vmware | CrashLoopBackoff

Renewing the Push

Well I passed the VCP 4 and my CCNA expired (can’t get around to renewing it). At work I did the VTSP as required by the partner program. Since I am in a test taking grove I think I need to push to passing the Enterprise Administration Exam. There was a series I started a while back on command line management of ESX. So like several others I will set my next goal at the Enterprise Administration Exam.

Here are some good sites I have recently seen on studying for the Exam.

VCDX Study Guides
Simon Long’s Site
follow @vcdx001 on twitter he is giving hints about the design defense, great info, but don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

I think for this first test you just have to know what you are doing with VI 3. My big problem is having worked with vSphere for a couple months now I hope that doesn’t hurt me.

: It isn’t time to freak out. Yet.

Using iSCSI to get some big ole disk in a Virtual Machine

First, I have lived in the South too long, because I said “Big ole disk” and couldn’t think of a more appropriate phrase. Now someone rescue me if I start to tell you to “mash” the power button on your server or SAN. I kid.

I am sure everyone out there has used this before but I like to document these things just case someone else needs help.

A coworker and I were installing a vSphere environment last week to support some new software for a customer. The software vendor required approximately 30 x 146GB drives in a Raid 5 to store images. Never would guess the software vendor happens to sell SANs too! I exaggerate it actually called for 3TB of usable space.

So my thought was to get over 2TB limit of VMFS we would need to use the MS iSCSI initiator inside the VM. Then my coworker thought we could enable MPIO using two virtual Nics with vmxnet3. We tied each vmxnet3 nic to a separate port group and assigned one of the 2 physical NICs to each port group. Additionally vmxnet3 lets you enable jumbo frames and the physical nics were already set to mtu 9000 because this was on the software iscsi vswitch. So we were able to get multiple paths from the VM to the network and have jumbo frames all the way through.

Next we presented the iSCSI volume of 3TB to the Windows machines. Of course at first it sees it as a couple of smaller volumes. Convert the disk to GPT and align to 64k, then format with NTFS. Just like that a 3TB disk inside a Virtual Machine.

Now we saw IOMETER push better sequential IO than an RDM that was set up for Round Robin, but not quite as good in the Random IO department as a RDM.

The main gain here is to get a file bigger than 2TB minus 512B. Useful for the scan/image servers that store a tons of files for a long time.

To sum up and make it clear.

1. Use the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and MPIO inside the VM when you need more than 2TB on a disk.

2. Use 2 port groups and bind them to separate physical nics to let the MPIO actually work over 2 nics.

3. With vSphere use the VMXNET3 driver for network to use jumbo frames, the E1000 driver does not support this.

Things a VMware Consultant should not Tweet.

So I don’t have any real content today. So I will make up things you should not tweet from a customer site.

1. @duncanYB How do I add a host to vCenter again?

2. Just overwrote dudes LUNS, hope there wasn’t anything on them.

3. Licenses? Everyone can use my file.

4. Just P2V’d dudes server in the middle of the day. Hope no one noticed the reboot.

5. iSCSI, Service Console, VM Network, DMZ, VMotion. All on one NIC Sweet!
(don’t ruin the effect by commenting about 10GigE)

6. Exchange and SQL on SATA? No better use for a single 1 TB drive!

7. Just finished my first ESX install on a real server. Faster than it was in Workstation.

8. @Texiwill is there a way to blank the root password for the Service Console?

9. Failover is for dummies that don’t do it right the first time.

10. Can’t wait to leave here so I can finish building my life size Yoda robot.

Add your suggestions in the comments or tweet them to me @2vcps

Storage KB entries from VMware

This is the kind of stuff I love to find. Good stuff all in one place. The Storage customer service team identified several of the top KB entries that could help in a pinch. Check them out on the VMware Knowledge Base Blog.

I have a personal experience with:

1002511 Recreating a missing VMDK (header) file

It would relate back to this post.

So thanks a bunch Storage Heavy Hitters!

New Releases for VMware vCenter

Two new products and a new release for an older product will happen today. Applications aimed for those trying to scale their VMware environment and make it more strategic in their organization. These will be released in the vCenter family but may not actually run on you vCenter Server.

First up is VMware vCenter AppSpeed. This software will alow drilling into the performance of the application level in a VM. One feature I find compelling is the Assured Migration. Take a look at an apps performance before and after migration to be sure the same level of service post virtual migration. This is very cool and needed for VI admins trying to prove that it is not VMware causing the problem. At least AppSpeed helps pinpoint performance issues faster, which is a huge help to anyone with a VMware environment.

Second is vCenter Chargeback. You can guess it, Chargeback provides the ability to apply accounting to your resources and if not charge for those resources at least get a look back to determine the actual costs of a initiative.

Last is the Update to an existing product, vCenter LabManager 4. Big news here is all Stage Manager functionality has been rolled into Lab Manager. Stage Manager will go away supposedly. The pricing for Lab Manager will change. If you have a valid SnS for Lab Manager or Stage Manager you will supposedly get Lab Manager 4. Cool.

So that this doesn’t just look like a copy of a VMware press release. I wanted to include my own thoughts. The appearance of more “manage and automate” applications like these three show that the VMware install base is demanding more and more from their environment. Customers investing in this type of software shows to me they are not looking to bolt to another product any time soon. Wait this is way too positive. Lets say something I don’t like, Lab Manger price will go up but still be less than Lab Manager and Stage Manager combined. As a customer I would not like this move because maybe I just wanted Lab Manager now you say the price has increased due to functionality being added that I didn’t ask for. It could be like Microsoft including SQL 2008 with every 2008 Server license and increasing the cost of the server license by the cost of SQL. Then not letting you buy them separate. The problem with my complaint is I guess many customers came to VMware and said, “Hey, I sure wish Lab Manager and Stage Manager were all one product.”

Rescan All Hba’s Where are you?

So I was updating some of my blog posts on the esxcfg-* commands with any changes in ESX 4. I wrote earlier I did not know much about the esxcfg-advcfg command. Since writing that post at the end of 2008, I found Duncan Epping used esxcfg-advcfg in 3.5 to set the option rescan all the Hba’s. I thought this was a great shortcut and decided to try it out in vSphere but:

[root@esx4 ~]# esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Scsi/ScsiRescanAllHbas
Exception occured: Unable to find option ScsiRescanAllHbas

So I looked through vCenter 4 and did not find the option under Scsi I looked around some in the other Advanced Options and it is no where to be found.

Has this been removed or moved somewhere else? If you know hit me up on twitter @2vcps

ESX Commands – esxcfg-module

After the last two entries being somewhat boring and not useful at least in my opinion. I am glad this command has a little more to it.

[root@esx1 root]# esxcfg-module -h
Usage: esxcfg-module
-g–get-options Get the options for a given module and whether it is loaded on boot.
-s–set-options Set the options for a given module. WARNING this may be overwritten by per device options.
-e–enable Enable a given module, indicating it should be loaded on boot.
-d–disable Disable a given module, indicating it should not be loaded on boot.
-q–query Query enabled modules options.
-l–list List all modules and whether they are enabled.
-h–help Show this message.
[root@esx1 root]# esxcfg-module -l
Device Driver Modules
Module Enabled Loaded
vmklinux true true
cciss true true
tg3 true true
qla4022 true true
e1000 true true
qla2300_707_vmwtrue truel
vmdriver true true
vmfs3 true true
etherswitch true true
shaper true true
tcpip true true
cosShadow true true
migration true true
nfsclient true true
deltadisk true true
vmfs2 true true
iscsi_mod true true
[root@esx1 root]#

So a common use I have seen with this command is to turn off unused modules. Go ahead and free up some resources turn off vmfs2! You don’t use it.
Another use is to change HBA options.

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-module -s ql2xmaxqdepth=64 qla2300_707_vmw
Remember to follow it with:
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-boot -b

Check out VCDX Master Ninja/Jedi Duncan Epping using this command combo in a scripted install.

ESX Commands – esxcfg-linuxnet

The guide from VMware.com says

esxcfg-linuxnet
Converts vswif to eth when booting ESX Server into service-console-only mode rather than into ESX mode. This command is used for the bootstrap process and is intended for VMware Technical Support use only. You should not issue this command unless instructed to do so by a VMware Technical Support representative.
There is no VI Client equivalent for this command.

Wow I should have saved all these for one post called stuff you don’t use unless someone smart tells you to.

Don’t worry though I checked ahead esxcfg-module has more too it. I actually slightly looked at it when I covered esxcfg-boot.

ESX Commands – esxcfg-init

Wow, this was a good one eh?
check out the help.

[root@esx1 root]# esxcfg-init -h
Usage: esxcfg-init
This program is used to initialize device names and advanced configuration options for the VMkernel on system boot.It is NOT intended for use outside of initialization scripts.
[root@esx1 root]#

I decided to google the command to see if anyone had insight. Not much more than what I give here. The help command then nothing. So for real I might get 2 blog posts in one day since this is so short.

ESX Commands – esxcfg-info

This is a great command to give you a whole bunch of information. Sort of like trying to drink from a fire hose. Go ahead and type esxcfg-info as root from your console. Wasn’t that fun?
You can follow this article and redirect the output to a file to make it a little easier. If there is a specific area that you need information about you can check the help and use a handy switch t print just the info you need. Which in all honesty may still be more than you can handle.

[root@esxlab1 root]# esxcfg-info -h
Usage: esxcfg-info mode
-a, –all Print all information
-w, –hardware Print hardware information
-r, –resource Print resource information
-s, –storage Print storage information
-n, –network Print network information
-y, –system Print system information
-o, –advopt Print advanced options
-u, –hwuuid Print hardware uuid
-b, –bootuuid Print boot partition uuid
-e, –boottype Print boot type
-c, –cmdline Print vmkernel command line
-F, –format Print the information in the given format
Valid values are “xml” and “perl”
-h, –help Print this message.

A sample from doing esxcfg-info -r (this is just a snippet of output)