real dollars between their allocated capacity and actual usage. This cost visibility is critical to capacity management, reducing VM spral and supporting private cloud initiatives.