The VMware PowerPack has now come back under the PowerGUI installation wizard and is part of PowerGUI 2.3 which can be downloaded from the PowerGUI site here.

Lest I start in again on how much I love PowerGUI and PowerCLI for managing your VMware environment, let’s just revisit the topic here.

Connect-VIServer YOURvCENTERNAME

$Information = @()
Foreach ($VM in (Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-View)){
$MyDetails = "" | Select-Object VMName,VMXLocation
$MyDetails.VMName = $VM.Name
$MyDetails.VMXLocation = $VM.Config.Files.VmPathName
$Information += $MyDetails
}
$Information |Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation C:output.csv

This little report is a nice bit of insurance to have, let me tell you…

• the awesome Backup & Replication 5
• Monitor Plus and Business Reporter

If you’re running a home lab, you kind of owe it to yourself to get a simple install of their products up and running. Diving more and more into their monitoring tools, as well as having Replication save my butt on a remote office move recently, I’ve got nothing but high regard for what Veeam offers to the virtualization community – and today? What it offers the virtualization community for free. Props to virtualization.info for the heads up!

I’m happy to see today’s post from Eric Sloof bringing up the announcement of the free VMware ESX Server Zenpack for monitoring ESX and ESXi hosts by leveraging our good friend esxtop:

To help use this awesome tool, we are excited to annouce that we have created a Free Zenpack to perform ESX/ESXi server monitoring with esxtop.  The Zenpack does the following:

• Automatically captures and graphs performance metrics from ESX/ESXi servers
• Allows the setting of thresholds and exception alerting based on performance metrics and events as they occur
• Keeps historical data for in-depth root cause analysis

With Zenoss’s VMware ESX Server Zenpack, you get visibility into your ESX/ESXi server and you are also able to proactively manage it.  A perfect example of this is over-provisioning of virtual CPUs; a condition that without esxtop is hard to diagnosis.

I’ve often found that monitoring becomes almost an afterthought during rapid deployment of almost any infrastructure. If you’ve found yourself in that spot, or just simply want to get a different perspective on what sort of trending and alerting you can get – for free, even! – I would highly suggest giving Zenoss a shot.

Welcome – looks like something is wrong with your virtual machine.
Before we go into details …
relax …
drink a coffee and follow the VM-sickbay-rules

1. DON’T PANIC
2. do not try to start the VM again
3. do not mount disks from other VMs
4. do not use vmware-mount or vdiskmanager
5. do not use vdk in read/write mode
6. make a copy of all vmware-log files
7. relax

Having found myself in a spot with a sick VM in the past, I’ve definitely done steps 2, 3, 4, and maybe even 5 and been the worse off for it. In addition, and the original point of Eric’s post, Ulli has posted up the most comprehensive collection of vmdk troubleshooting info in one spot I’ve seen yet. Definitely bookmarked…

Forbes Guthrie has released another vReference card - this time, updated with juicy 4.1 info. If you work in vSphere and don’t already use one of his incredibly useful previous vReference releases, you owe it to yourself to download the vSphere 4.1 version. Also available are Virtual Infrastructure 3 cards for those of you not inclined to upgrade just yet.

Esxcfg command help

Thank you, Eric Siebert!

During VMworld 2010 in San Francisco one of the big messages being pushed out to the attendees is that VMware ESX will no longer have a future. The 4.1 release will be the last release of VMware ESX, future releases will only come with ESXi. Dauglas Phillips interviewed Sean and Charu from the ESXi team about what this will mean for customers.

Our 4.1 upgrade just changed a wee bit, I think.

The vCenter Server’s vpxd logs contain entries similar to:

An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Check database connectivity before restarting. Error: Error[VdbODBCError] (-1) “ODBC error: (23000) – [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint ‘PK_VPX_GUEST_DISK’. Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.VPX_GUEST_DISK’.” is returned when executing SQL statement “INSERT INTO VPX_GUEST_DISK (VM_ID, PATH, CAPACITY, FREE_SPACE) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)”

The link to the VMware knowledgebase article is here: vCenter Server service fails with the error: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint ‘PK_VPX_GUEST_DISK’

The curious part? That issue is addressed specifically by vCenter Update 1, Build 208111 and we’re running 208111. In any case, shutting down the vCenter service (ok, it wouldn’t run anyway) and running the SQL script supplied in the KB article did the trick and fixed that which should probably already have been fixed. Still super happy we’re not running on Oracle anymore, though…

If you haven’t heard about disk alignment and you’re using virtual machines, you owe it to yourself and your most-likely-growing infrastructure to understand what alignment is all about. On a small scale it’s almost unnoticeable. But I can tell you that on a large scale it becomes a major pain for you or your storage infrastructure team.

One quick tip: to check your disk offset on Windows systems, simply launch msinfo32.exe from the Run menu. See the thumbnail of this post for a screenshot.

From VirtualGeek’s excellent post:

The purpose of alignment is to minimize extraneous internal array operations. All arrays have internal constructs that are generally a function of the RAID model (and also the filesystem alignment, and in some cases logical page table constructs in virtually provisioned models).

<snip>

All the funky goodness is done via either filesystem or another (pages commonly) abstraction on TOP of the RAID abstraction. Think of a 4K NTFS IO operation in a Guest making it’s way down to the array. Once it gets there, let’s say the array has a 64K stripe, but a 1MB “page” used for these fancy features. Falling into two 1MB logical memory pages as an example – where statistically it’s much more likely to land on a boundary if the volume is aligned on a 4K boundary.

It’s very worth your time to delve into this article and find out how your environment is set up, like right now. You might find your templates are mis-aligned, or in our case, that VMware Converter does not properly align disks on conversion (wonder-app Platespin Migrate does, in fact, give you properly-aligned disks).