Reported Update 2 Issues (HA)

A few of the forums and other blogs are reporting Problems with Update 2 HA….

Usual issues include:

“insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover level on cluster” and also “unable to contact a primary HA agent in cluster”

The following should help you out:

All hostnames need to be in lower case only.

In Virtualcenter check the following:

  • On each host in the cluster, go to the configuration tab, DNS and routing, hostname, everything needs to be lowercase

On each one of your ESX hosts:

ssh into each host and check lower case names only

  • /etc/hosts lowercase names only
  • /etc/sysconfig/network
  • cat /proc/sys/kernel/hostname if not correct :

hostname <FQDN>

  • after this you can check the settings are correct using

    uname -n

    hostname -a

    hostname -s

    hostname -d

    hostname -f

    hostname

  • make sure hostname in /etc/vmware/esx.conf is lowercase

    /adv/Misc/HostName = <FQDN in lowercase>

    Once these are checked enable HA on cluster again and cross your fingers.

Run ESXi 3.5 Update 2 from a USB drive

If you would like to check out ESXi 3.5 update 2 risk free without installing over the top of your current OS. Here’s a good pdf about how to install it on a USB drive.

Shame mine broke last week and I’m waiting for a new one in the post !

Sneak Preview Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer – Version 2.0

VKernel intrepid Founder and CEO Alex Bakman just couldn’t wait to start talking about a future product release, VKernel’s Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer V2.0. Needless to say, there brand new VP of Sales wasn’t too happy about leaking news for a future product. But the cat’s out of the bag. You can watch a video podcast that previews this latest release here

I wonder if there will be a UK version (Analyser) 🙂

ESXi Single Server Environment training just ÂŁ27.50

Gain the knowledge and skills to operate VMware ESXi in a single-server environment.

This self-paced course contains brief concept modules, guided demos, and interactive simulations. Topics covered include: Virtualization Concepts, Server Configuration, Virtual Machine Management, Networking, Performance Monitoring, and more.

This online course includes approximately 120 minutes of content with unlimited access by the subscribing individual for 90 days:

After completing this course you will be able to:

  • Configure ESXi
  • Install the Virtual Infrastructure client
  • Understand and configure ESXi networking
  • Understand and configure ESXi storage
  • Monitor and configure resource use
  • Build and configure virtual machines and install guest operating systems
  • Clone virtual machines
  • Monitor and manage virtual machine performance

Click here to visit the VMware training site

Enhanced Vmotion

I was just reading up a little more on Enhanced Vmotion as was impressed that we no longer have to worry about CPU architecture and found the following useful information:

Enhanced VMotion Compatibility

Because new features are constantly incorporated into new CPUs, you are likely to encounter incompatibilities and therefore face problems while attempting migration with VMotion. Such CPU incompatibilities limit VMotion to a certain range of CPUs. VMware has investigated the issues and concluded that there is no software‐only solution to this problem. To minimize exacerbation of the compatibility problem with time, VMware has worked with CPU vendors to facilitate live migration of virtual machines across different CPU revisions.

VMware Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC)—available in VMware Infrastructure 3 beginning with version 3.5 Update 2—facilitates VMotion between different CPU generations, taking advantage of Intel Flex Migration and AMD‐V Extended Migration technologies. When enabled for a cluster, EVC ensures that all CPUs within the cluster are VMotion compatible. CPUs starting with Intel 45nm Core 2 (Penryn) and AMD Second Generation Opteron (revision E or F) incorporate FlexMigration and Extended Migration technologies, respectively.

The EVC feature allows the virtualization layer to mask or hide certain features by modifying the semantics of the CPUID instruction and hides certain CPUID feature bits, even from nonprivileged code. For example, with support from hardware, the virtualization layer modifies the semantics of the CPUID instruction to mask or hide the SSE4.1 feature from any code (privileged or nonprivileged) to make CPUs differing in this feature compatible for VMotion.

Specifics on CPU compatibility with the Enhanced VMotion Compatibility feature are available in the Basic System Administration guide for each ESX release starting with version 3.5 Update 2.

EVC utilizes hardware support to modify the semantics of the CPUID instruction only. It does not disable the feature itself. For example, if an attempt to disable SSE4.1 is made by applying the appropriate masks to a CPU that has these features, this feature bit indicates SSE4.1 is not available to the guest or the application, but the feature and the SSE4.1 instructions themselves (such as PTESE and PMULLD) are still available for use. This implies applications that do not use the CPUID instruction to determine the list of supported features, but use try‐catch undefined instructions (#UD) instead, can still detect the existence of this feature.

Therefore, for EVC to be useful, application developers must adhere to recommended guidelines on feature detection. CPU vendors recommend that software programmers query CPUID prior to using special instructions and features available on their CPUs. If this guideline is followed by programmers, EVC is a reliable mechanism for live migration of x86 virtual machines across varied hardware. Thus, you can use EVC to enable an entire cluster to use the same set of basic features, allowing migration with VMotion across any two nodes in the cluster. VirtualCenter can also set up new hardware add‐ons to the cluster and apply these masks.

Conclusion
Virtualization is still a relatively new technological innovation, and the area of live migration of virtual machines is still in its infancy. VMware VMotion is an extremely useful and critical feature in data centers to ensure business continuity, resource optimization, and a host of other benefits. VirtualCenter performs numerous compatibility checks before allowing migration with VMotion. Some stringent CPU compatibility checks for VMotion are necessary for proper functioning of a virtual machine after migration. Though users can override these checks and complete VMotion by applying appropriate masks, the virtual machines and applications may not function properly if they rely on features particular to the underlying hardware. The x86
CPU vendors did not initially envision live migration of virtual machines and design CPUs to support it.

VMware has worked with CPU vendors to support such features, taking advantage of Intel Flex Migration and AMD‐V Extended Migration technologies. With Enhanced VMotion Compatibility, VMware Infrastructure works in conjunction with hardware to support live migration of virtual machines in a wider range of environments. Effective use of enhanced VMotion also depends on using application software that follows recommended guidelines to support CPU feature detection.

ESX 3.5 Update 2 now available

VMware just released Update 2 for ESX(i) 3.5 and some new patches.

So what’s new?

  • Windows Server 2008 support – Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions) is supported as a guest operating system. With VMware’s memory overcommit technology and the reliability of ESX, virtual machine density can be maximized with this new guest operating system to achieve the highest degree of ROI. Guest operating system customizations and Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) are not supported with Windows Server 2008.
  • Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations by automatically configuring server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter will not permit the addition of hosts which cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.
  • Storage VMotion – Storage VMotion from a FC/iSCSI datastore to another FC/iSCSI datastore is supported. This support is extended on ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 1 as well.
  • VSS quiescing support – When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are supported. With Windows Server 2008 guests, only filesystem quiescing is supported. For more information, see the Virtual Machine Backup Guide and the VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 Release Notes.
  • Hot Virtual Extend Support – The ability to extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running is provided. Hot extend is supported for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode.
  • 192 vCPUs per host – VMware now supports increasing the maximum number of vCPUs per host 192 given that the maximum number of Virtual Machines per host is 170 and that no more than 3 virtual floppy devices or virtual CDROM devices are configured on the host at any given time. This support is extended on ESX 3.5 Update 1 as well.

Hardware additions:

  • 8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs – Support is available for 8Gb fiber channel HBAs. See the I/O Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
  • SAS arrays – more configurations are supported.  See the Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
  • 10 GbE iSCSI initiator – iSCSI over a 10GbE interface is supported. This support is extended on ESX Server 3.5 Update 1, ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Embedded and ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Installable as well.
  • 10 GbE NFS support – NFS over a 10GbE interface is supported.
  • IBM System x3950 M2 – x3950 M2 in a 4-chassis configuration is supported, complete with hardware management capabilities through multi-node Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver and provider. Systems with up to 32 cores are fully supported.  Systems with more than 32 cores are supported experimentally.
  • IPMI OEM extension support – Execution of IPMI OEM extension commands is supported.
  • System health monitoring through CIM providers – More Common Information Model (CIM) providers are added for enhanced hardware monitoring, including storage management providers provided by QLogic and Emulex.  LSI MegaRAID providers are also included and are supported experimentally.
  • CIM SMASH/Server Management API – The VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API provides an interface for developers building CIM-compliant applications to monitor and manage the health of systems.  CIM SMASH is now a fully supported interface on ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
  • Display of system health information – More system health information is displayed in VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
  • Remote CLI – Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) is now supported on ESX Server 3.5 as well as ESX Server 3i. See the Remote Command-Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide for more information.
  • VMware High Availability – VirtualCenter 2.5 update 2 adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures based on VMware tools heartbeats. This release also extends support for clusters containing mixed combinations of ESX and ESXi hosts, and minimizes previous configuration dependencies on DNS.
  • VirtualCenter Alarms – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 extends support for alarms on the overall health of the server by considering the health of each of the individual system components such as memory and power supplies. Alarms can now be configured to trigger when host health degrades.
  • Guided Consolidation – now provides administrators with the ability to filter the list of discovered systems by computer name, IP address, domain name or analyzing status. Administrators can also choose to explicitly add physical hosts for analysis, without waiting for systems to be auto-discovered by the Consolidation wizard. Systems can be manually added for analysis by specifying either a hostname or IP address. Multiple hostnames or IP addresses, separated by comma or semi-colon delimiters, may also be specified for analysis. Systems can also be manually added for analysis by specifying an IP address range or by importing a file containing a list of hostnames or IP addresses that need to be analyzed for consolidation. Guided Consolidation also allows administrators to override the provided recommendations and manually invoke the conversion wizard.
  • Live Cloning – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it.
  • Single Sign-On – You can now automatically authenticate to VirtualCenter using your current Windows domain login credentials on the local workstation, as long as the credentials are valid on the VirtualCenter server. This capability also supports logging in to Windows using Certificates and Smartcards. It can be used with the VI Client or the VI Remote CLI to ensure that scripts written using the VI Toolkits can take advantage of the Windows credentials of your current session to automatically connect to VirtualCenter.

Download updates now:

ESX 3.5 Update 2
ESXi 3.5 installable Update 2
VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2
VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5

[Original Source – Yellow Bricks]

Quick Stats from VMware for reports

I wrote another quick script today as my powershell skills grow!

The following script can be used to give you a JPG outputted graph of some stats that you can choose, handy for reports.

It can easily be adjusted to perform stats on the ESX servers (vmhost) as well.

Example output (My Test server names have been blurred):

Chart

connect-VIServer yourserver

# Set the following 3 variables for your needs
# Example stats are:
# % CPU Usage – cpu.usage.average
# Mhz CPU Usage – cpu.usageMHZ.average
# % Memory Usage – mem.usage.average
# Kbps Network Usage – net.usage.average
# Kbps Disk Usage – disk.usage.average

$Caption = "CPU Usage"
$Stat = "cpu.usage.average"
$NumToReturn = 20

$categories = @()
$values = @()
$chart = new-object -com OWC11.ChartSpace.11
$chart.Clear()
$c = $chart.charts.Add(0)
$c.Type = 4
$c.HasTitle = "True"
$series = ([array] $chart.charts)[0].SeriesCollection.Add(0)

Get-Stat -Entity (Get-vm) -Stat $stat -MaxSamples 1 -Realtime |Sort-Object Value -Descending | Select-Object Entity, Value -First $NumToReturn | foreach-object {

$categories += $_.Entity.Name
$values += $_.Value * 1
}
$series.Caption = $Caption
$series.SetData(1, -1, $categories)
$series.SetData(2, -1, $values)
$filename = (resolve-path .).Path + "\Chart.jpg"
$chart.ExportPicture($filename, "jpg", 800, 500)
invoke-item $filename