Unless your lucky enough to user Lab Manager on a regular basis then your probably like must Admin’s. When talking with people everyone seems to have a solid idea of what Lab Manger can do but they have little experience in setting up and supporting a LM environment. The team over at VMware KB has created a few videos to showcase and explain some of the core features. You can view them from VMware KB1020915.
I’ve been building a list of blogs and news sites that I read on a regular basis for sometime now. To this point I have been using a RSS reader that sync’s with Google reader to keep things centralized and backed up in case I have an issue. This works pretty well for myself but in talking with peers about what I’ve been reading lately there seemed to be a need for something the community could use as a central point to find good articles. There are obviously other sites like this for different topics but to my knowledge nothing for the Virtualization segment existed.
So today I would like to introduce The Virtual News to the public. Its in a public Beta phase I would say for now. My dream for the site is to become a central location where the community can share good articles with others interested in Virtualization related information. I look forward to the day that others are sharing great links via the site and I will discover bloggers and others writing content that I am interested in.
I welcome any suggestions or comments on the function, look and idea of the site.
read moreI’ve seen a few other guides for this same type of install. I just wanted to put something together to save for myself. I will show you how to use the EDA deployment appliance to install vSphere in VMware Workstation. You can follow most of the same steps for a physical machine install with just a few changes.
For this I was testing things for my home lab and created this on my laptop just using Workstation 7.0. I created two virtual machines, one for the EDA appliance and one blank that will get ESX 4.0 installed from the Deployment script.
Step 1: Download the EDA appliance http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/va/89313/download
Step 2: Import the EDA virtual appliance into VMware workstation.
Step 3: After the input I had to add in a CD-Rom to the VM and attached the vSphere .iso file to the CD drive.
Step 4: You can then start up the EDA appliance and choose Reconfigure.
Step 5: Fill out your network information on the screen shown below. Then press enter or click on OK.
Step 6: You can now log into the configuration web page for the EDA appliance. In my configuration it was http://192.168.1.19
The default login for the page is root - root. You will be presented with several sections that will allow you to configure options for the install. I will briefly cover these parts as I did not change much on them for this test. The Post installation commands section allows you to script any custom changes or adds that you want to make for your install. The General settings section is used for basic network and disk settings for each install, this section is pretty easy to understand.
Step 7: Now you are ready to prepare the Host specific details. Refer to the image below as I describe the steps. You can either modify the sample host that is loaded by default. By clicking on the host name or selecting “new host” you will get a screen like the 2nd picture below. This will allow you to specify host name and IP addresses needed for your base install. Once created if you click on the “ks” link for the hostname you will see what the kick start file contains for commands.
Step 8: Now you will need to setup the options for the DHCP server. Upon clicking on the “configure DHCP server” link from the top menu you will be presented with the following configuration file. I highlighted a few of the important lines that I changed to work for my setup. You will need to make sure all of the normal DHCP options are set in this file.
Step 9: Now you will need to “import PXE files” so that you can boot the server that you will be installing ESX onto. You need to make sure that the ESX CD or .iso file is mounted to your EDA appliance. If the ESX disc or file is properly mounted you will see the confirmation in the top right just like the image below. Then you select the “Import PXE bootfiles” from the menu and you will see a screen like the second image below.
Step 10: If you are using a physical server to install onto you can start now and have the machine PXE boot.
If you are going to use a virtual machine you need to create a VM with the proper OS select, disk size, memory and number of Nic’s that you wish to use. Once this is done you will see a screen like the one below you start the install. I trust that you know what settings need to be used for installing ESX into VMware workstation, if not there are plenty of good guides for it. If you are using Workstation 7.x the process is now built in and very easy to select from the OS choices.
Note: If you created multiple host install names you will get presented with the options and can type the name of the one you wish to install. I circled in red above as an example.
read moreIf your lucky enough to be heading to one of the VMworld shows this year or thinking of buying the access to the content on the VMworld website for recorded sessions.
This year’s batch of breakout sessions and labs look to be innovative, technical deep dive, best practices, and partner sessions to be presented at VMworld should satisfy just about anyone.
You can see the VMware Content Catalog here.
read moreWith more talk about Storage IO Control (SIOC) each month, VMware is starting to leak more details about the feature. The best write up on the feature was by Scott Drummonds last month that you can read here. With SIOC you will be able to have almost a quality of service for VM’s in regards to storage IO control. With a very simple setup showcased in the video below you can level the playing field so that something happening in one virtual machine does not monopolize all of the storage bandwidth and starve other machines.
A few things to keep in mind for now. That SIOC is enabled per datastore, does not have a reservation limit at this time, only enforces limits when a threshold is reached and can enforce limits for IOPS when specified at the VM level. Thanks to Duncan for these details.
In the images below you can get an idea of how Storage IO Control is working along with Shares applied to Virtual Machines to stop any VM from hogging all of the IO.
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In working with a client recently I noticed that they are cloning virtual machines and it’s causing issues with their tool set. This really came to light when working with their XenApp servers. The Citrix team was building servers loaded with apps to create a template that could be cloned to create the other servers in a application pool. The issue with this is that the team was using existing servers already in production that already had the tools installed on them. The problem came to light with issues from the tools used to protect and monitor the virtual machines. This would not be an issue with standard OS templates already created that would have the tools added after the cloning process.
When cloning the virtual machine there are still a lot of registry entries left over with the old server name for tools like Opsware, McAfee and an asset mgmt application. These old registry entries would cause the new VM to knock the old VM out of the tools console and cause issues with reporting and management of the source server. For example Opsware would start talking to the newly cloned server thinking it was the source server and this would leave the source machine not in the patching scheduled.
To clean this up it was necessary to uninstall these tools from the new virtual machine then go back through the registry and clean up any entries that referenced the old server name. Then reboot the server and reinstall the tools. This will clean up the issues and allow everything to work without conflicting with the source server.
So for future requests of this type they have agreed to either use a base OS build and load applications on by hand or create their Citrix template with applications and clone prior to installing any monitoring applications. This will eliminate the issues that they had been experiencing.
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