Archives for January 2010

VMWare vSphere needs Hosts file

January 27, 2010 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

In late November of 2009 VMWare released the U1 packages for vSphere (ESX 4) and vCenter 4 (VirtualCenter). U1 stand for Update 1 and you can compare it to a service pack on the Windows side of things. Update 1 for vSphere fixed several bugs. Update 1 for vCenter added Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2 compatibility. So far so good. I deployed the U1 package for ESX 4 via the Update Manager with no issues. However, U1 for vCenter surprised me with a noce problem.

After applying U1 for VirtualCenter 2 hosts in a HA cluster did not play nice. I was not able to enable HA (High Availability) for this cluster on these 2 hosts. The event log inside vCenter did not provide me with much information, however the vmkernel log pointed towards something in regards to name resolution. I checked the DNS settings and name resolution via DNS – no issues here. Then I checked for the hosts file to see if something was messed up.

Well, the hosts files (/etc/hosts) were missing. Let me rephrase that – they were not missing, but they were renamed to hosts.old. I have yet to find the reason why this happened or why the vcenter agent would do it. However, after I renamed these files back to just “hosts” and then initiated the “Reconfigure for HA” inside VirtualCenter these 2 hosts came back just fine and joined the HA setup. I am working with ESX since the good old 2.5.x days and back then it was very important to have a custom configured hosts file. With 3.5.x that requirement disappeared (if I remember this correctly), however I have always used custom hosts files in case DNS craps out on me and this incident now shows that there is a large dependency on having at least a basic hosts file on an ESX 4 vSphere host to use features like HA (High Availability).

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Review of Copa Host

January 21, 2010 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

I just purchased 2 .DE domains a few days ago. The German Domain Registry DENIC requires the DNS servers to be on 2 different IP subnets for redundancy – a requirement you cannot achieve by default with a normal cPanel hosting account as DNS is usually hosted on 2 IP addresses that reside on the same IP subnet. In addition (for SEO purposes) I wanted these 2 domains hosted as close to the customer base (Germany) as possible. I spent about 2 hours researching possible web hosts and apparently cPanel hosting is not very popular in Germany. 🙁

Most German web hosts do not take credit cards (WTF) or require a 12 month contract (WTF) or require you to have a bank account in Germany where they deduct the money from the account (WTF). So, after looking around I found a web hosting company not located in Germany, but with servers in a data center in Munich, Germany. This web host is Copa Host (not an affiliate link) out of Brazil. I contact them with a few questions and man, these guys responded fast. If support is that fast in case I really need technical support, this would be awesome. After 2 emails with my questions answered I decicded to sign up.

The sign up process was very easy and streamlined (WHMCS). My account was setup instantly (nice) and I was up and running in no time (well, almost). The only problem was with the DNS propagation. Not only are the domain name registration requirements very complicated for .DE domains, their DNS propagation and updates at the domain registry level are horribly slow as well. This is definitely the sucky part about dealing with .DE domains.

Anyway – I did a few speed tests against the site via IP address and the performance even from the Western part of the United States is very good. I am impressed. So, right now I am hoping those Germans are waking up to get the DNS changes registered and going. Unfortunately the web host (Copa Host) has no influence on this as they are only providing the infrastructure. If you need cPanel hosting in Western Europe I highly recommend Copa Host. The prices are low (in Euro though) and at least so far the service has been excellent.

Disclosure: My project did not take off and so I canceled my account with Copa Host. This is not due to Copa Host or, but do to my project not working out the way I wanted it. If you need a cheap web host in the US, please look at Just Host or IX Web Hosting.