Enhanced Vmotion Capabilities and You!

Sometimes you need to enable EVC to make sure vMotion plays nice with your ESX Hosts, I used this document as a reference point to make sure everything would work once EVC was enabled. Check it out.

For those questioning, “Can I enable this on the fly without downing any ESX Hosts or VMs?” The answer is yes you can enable it on the fly, just make sure to comply with the compatibility results when selecting your processor type, be it Core2Duo or Core2Duo 45nm etc…

-NS

HP Integrated Lights-Out 2 v2.00 (22 Jun 2010)

ILO2 has been update a little while back, if you are still running an older version of ILO2 I would recommend upgrading as it fixes some ASR shutdown issues amongst other enhancements.

Added the following new features:

• New HP Intelligent Power Distribution Unit 
• Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for imported certificates
• A Recovery Payload that will help users recover iLO 2 from a failed firmware upgrade via FTP. Additional details can be found in the new User Guide which can be found at http://www.hp.com/go/ilo
• “IPMI over LAN” functionality. The IPMI 2.0 RMCP+ (or Linux ipmitool “lanplus”) protocol is supported with this release.
• IPMI Serial Over LAN (SOL)
• Data Center Manageability Interface (DCMI) v1.0 specification
• Enhanced the “in band” Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) to comply with the IPMI specification version 2.0

Go here to download the firmware, extract to a folder then upload the firmware via ILO2, yes you can do the upgrade live, only ILO will be reset.

-NS

SysAdmin Day!

Hey everyone, if you an IT Administrator of any kind, its SysAdmin Day! [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/udhd9fmOdCs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] So grab yourself a coffee, sit back, and administrator something technical!

Veeam and Consolidate Helper- 0

A lot of people run into issues with Veeam and the cause can sometimes be the Consolidate Helper. Here is an explanation from Veeam.

“it is automatically created by ESX host during snapshot management process. Whether the job fails due to an error, or manually stopped, Veeam Backup goes through the same (and only) cleanup procedure that would remove snapshot we have created during backup (“VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT”) – you can easily confirm this snapshot appearing first, and then disappearing.”

So basically you should disable any Veeam jobs that are scheduled and remove the offending “snapshot” Be wary though that when removing a snapshot, it can hog the disk on the ESX host, and in-turn may cause issues with any servers on that host.

-NS

Veeam Restore Issue and Resolution

When you go to restore a VM using Veeam Backup 4.x.x you may get the following error.

Failed to validate command “OpenPortIn for firewall port xxxx”

The resolution is simple and as follows.

Under the ESX Host properties you are trying to restore to, enable “Elevate to Root” and “Add account to sudoers file automatically”

Once you have completed this step you should be good to go.

-NS

New Blackberry 9800

I’ve been noticing a lot of stories popping up about Blackberry’s device that should help businesses keep away from iPhones. Here is an insert with some information and specs on the new phone.

RIM is expected to announce details of the iPhone-esque BlackBerry 9800 next week. Don’t hold your breath that for the BlackBerry smartphone to blow the iPhone or Android smartphones out of the water, but as long as the device can hold its own it should be a winner for RIM.

The phone will be having a 3 inch display touch screen with 360 x 480 pixels having 65K colors, 5 megapixel camera with Liquid lens technology, Touch sensitive optical track pad, HSDPA and GSM facility, 3.5 mm audio jack, micro SD slot that can handle up to 16 GB of files, GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, microUSB v2.0 and Li-Ion 1050 mAh battery. It also includes Wi-Fi 802.11n, a 4GB on board storage for more space for downloaded files, 512 MB RAM. It also has a media player, pod cast apps and Upgraded Web kit browser that is really cool and entertaining stuff that fits any user, ensuring happy and comfortable use.

Currently I have been using my Bold 9700 with a hybrid operating system, some of OS 5 and some of OS 6. I must say that there are some key benefits to OS 6.

-NS

P2V Conversion Fails, OS will not boot

Sometimes you get a server that fails to convert, i.e. it just won’t boot. If you use a Recovery CD (Windows Server 2003/2008 Install Disk) you can see that the files are all there, but it just refuses to boot no matter what you do. Well here is what I ran into… ESX Host was ESX 4.1(same results when running ESX 4.0 Update 2) and the guest OS to be converted was Server 2003 R2. Using VMware Convertor 4.1 i tried to convert it a few times using different settings and different SCSI Adapters, all the while never worrying about which version of vHardware i was converting to, which was v7. So after many failed attempts, Ithough what if I use v4 hardware and upgrade from there, well what do you know, I was correct. Sometimes a guest OS just cannot handle the bump in vHardware. So after that, all i had to do was install VMware tools for ESX 4.1 then update the vhardware… done…. hope this helps someone.

-NS

VMware vSphere 4.1 is Officially Released!

Its finally here, VMware vSphere 4.1, which includes VMware ESXi 4.1 Installable, VMware ESXi 4.1 Embedded, and VMware vCenter Server 4.1.

I intend to start testing this new release tomorrow am, I am usually a big fan of ESX4 Installable, but based on how things are going in VMware I will have to start migrating to vSphere ESXi 4.1. I included an insert from www.VMware.com to peek your interest.

VMware ESX. VMware vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture.

- VMware recommends that customers start transitioning to the ESXi architecture when deploying VMware vSphere 4.1.
- VMware will continue to provide technical support for VMware ESX according to the VMware vSphere support policy.
- To learn more about the ESXi architecture and how to migrate from ESX to ESXi, go to the VMware ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center.

Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting. You cannot use scripted installation to install ESXi to a USB device. See the ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide, the ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide, and the ESXi Embedded and vCenter Server Setup Guide.

vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi. After installing ESX and ESXi, users are directed to the download page on the VMware Web site to get the compatible vSphere Client for that release. The vSphere Client is still packaged with builds of vCenter Server. See the ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide, the ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide, and the ESXi Embedded and vCenter Server Setup Guide.

Don’t forget to reference this link, for all the new features, download links and information your techie mind can handle!

-NS

vSphere 4.1

VMware is to announce the official release of vSphere 4.1 tomorrow. One great option for SMB Clients is vSphere Essentials Plus.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus—This kit includes all the features of vSphere Essentials, plus High Availability and Data Recovery to automatically recover your data and restart your virtual machines in the event of system failures; with vMotion technology, now you can completely eliminate planned downtime during server maintenance.

I also mananged to find a list of features, a main one being support for passthrough USB, can it really be true? Anyways go here for the complete list of BETA features, its possible that not all will make it in the official release, I will post again after vSphere 4.1 is officially released.

-NS

Google App Inventor

Now this is interesting, a front end to help an end user create their own Google apps!

People can build any app they want with App Inventor, according to Google. The App Inventor team has created blocks for just about everything you can do with an Android phone, the company said.

The team has also created blocks for doing “programming-like stuff” such as storing information, repeating actions, performing actions under certain conditions, and talking to services such as Twitter, Google said.

Users can create games, quiz apps and leverage Android’s text-to-speech capabilities.

To use App Inventor, you have to first fill in a form and sign up for the beta here. The form focuses strongly on educators.

Before using App Inventor, users have to link their smartphones to their PCs or Macs through the USB port.

Head on over to Technology News to get the full scoop.