ESX 3.5

vSwitch and vSwif Problems

What happens when you cannot connect to the service console anymore, and even if you had a backup service console and it wasn’t working either, well i happened to me. When I attempted to attach a vmnic to a vSwitch, I got an error message, no matter what I tried I could not get it reconnected. Last ditch effort is to recreate the vswif interface. Below are the steps I took. I had to do the first 4 steps twice, as i had to vSwitches.

Note: On your system the vswif, vmnic, vSwitch numbers and network settings are different.

1.Run the following command to list the name of the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif -l

2.Run the following command to delete the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif –del vswif0

3.Run the following command to list the name of the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -l

4.Run the following command to delete the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -d vSwitch0

5.Run the following command to create the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch0

6.Run the following commands to create default port groups for vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -A “VM Network” vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -A “Service Console” vSwitch0

7.Run the following command to create the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif –add –portgroup “Service Console” –ip=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn –netmask=255.255.255.0 vswif0

8.Run the following command to verify that the settings in the network file are correct:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
GATEWAYDEV=vswif0
HOSTNAME=host.domain.com
GATEWAY=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn

9.Run the following commands to list all of the network adapters and associate a vmnic which has a link status of up:

esxcfg-nics -l
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch0

10.Run the following command to verify that the vmnic is associated with the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -l

11.Ping an IP address to check for network connectivity. If the ping fails remove the previous vmnic from the vSwitch and try another adapter that has a link status of up.

12.Once you have verified connectivity, you can then connect to Virtual Infrastructure client of the affected ESX Server, you may or may not have a bit a work ahead of you at this point, depending on iSCSI, etc…

Good Luck

-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

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

DRS, Vmotion, and Snapshots

I think setting DRS(Distributed Resource Scheduling) to manual mode when removing snapshots, should be best practice, especially when you are only running two ESX servers and they are slightly taxed. Why? Mainly because when you remove a snapshot, especially a two tiered one, it can cause the hard disk to “thrash” and thus signaling DRS to Vmotion a Virtual Machine from one ESX Server to the other ESX Server automatically. This will of course cause more stress on the hardware and eventually the client may notice the decrease in performance. Hey I’m just speaking from personal experience. When the snapshot is removed, re-enable DRS. Comments?

-NS

Openfiler, Free and Opensource

I am back in the books after being un-prepared for VCP-310 and was needing some iSCSI practice, well i dont have an MSA or HP All-In-One laying around so i improvised. My buddy Raj ( he has a blog on here also) pointed me to a program called Openfiler. I was able to create a VM on VMware Workstation, install Openfiler, and then create an iSCSI target for my ESX Box. Worked like a charm. Since I had never used this product before, I used this Petri Article, “Use OpenFiler as your Free VMware ESX SAN Server”. Read through it all, its a 2 part post.

Just wanted to share my awesome experience of configuring an iSCSI target out of a laptop and virtualization components!

NS

VMware 3.5 and Virtual Infrastruture Client 2.5 Ports

Check this link out, it has a neat port guide in PDF format with all the ports mapped and labelled. Its a visual representation of the ports below.

22. SSH access to service console.
80. HTTP access to web servers.
443. HTTPS SSL access to web servers for VI Web Access.
902. VI Client access to ESX Server or VirtualCenter, and communication between VirtualCenter and ESX Server hosts or between hosts.
903. VM Console access via VI Client or VI Web Access.
2049. Connection to NFS storage devices.
2050-5000, and 8042-8045. Traffic between ESX Server hosts for VMware HA (also utilizes EMC Automated Availability Manager).
3260. Connection to iSCSI storage devices.
8000. Incoming requests from VMotion.
8083. VirtualCenter diagnostics port.
8086. Apache Tomcat web server admin on VirtualCenter Server
27000. License transactions from ESX Server to the License Server.
27010. License transactions from the License Server.

Veeam Backup and Replication 4.0

The soon to be release #1 Backup solution for ESX 3.5 and vSphere is better than ever! Read below for all the new features. If you would like to be notified when Veeam Backup 4 gets released go here.

• Native support for thin-provisioned disks for faster full VM backups and restores, to reduce the amount of storage required to host your production VMs.

• Ability to leverage ESX4 changed block tracking for lightning-fast incremental backup. For instance, if a VM only had 5 percent change since the last backup, the incremental backup time will be 20 times faster.

• Support for the new vStorage API – a VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) replacement. With VCB being discontinued, the vStorage API is the recommended API for VMware vSphere backup going forward. For example, the backup of vSphere

Fault Tolerant VMs will only be possible using the vStorage API. While Veeam is still committed to supporting VCB as long as our customers will require, native support for the vStorage API makes Veeam Backup & Replication the most future-proof solution currently available on the market.

• Support for virtual applications (vApp) for more flexibility with your job setup.

Near-real-time replication at a fraction of the cost In our continuing effort to provide the best VMware replication capabilities on the market, Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 now leverages the new vSphere ESX(i) 4 functionality to provide much faster replication cycles. You can now schedule replication jobs to run as often as every few minutes, allowing you to achieve very low recovery point objectives in case of disaster, thus providing near-CDP (continuous data protection) protection at a fraction of the cost.

Unlike competitive solutions that require replicated VMs to run with open snapshots (which prevent Live Migration and DRS)

Veeam Backup & Replication does not have this requirement and instead uses new vSphere ESX(i) 4 APIs to achieve fast replication cycles. Veeam Backup & Replication also provides the ability to fail over to both current and earlier points in time in case of software corruption – functionality not available from other vendors.

Other Enhancements

Numerous additional enhancements requested by our customers are also included to make Veeam Backup & Replication even easier and more convenient to use:

General

• Hot VM copy. Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 now features a new job type supporting scheduled full-image copies of running VMs to allow hot mirroring of your production environment to test lab storage, for datacenter migrations, or for ad-hoc backups.

• Safe snapshot removal. Veeam Backup & Replication now implements a safe snapshot removal technique to prevent production applications from timing out during helper snapshot commit. This makes Veeam Backup & Replication the only truly production-ready application able to perform hot image-level backups and replicas of large VMs with high disk I/O loads without affecting production applications.

• PowerShell access. You can now control all aspects of Veeam Backup & Replication via PowerShell scripts. This allows you to automate all Veeam Backup & Replication activities, such as job creation and control, changing settings and so on.

• New transactional backup storage, providing for better reliability, performance and improved compatibility with thirdparty hardware storage devices.

• Backup and replication jobs can now automatically fail over to network mode if direct storage access (SAN) mode is not available due to the storage infrastructure issues.

• VM log files are now automatically excluded from backup and replication to increase backup speed and decrease the Backup

• Backup storage disk space monitoring. The backup file location is now continuously monitored, with warnings logged whenever backup storage goes low on free disk space, providing advanced backup storage capacity planning.

• Full backup every N cycle. You can now configure jobs to optionally create full backups at defined intervals, instead of performing forever-incremental backup with synthetic building of the full restore file. A full backup can also be initiated manually from the user interface.

Replication

• Replica seeding. You can now optionally perform initial replication over removable storage, instead of having full replication traffic go over WAN.

• Disk exclusion for replication jobs. Similarly to backup job disk exclusion capabilities, you can now exclude specific disks from replication jobs as well.

User interface

• VM exclusion. Veeam Backup & Replication now provides the ability to exclude specific VMs or virtual infrastructure objects from your container-based backup and replication jobs for added flexibility.

• Multiple job creation wizard enhancements. Creating jobs is even easier than before with the new ability to search for objects based on a few letters from the name, seeing the size of your selected scope of objects, and the ability to estimate the required disk space for backups given your retention policy.

• Ability to change backup and replica destinations on existing jobs so you can move the destination without requiring a full backup from scratch.

• Ability to disable jobs. You can now temporarily disable a backup from running on schedule with a single click, without having to open job properties or clear the schedule.

• Ability to customize VM attribute used to store backup results (backup date and time, backup console name, and path to the backup file containing the specific VM) upon successful backup.

• Ability to perform Windows file-level restore directly to running Windows guest with a new built-in file-level restore.

• And many more minor enhancements requested by our valued customers.

ESX Server not responding

What happens if you esx server stops reporting its memory and cpu usage? What if you cannot connect to any VM’s? I just ran into this issue today. What you need to do is restart the vmware-mgmt service on the ESX Console.

What you will need to do is connect to the ESX Service console via Putty, once there login as a user who has root access, then type su - and hit enter, now put in the root username and password. Once you are connected as the root user, type this in “service mgmt-vmware restart” This will restart the Vmware Virtual Center Management Agent and allow you to gain back control of your ESX Server.

NS

Veeam 3.0 for VMware Infrastructure

Veeam Backup 3.0 has just recently been released. Below are some of the main features and benefits.

• Backup and replication combined
• Support for ESXi and ESXi free
• File-level recovery in seconds
• Database-consistent backup
• Reduced storage costs with data de-duplication
• Faster backup and restore with synthetic backup
• Replica rollback
• Integration with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)

I installed the demo version, which can be aquired from here, all you have to do is put some information in including you email and they will send you a demo license. I was able to backup a 16GB VM and do a file level restore in under 30 mins. The scheduling is a breeze, the interface is clean, and the performance is amazing. I highly recommend this product.

HP has recently partnered with them. Check it out here. EPIC information Solutions also became partners with Veeam for the purpose of reselling and support.

For more information on Veeam Backup go to their homepage and check it out.

 NS

ESX 3.5, IDE, and Me

What the heck am I talking about you say? Well I decided to load ESX 3.5 on a workstation of mine. This is so I could do a test upgrade from 3.5 to 3.5 Patch 3, mainly because I want to make sure VMFS and the VMs are retained after upgrading to said patch level.

So I commenced installing ESX 3.5 on my 40GB IDE drive, yeah I said IDE, who uses those anymore anyways, apparently I do. The install went fine, for the most part, until it said that I wouldn’t be able to use the current drive as a datastore (without advanced configuration). Anyways on I go, I finish the install and all is fine. I was able to connect using Virtual Infrastructure Client, but then I see the message that ViC could not find any static storage, click here to configure a datastore. I clicked on the link and of course nothing was there… did some searching and it turns out that ESX 3.5 does not support IDE drives as a datastore due to the fact that NCQ(native command queuing) is missing from IDE Drive, however SATA drives will work fine. So what I ended up doing is I just installed a 80GB Sata drive, yes small i know, but its only for testing purposes, and rebooted the ESX machine, from ViC. Upon rebooting it found the new hardware and I was able to use ViC to add the new datastore… all 80GBs of it, all right!

Moral of the story… SATA/SCSI okay, IDE not okay

Till next time,

NS