North East VM User Group

The next North East VMware User Group has been announced.  It’s at Ramside Hall Hotel near Durham on Tuesday 27th March from 16:00 to 17:30.  The agenda is as follows:

• Official VMUG - An overview by Matthew Steiner of VMware
• Site Recovery Manager and VDR
• Group discussion
• Formation of a steering group

To register and find out more info see http://www.vmwarenortheast.org.uk/

Home Lab Update

   It’s been a while since my last post so what better what to start that with a home lab update.  My previous home lab was an HP Proliant DL380.  This did serve it’s purpose but due to it being a power hungry beast and the fact it sounded like a jet engine it was just impractical to run 24 x 7.  I wanted a lab that could run a DC, SQL, vCenter 5 and a Windows 7 machine for remote access.  It would also be nice to have a bit of spare capacity for trialling other VM / software but primarily this was to learn vSphere 5 to prepare for both VCP5 and both VCAP’s once released (I passed VCP5 about 2 months ago).

   So, after reviewing what was out there I decided on the HP Microserver due to cost (HP are currently offering £100 cash back) and power consumption.  Simon Seagrave has an excellent review of the HP Microserver here  I purchased the following:

3 x HP Microserver N36L
3 x HP V165 8GB USB Flash Drive
3 x Intel PRO/1000 CT Desktop Adaptor PCI Express
6 x Kingston Value RAM memory - 4 GB - DIMM 240-pin – DDR3

   The idea was to have two ESXi5 hosts and one SAN (OpenFiler).  Since HP still had the £100 cash back offer on I decided to purchase another Microserver, this time a N40L which came with 2 GB ram instead of 1.  All 4 servers came with 250gb 7.2k disks which I inserted into the N40L and installed OpenFiler and created 2 iSCSI LUNS and NFS shares.  Since I now have 3 ESXi5 hosts I use two for the general day to day operations and also use the 3rd for testing auto deploy.  I purchased a cheap Net Gear gigabit switch (unmanaged) and hooked it all up.  I have ESXi5 running of USB connected to the OpenFiler SAN.



 

Ghost VMkernel Adapter

I came across a strange issue recently when configuring a new vDS in vSphere 5.  I had already configured two VMkernel adapters but for some reason one of them half created.  Only one was visible when viewing the vDS settings on the host:

When attempting to create a new one I’d receive a message stating that one already existed (apologies I don’t have the screen shot as I fixed it before creating this post).  I was unable to locate this within vCenter or even when connecting directly to the host.  Only way I could resolve it was to enable and connect to the host via SSH and list all VMkernel adapters with the following command:

esxcli network ip interface list

Now I could see the offending adapter.  Next option was to remove it:

esxcli network ip interface remove –i <Adapter name>

Now when listing the adapters again it was successfully remove and could be re-added again within vCenter.

Book Review - vSphere Clustering - Technical Deepdive

Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman have done it again.  Following the success of HA and DRS - Technical Deepdive for vSphere 4.1 they have released vSphere Clustering - Technical Deepdive for vSphere 5

The book is available in Black and White, Colour and also for the Kindle.  I opted for the full fat colour version which I ordered from the USA as it wasn't available in the UK.  The full colour version doesn't disappoint due to the sheer amount of diagrams used to explain some of the concepts.

Chapters 1 through 9 go through vSphere High Availability (HA) and also go in depth over the changes in HA with vSphere 5.  No longer do we have the concept of primary and secondary nodes and the issues that can arise in the event of losing all primary nodes. vSphere 5 HA was completely re-written and uses FDM (Fault Domain Manager) which has the concept of master and slave nodes within a cluster.  The book also goes in depth about the new HA datastore heartbeat which can be used in the event of loss of the management network.  HA is one of those features that people take for granted since it can pretty much be configured with a few clicks and "just works".  These chapters go into the inner workings of HA and are a must for anyone designing vSphere environments.

Chapters 10 through 19 go in depth, and I mean really in depth, in the changes to Distributed Resource Scheduler DRS within vSphere 5.  Once again, DRS is one of those technologies than can be enabled with a few clicks and pretty much forgotten about.  These chapters explain every inch of DRS and how it goes about making the decisions that ultimately affect where a VM is migrated or a host is powered down to save power consumption.  Some of the concepts can be quite difficult to follow but nearly all discussions are followed up with flow diagrams that further explain the theory.  I found myself having a read some sections a couple of times to let the information sink in and then the flow diagrams reinforced it.

Chapters 20 through to 26 explain about the new vSphere Storage DRS (SDRS).  This is a new feature in vSphere 5 that allows monitoring of datastores for disk space and disk latency and either make recommendations or, in automatic mode, perform the actual recommendation.  SDRS will ensure all datastores are load balanced for disk IO and space as best it can whilst also taking into consideration any affinity or anti affinity rules you have.  The chapters explain all setting (including advanced) that you have at your disposal and how certain decisions can affect others.

Once again, the guys have produced an excellent technical resource that just shows that HA, DRS and SDRS are extremely useful and advanced features of vSphere that all production environments should utilize.

UK North East vBeers

Interested in VMware?
Live in/or near the North East of England?
Like beer?

Then why not join the UK North East vBeers first meeting:

http://www.vbeers.org/2011/06/27/vbeers-%E2%80%93-north-east-england/

Time to start blogging again...

I've been pretty slack recently in blogging and I'm going to try and change going forward.  Work's been pretty hectic over the last few months with an Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migrations (Which is nearly finished) and various other projects.  I now have a bit of time free to concentrate on rebuilding my home vSphere lab.  I'm planning on rebuilding the entire environment including all VM's due to the various changes that have been made to the over the years.  I'll hopefully keep you updated.

vCenter Alarms not triggering

I’ve recently just finished upgrading our vSphere environment from ESX4.0 to ESXi4.0 and encountered a strange issue with alarms.  We have custom alarms for when a datastore is overprovisioned and when a snapshot exists.  When building our two new vCenter 4.1 servers I configured these alarms so they were ready for when I connected the ESX hosts ready to rebuild.  Once I connected all our ESX hosts and add the VM’s to the inventory none of the alarms would trigger.  I knew we had datastore’s that were overprovisioned and I also created a snapshot for a VM to see if the alarm would trigger.  None of the custom alarms would trigger.  In order to resolve this I had to go into the alarm definition, disable the alarm, OK the command and then re-enable:

Obviously this had something to do with me creating the alarms before having any VM to apply it to.  Just something to watch out for.