motogobi

So some interesting stuff has fallen out of the investigation we’ve done regarding how VMware High Availability handled five of our hosts falling off the network last week. In speaking with VMware’s support staff I’ve learned a few things to keep in mind when planning architecture, as well as how to respond to something like this in the future (hint: don’t panic). Turns out, ESX didn’t really fail as much as it politely gave up, opting to take the route that seems to be the least harmful to our guest VMs’ operating systems. Admit it, we’ve all been there: you’re working on a Windows machine, it’s not responding, and you get to the point where you just hit the reset button. Well, VMware will let you – and only you – take that final step towards OS recovery during an event like this.
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My favorite hypervisor just received some much-needed updates that really bring it into striking range of VMware’s Workstation or Parallels. Among the most notable additions to the best-priced (free!) product in desktop/workstation virtualization are:

• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests
• RDP video acceleration
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only)

As you might already know, VirtualBox is my favorite virtualization product for the desktop because of it’s rich feature set and support for both Windows and Mac. I recently scored over a 90% on my VCP exam in no small part to the ability to run a Windows VM on my Mac, allowing me to mobilize my study environment with ease. If you’re looking to simply get into virtualization with ease, and for free, VirtualBox is definitely worth the download and minimal install footprint.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

This little tidbit from The Lone Sysadmin saved our bacon this morning: if you’re finding it impossible to migrate a VM off of a host because of a stuck VMTools installation process, there’s a quick way to kill this process off via the command line to get things moving along. First, you need to know the process ID of the VM you’re working with (run this from the host where the VM is currently living):

/usr/bin/vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vmname/vmname.vmx getid

This should return something like “getid() = 192″

Using that ID you can then cancel that tools install:

/usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall

Voila! No more tools install, and migration should work normally. Huge thanks, again, to Bob over at The Lone Sysadmin!

So I’ve been restoring some Windows servers from NetApp snapshots today, specifically single hard disks that had been having problems (long story involving Windows problems, etc). I found this pretty easy to do once I got the syntax down – basically, all I was looking to do was to restore the C: of a server, but keep it’s D: intact – that way I’d keep the most recent data, in this case some SQL files, but could roll back to a point where the Windows OS was a little less hosed up. Mostly for my own quick reference in the future, this is how I cranked a bunch of these out.

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…when I flipped the page over on my desk calendar this morning and noticed that the January 31st Virtualization Tip of the Day from the fine folks at PrintedOwl.com has this to say:

It’s a best practice to keep the number of COS software installations to a minimum. Here’s a case that’s justified for some environments to ensure graceful host shutdowns. Mike at motogobi has done some leg work & put up a procedure: http://www.motogobi.com/2008/11/13/setting-up-powerchute-network-shutdown-in-vmware-esx-35/

I’m flattered

It’s good to see Lifehacker focusing on backup tools. After literally years of struggling with backing up various computers and laptops I’ve owned over the years, and having learned my disaster-recovery lesson the hard way when I lost the hard drive on my desktop in 1996 or something, I’ve recently settled into a very cozy relationship with Mozy. I signed up for the yearly Home Unlimited plan ($50/yr per machine) and have been nothing short of pleased with it’s performance.

Check out other options over at Lifehacker, but whatever you do? Make sure you’re backing up your data…

Click for larger, more confusing view

Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – and they’re here to help us make heads or tails of iSCSI storage. You’ll even be able to make sense of that diagram above after reading:

As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.

This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.

Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:

Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?

Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?

Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?

Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?

Here are the answers you seek…

It’s inevitable: hard drives just fall by the wayside. Even more so with the switch from IDE to SATA over the last couple of years. Where I work, large amounts of data had been stored on single spinning IDE disks (bad), so one of my goals was to migrate that data to redundant arrays for better protection. OK, that’s fine. But what to do with the oddly-sized 500 and 750gig IDE hard drives that end up in a pile on your desk?

One word: NAS. (okay, so it’s an acronym for Network Attached Storage)

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I currently admin a sizable VMWare ESX deployment hosting a couple dozen domains and over a hundred Windows servers. Most are for testing and could be rebuilt pretty quickly, but some are for production deployment – at least one of which is fairly irreplaceable. This past summer our office suffered some extended outages due to city-wide power interruptions, so it was a no-brainer to approve the purchase of PowerChute services for these servers. Turns out, APC is lagging a little on getting an ESX 3.5-compatible current version of PCNS out there so I decided to get v2.2.1 running on my five ESX hosts.

Here’s how I did it – mostly for my own future reference: continue reading…