If you are running a vCloud Director environment, host maintenance and host management is a bit different. Changes you make in vCenter might not reflect correctly inside vCloud. If vCloud Director does not know about certain changes, the stability and performance of your environment is at risk. [Read more…]
How to fix vCloud VMRC connection issues
Sometimes things happen for no reason. I am working in a new, inherited environment these days and a lot of my time is spent investigating, gathering data and information, and of course putting out fires here and there. The last system administrator had left before I started and so I am flying blind a bit, but that is alright. [Read more…]
How to update Qlogic HBA Firmware on VMware ESX
Recently I ran into an issue with a VMware server running ESX 4.1 U2. The server started crashing randomly. Working with Dell we did a lot of troubleshooting and they replaced a lot of hardware during the process. Dell could not pinpoint the faulty part and so they started replacing motherboard, CPUs, RAM, Memory Riser Cards, the motherboard (again), and the 2 Qlogic HBAs. At that point Dell required that the HBA Firmware needs to be upgraded due to the replacement parts not being on the latest version. And that’s where things became ugly. [Read more…]
PowerCLI Clone VMs Script
One internal customer I have been working with for a while never stops to throw new challenges at me. Initialy the task was to set up 30+ VMs for the customer. Then we had to work through a situation where they wanted to take snapshots, but keep them for months at a time. Snapshots under my watch are not being kept that long. If a customer needs a snapshot for that long, we’d rather take a backup or clone the VM as needed. [Read more…]
SAN Cleanup with PowerCLI
Recently I had the need to do some SAN storage cleanup. We had VMs that were changed in regards to criticality and accordingly needed to be moved (storage vmotion) to different LUNs. In the environment I currently work in, storage has several tiers and it depends on the VM criticality where it fits in. As an example a development or test VM would be on different storage compared to a production server. [Read more…]
How to install VMWare Drivers from VMWare Driver ISO for ESXi
Last night I was working during non-business hours patching and upgrading several ESXi hosts (HP Blades BL460 G7). Everything was going well, so I thought. However, upon having all patches and update packages installed I noticed that my storage was gone. A quick check on the configuration screen in vCenter revealed that the Emulex NC553i 10GB 2-Port Card was not existent anymore. Initially my thought was that it died on me, but checking a second host that I was patching, revealed the same problem. My thought process immediately switched to drivers for the resolution. [Read more…]
VMWare Disk Alignment Issues
If you are using VMWare ESX or ESXi in a SAN or NAS environment you might have heard your storage vendor talking about the importance of disk alignment. I do not want to go into too much detail about disk alignment and what it is in exact detail as this has been covered over and over again. A great resource to read about the importance of disk alignment can be found here at Netapp.com’s website and blog. [Read more…]
VMotion fails at 9 Percent and how to fix it
VMWare VMotion problems have been reported many times over the years. If you search on Google or on the VMWare online communities you can see that this is a fairly common problem and in most cases points to misconfiguration in user environments. In other cases it has been a bug inside VMWare ESX/ESXi, but those were usually addressed by VMWare over time. Recently a new series of VMotion problems has shown up. VMotion fails at 9 percent. And sure enough, one of my environments was affected by this problem, too. VMotion failed or timed out at 9 percent and it was almost impossible to free up a host. I could power off VMs and then move them, but nothing worked in a powered-on state of many VMs. Here is how I fixed it. [Read more…]
vSphere VMFS 5 Upgrade
Eventually you will upgrade your ESX/ESXi environment to ESXi5. With vSphere 5 VMware eliminated the ESX branch of their virtualization products. All future versions will run directly on the hypervisor platform ESXi. The normal upgrade path to vSphere 5 starts with the vCenter Upgrade to vCenter 5. From there you will tackle the different ESX and ESXi hosts. [Read more…]
How to install / force migrate ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5
With version 4.1 of ESX VMware discontinued the vSphere versions that were based on the Linux Kernel and started offering only vSphere ESXi editions of its popular Virtualization platform. If you are still running your virtualization on version ESX 4.1 or lower you need to upgrade to ESXi if you want to use vSphere 5. [Read more…]