How to Properly kill a VM

We all know that you can use the command “ps -ef |grep (vmconfig filename.vmx)” to find the PID for a VM, but I get confused as to which number that comes up is actually the PID… I found a new command that works much better. See below.

The Definitive way to Kill a PID process

The steps below are based on the fact that you already tried to use “vmware-cmd vmname.vmx stop; stop hard”

1.)    A final solution is to kill the PID (process ID). Issue the following command: “ps auxfww | grep <vmname>” to locate the correct PID (BTW: this cannot be done via *ESXTOP*). The first number to appear in the output is your PID. The PID can be used to terminate the process by issuing kill -9 PID.

2.)    Run vmware-cmd <vmname>.vmx getstate to see if it is now “off”, as it should be.

3.)    You can now go back into Virtual Infrastructure Client and start the machine.

-NS

Windows Server 2008 File Management

If you are looking for Open files in Windows Server 2008 you need to find Share and Storage Management. To start the tool, choose Start > Administrative Tools > Share and Storage Management, from there you can click on Manage Open Files(from the right most pane). Done.

-NS

VMware Vroom!

If you haven’t subscribed to this RSS Feed, you should do so now… it includes Performance Tips for ESX and vSphere. Here is the link and read the insert below.

“We made a huge number of performance improvements in vSphere 4.0. The ESX storage stack was no exception. We ran a wide variety of micro and real world benchmarks to thoroughly evaluate and optimize vSphere’s storage subsystem. It is now even more efficient for the enterprise and ready to support the cloud.

A wide variety of I/O intensive applications will run efficiently on vSphere with all the improvements.  You can find details on the architectural changes and storage performance improvements made in this white paper.”

I suggest you add the feed to your BlackBerries(Viigo) or iPhone immediately, yes now… not later, now.

NS

vSphere and Datastore Monitoring

I just wanted to point out an article that I found while searching about vSphere and Datastore management and monitoring.

What would be better than being warned that your datastore is reaching a critical point, wouldn’t it be nice to intercept before the VMs crash?! Of course it would. Check out this pdf “Storage with VMware vSphere“, I have included an insert below.

“vSphere enables many new features for the management of virtualization storage resources. These capabilities provide vSphere administrators with new ways to increase efficiency for disk utilization and CPU cycles. With automated proactive alerts and alarms, vCenter provides more visibility and control of storage resource allocations, deployment, and monitoring. Also, new levels of reporting, topology maps, and datastore status and details screens provide an easy way to manage access and limit storage sprawl in VMware deployments. Storage VMotion has been enhanced to enable more choices for migrating VM homes from one type of storage to another. And finally, new choices exist for optimizing I/O traffic for I/O intensive Virtual Machines.”

This next link gives you a quick insight into what vSphere Offers in terms of Data Management overall, including “Responsible Thin Provisioning”.

Of course if you just cant get your hands on vSphere 4, then you can purchase Veeam Monitoring, which can monitor datastores and alert you when the datastores are almost full… see insert and check out the Veeam Monitor Homepage

“Veeam Monitor 4.0 provides full storage monitoring capabilities, including disk space, disk issues and datastore monitoring. The latter allows for viewing datastore load information aggregated from disk utilization statistics of all VMs and hosts using the specific datastore. This allows you to see the actual cumulative load on a particular datastore, and set up an alarm that fires off when the datastore load is above a specified threshold. Datastore I/O monitoring is a unique Veeam Monitor feature not available from other VMware monitoring applications.”
-NS

New Sysinternals Release Disk2VHD

Anything from Sysinternals is worth a look, I have never used Disk2vhd, but im sure it works like a charm. Remember not to make your VHD bigger than 127GB as Virtual PC cannot handle and will not work with VHD’s of that size. Also Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and higher, including x64 systems. Read the full article here.

Run it from live.sysinternals.com

Insert from Sysinternals

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

“Windows 7″ is only Three Days Away!

Everyone ready to buy and install the latest and greatest Operating system since Windows XP? Based on the below stats(see insert), i think it is. I for one give Windows 7 a big thumbs up. I haven’t had this good of an experience with anything before retail as I have had with Windows 7 RC2. In fact, even though as an MSDN subscriber I am not going to install the latest copy of Windows 7, its just not needed at this point(for me personally). If you my readers can give me a few reasons why,(other than testing App-V; which I will most likely be able to download and install here anyways) then I might have to bite the bullet and start over once again. Its not like I haven’t re-installed my PC about a hundred times in the last 5 years! What is one more reload right?

Insert from Business Standard

“Microsoft, despite claims to the contrary, has not had much success with Vista which was launched in 2006. Analysts estimate that just one fifth of the world’s 1.2 billion computers use Vista. About four fifths use Windows XP (launched in 2001), introduced eight years ago, or even older Windows operating systems. XP is eight years old, but still runs on 70 per cent of all the Windows PCs across the globe. Microsoft will end active support for XP by 2014, and extended support by 2017.” Read the full story here.

Hosted Exchange and Outlook 2007 SPLA

EPIC Information Solutions hosts exchange for many clients, and one of those clients emailed me and asked me to fix the “AutoComplete” option in his Outlook 2007 installation. When a customer subscribes to hosted exchange we can provide them with an Outlook 2007 SPLA (Services Provider License Agreement) Client (Outlook 2007 only) Doing some quick research turned up this article from Technet “Impact of deploying Outlook 2007 without Word 2007“, for your reference i have inserted a small portion of the article.

“Features that are not available without Word 2007

When Office Outlook 2007 runs on a computer where Office Word 2007 is not installed, the following functional areas are affected.

Attachment Preview
Attachment preview in Office Outlook 2007 is not supported for Microsoft Office 2003 file types or earlier. To preview attachments in Office Outlook 2007, you must have an application installed that can preview the file type and uses the IPreviewHandler interfaces that were introduced with Office Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista. For example, to preview a Word file in Office Outlook 2007, you must have Office Word 2007 installed. This also applies to other Office file types regardless of the Office compatibility packs or viewers installed.

Autoformat
All auto-formatting behaviors, with the exception of hyperlinks, are disabled. This includes AutoIndent for tabs, AutoFormat of bullets and numbering, and so on.

Internet and network paths with hyperlinks are still automatically formatted as hyperlinks.

Autotext
Autotext functionality and the new Building Blocks feature (Quick Parts) are disabled and removed from the user interface (UI).

Background spelling
The option to use F7 for spell checking is enabled, but there is no background spell checking (no red squiggles* under misspelled words).

* I like how they actually used the word squiggles

-NS

Nvidia’s New GPU

Its called “Fermi” Nvidia’s new super GPU. It has around 3 billion transistors, which is three times the amount of transistors in Nvidia’s most powerful GPU. Fermi will contain 512 processing cores, they say that this would enable scientific breakthroughs, and can only be possible with the new technology. Read the full story here and check out this story over at CNET for a gaming perspective. I included an insert for a quick preview of the full story.

“From a gaming perspective, the most significant features Nvidia mentioned are that Fermi will indeed support DirectX 11, and that it will use GDDR5 memory. Those features answer two of AMD’s most obvious advantages with its new Radeon HD 5800-series cards, but Nvidia hasn’t provided information on availability, which remains AMD’s most important edge.”

Understanding VMware Snapshots.

I wanted to clear the air on snapshots, everyone is always asking, how much space does it take to remove a snapshot, but no one has a real answer…  whatever the answer may be this information inserted from the Basic System Administration PDF, which is readily available from VMware and can be downloaded from this link here, will help to explain how they work, and what can be done if you run out of space and cannot commit a snapshot. Please take your time and read through the below information and you will get a much better understanding of snapshots. The information below is a copyright of VMware. I have in no way altered its content.

“The Understanding Snapshots section does not include information on delta disks. The section should contain the following content:

To take a snapshot, the state of the virtual disk at the time of taking the snapshot must be preserved. When this occurs, the guest operating system cannot write to the VMDK file. The delta disk is an additional VMDK file where the guest is given write access. The delta disk represents the difference between the current state of the virtual disk and the state at the time of the previous snapshot. If more than one snapshots exist, delta disks might represent the difference (or delta) between each snapshot. Also, the guest can write to every single block of the virtual disk causing the delta disk to grow as large as the base VMDK of the virtual machine.

NOTE To consolidate all snapshots into the base virtual machine, you might need extra disk space, as large as the base VMDK.

When a snapshot is deleted, if a user chooses to merge the changes between the snapshots to the previous disk‐state, all the data from the delta disk that contains the information about the deleted snapshot is written to the parent disk. This might involve a large amount of disk I/O and might reduce the virtual machine performance until consolidation is complete.

If the user chooses to ignore the delta disks, delta consolidation is not required.

See VMware Knowledge Base system for more information on the iterative snapshot deletion behaviour. I’ve Included the details of the (KB article 1003302).

Details

If you try to initiate a Delete All snapshot for a virtual machine using Snapshot Manager, and if that virtual machine is on a datastore that does not have sufficient space for the snapshot, the following message displays in VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client:

msg.hbacommon.outofspace: there is no more space for the redo log of <VMname>-0000xx.vmdk.

You are given the option to abort or retry.

• If you choose Abort, the virtual machine is powered off, the snapshot is aborted, and a Consolidate Helper snapshot is created. The Snapshot Manager UI displays that Consolidate Helper snapshot. You can delete the Consolidate Helper snapshot after you have made space available.
• If you click Retry, the Snapshot Manager returns to Consolidate Helper snapshot mode unless you have made more disk space available.

Solution

Free up disk space if possible, or extend the VMFS volume using VI Client.

To extend the VMFS volume:

1. Select the host on which the virtual machine resides and click the Configuration tab.
2. Select the datastore on which the virtual machine resides and click Properties.Note: If there is no available storage, a new LUN must be presented to every ESX host that can see the LUN.

3. In the dialog that appears, click Add Extent and follow the prompts in the Add Extend wizard to add an extent.
4. Perform a rescan on every ESX host that is being presented the new LUN so that the addition of the extent is detected.
5. After you have extended the VMFS volume, you can check the Retry option of the Redo log pop-up.

Caution: When using Delete All in the Snapshot Manager, the snapshot furthest from the base disk is committed to its parent, causing that parent snapshot to grow. When that commit is complete, that snapshot is removed and the process starts over on the newly updated snapshot to its parent. This continues until every snapshot has been committed. This can lead to an aggressive use of additional disk space if the snapshots are large. Use care when exercising this option if there is not much space available on the datastore.”

Veeam Monitor 4.5 + Veeam Business View

… Are now  is now available!

For the first time ever, you can see the impact of virtual infrastructure performance on individual business units…and take immediate action! Veeam’s newest release now allows you to bridge the gap between IT and business:

- Group, view, and manage virtual machines based on business criteria such as business unit, location, application (e.g. all Exchange servers), service level agreement (SLA), owner, etc.

- Create flexible alerts based on server or application type (e.g all Exchange servers) and business impact (e.g. all high SLA VMs)

- Identify the business impact of the virtual infrastructure’s performance

- Fight VM sprawl

- Discover how easy it is to see your business in a brand new way with Veeam Monitor 4.5 plus Veeam Business View.

Go Here to download Veeam Monitor and Veeam Business View