Blue Gears

I recently co-presented with William Lam a session on the vGhetto Scripts and Client at VMworld 2010. The PPC-07 talk was within the Technology Exchange for Developers sub-conference of VMworld 2010.  For an extra few hundred dollars you were able to sit in on sessions by Carter Shankln, William Lam, and other VMware vSphere SDK developers.  We wanted to wow our audience, which in the end I believe we did. We displayed and used the vGhetto Client from VMware vMA, my Mac OS X laptop, and an iPad.  However, to get to the final set of demos required quite a bit of setup. I want to discuss this setup further so that others can duplicate what we did.

Hardware

The lab for the demos ran on three hardware devices. The first was an i7 Mac Book Pro with 8GBs of memory and a 512GB SSD. SSD was a great benefit for the demos as we will be running quite a few VMs. The second bit of hardware was of course an Apple iPad. The third however, no one really saw within the environment and was a Dlink DWL-G730AP. This last device is a USB or wall powered Access Point which provided DHCP within the demo environment as well as the ability to connect the iPad to the environment without needed to worry about whether or not the VMworld wireless was running.

Virtual Machines

The environment consisted of the following VMs:

• OpenFiler 2.3
• VMware vSphere ESX 4.1
• VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1
• VMware vCenter 4.1
• VMware vMA 4.1

These VMs ran within VMware Fusion 3.1.1 with 2 networks in use. The bridged network was connected to the AirPort device and then to the Dlink DWL-G730AP device. This network contained all the management appliances for each ESX host, OpenFiler, vCenter, and vMA. The second network was host-only and was for the vMotion and Fault Tolerance networks to be created by the demo scripts.

Even a demo should contain necessary security separation. You really need to demo using what you want to happen in reality. To that end, we never logged in as an Administrator or root user, but as the vMA410 and vi-admin users who had the proper permissions within the environment.

Software

The software we used was Perl based, which required us to ensure the proper bits were installed within MacOS X as well as VMware vMA. To that end, two new vGhetto Installer scripts were created: vghetto.sh and vghetto-osx.sh. These are available via SVN using:

svn co https://vghetto.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vghetto vghetto

The scripts are located within the installers directory. Each of these scripts setup the environment for running the vGhetto Client as well as the scripts. If you wish to use VNC from vMA then uncomment the last line of the vghetto script. This last line installs select components of X11R6 and Gnome within vMA as the Perl/TK vGhetto Client will not work with just the TWM window manager. I am sure there is a reduced set of packages that will work but we had limited time to organize this configuration.

What we found was that both MacOSX and vMA were missing quite a few pre-requisites to even  use the vGhetto scripts. For MacOSX this also required the download of the vSphere SDK for Perl from the VMware download site. Then running the vghetto-osx.sh script from within the directory where you stored the installation image for the vSphere SDK. Not only would the script install dependencies but will also install the vSphere SDK for Perl when required to do so.

These two scripts do all the heavy lifting so that you can make easy use of the vGhetto scripts and Client. Actually, there is also a demoprep.sh script you can use to create the same demos used within PPC-O7.

Other than one slight problem with OpenFiler, all the demos ran without a hitch. We were even able to configure FT on a VM even when shared storage was not available.

I get lots of spam. There seems to be nothing I can do about it so I believe I need to find a better  scanner/mail platform. So I went looking for something different. Currently I use Amavisd/Postfix/ClamAV/SpamAssassin, which when properly configured SHOULD find nearly all Spam. But alas, I believe after the most recent upgrade the configuration was shot. Even the bayesian learning system did not really learn anything new, and I kept getting the same old mail. This was/is annoying at best.

So I looked into Zimbra. Zimbra ships as a Virtual Appliance which was perfect for my needs and a 10 user limited license is fairly inexpensive as in free. Continue reading ‘New Mail Server: Zimbra? MailScanner?’ »

Well I had some serious issues going to vSphere 4.1 from v4.0U2. The steps for the upgrade seemed straightforward:

1. Upgrade vCenter Server
2. Upgrade ESX

Well, it was not all that easy. Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade: Going to 4.1 (Updated)’ »

I was in the market for a new Laptop, given that mine is at least 3 years old and starting to show its age with non-working USB ports, one blown power supply, and failing batteries. My requirements are slightly above the average:

Any laptop must be able to run the following at the same time within a hosted virtualization solution such as VMware Workstation or Fusion.

• VMware vSphere ESX 4
• VMware vSphere ESX 4i
• VMware vCenter Server on Windows 2008
• Virtual Storage Appliance (I use OpenFiler at the moment)
• Firewall
• Development Environment for my security script Continue reading ‘Moving from Windows 7 to Mac OS Snow Leopard’ »

In my last post “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail” I realized that I badly configured my SAN from the start. So I bit the bullet and started a process to change the number of spindles per LUN to 11 of 12 disks, with the 12 disk being a hot spare. Performance on SAN LUN is directly proportional to the number of spindles in use by the RAID set and my old setup had 3 Disk LUNs instead of using virtual LUNs ontop of one larger physical LUN.

Now that I know how to configure this, I wanted to make use of the higher performance. To do this, I had to

1. first offload all VMs from the SAN to some other storage by way of SVMotion
2. backup any RDMs I have
3. update the LUN layout of the IBM DS3400 to be 11 disks in a Raid 5 with virtual LUNs presented to ESX
4. SVMotion the VMs to the new LUNs Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade: Rearranging LUNs for Better Performance: Updated’ »

Recently my IBM DS3400 SAN gave an alert that the controller batteries had to be changed out. So after ordering some batteries, receiving them, it was time to perform a battery exchange.   The steps are quite straight forward but still require a bit of forethought. I run  IBM System Storage Manager 10 from within a VM running Windows 2008 R2, it is actually my VMware vCenter Server. In order, for me to exchange the batteries the IBM System Storage Manager 10 must be able to talk to the controllers either over the network or over the fibre connection. Since this is a VM, all I can do is control the SAN over the network at this time. Continue reading ‘IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail’ »

I recently donated the last of my DL380 G3 systems to Keefe Technical Highschool for use as their ESX v3 Cluster. The only issue was that this machine was also my last remaining server that I had yet to virtualized and it was my backup server with quite a bit of disk space, connection to my tape libraries and my DISC Blu-Safe backup library. To virtualize my backup server was going to be difficult at best as I am switching entirely from Tape devices to Blu-ray devices.

I explained this choice in another post but suffice it to say, I need to be able to connect this USB device to a VM and then use it as part of my backup solution. This required a bit more work than before as now I had to include in my vNetwork a USB over IP device that would allow not only my printer but my Blu-Safe to be seen by multiple and individual VMs.  For this I chose the Belkin FL5009 5-port USB over IP device. While it has its issues, such as not working across a NAT, it does however allow me to share my printer with other VMs while locking the Blu-Safe to a very specific VM. Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade – The Backup Saga’ »

Thanks to Cody Bunch of the twittersphere helped me to solve the latest mystery within my vSphere environment: vCenter would fail to start after a reboot of the Windows 2008 vCenter Server VM. This has been plaguing me since I started this process, but it finally needed to be fixed!

The problem is that VMware Update Manager and VMware vCenter Server collide when they are both trying to access the MSSQL 2008 database for some odd reason.

The solution is fairly easy, add a service dependency on VMware Update Manager so that it requires VMware vCenter to start first. To do this open up regedit and navigate to HKLM\System\ControlSet001\services\vmware-ufad-vci key and add a new Multi String Value named ‘DependOnService’. Give this new registry element a value of ‘vpxd’.

This will now place a dependency on VUM such that it requires vCenter to start first. Now on reboots, vCenter starts properly and I no longer have to manually start the service.

Well I got bit by the 2nd disk issue that occurs with hardware 7 on Windows 2008 Datacenter server. It was very troublesome until the twitter-sphere pointed me to an article written by vStu about this issue. Yet this did not entirely fix the problem. It took some more twitter-sphere assistance to find the solution to the problem.

As vStu discovered all virtual machine disk files (VMDKs) are presented to VMs as SAN disks and Windows 2008 changed how SAN disks were handled, in effect they are offline until you set them online. I kept getting a pesky, “Disk is Offline because policy was set by an administrator” message. Microsoft’s website does not even know about this error message apparently. But the solution is a combination of websites. First you need to change how Windows 2008 sees the SAN devices, then you need to clear a readonly flag, then you are good to go. Using ‘diskpart’ enter the following commands: Continue reading ‘vSphere Upgrade – 2nd Disk Issues with Hardware 7’ »

Well, as time permits I have been slowly upgrading my VMs to the latest virtual hardware. When I started this process, it was before VMware instituted a warning within the Upgrade Virtual Hardware that you first need to upgrade VMware Tools. This problem bit me twice and it was enough that I put in my own policy to always upgrade VMware Tools BEFORE upgrading the Virtual Hardware.

When you play around with Windows 2008 R2, if you do not properly upgrade VMware Tools before a Virtual Hardware Upgrade your VM will spin out of control sucking up CPU until you kill it. Which you have to do, in order to fix the issue. A reboot will fix the issue, but then you must upgrade VMware Tools before anything else happens. I suggest using Safe-Mode.

In one of the updates VMware kindly introduced a warning box when you upgrade Virtual Hardware to let you know that you need to update VMware Tools first. If you do not install VMware Tools due to security concerns, you may want to not upgrade your virtual hardware. I have not tried removing the tools after Virtual Hardware Upgrade, which may be another option.