Ok, we all know what Storage VMotion is…
Enable live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage arrays. VMware Storage VMotion lets you relocate virtual machine disk files between and across shared storage locations while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity.
VMware also give us some nice detail telling us how Storage VMotion works…
I have now added a new page to my blog, you will be able to find this at the top just under the title bar, it is called UOVMUG.
I will add all user group related details to this tab and upload the recorded video after the occasion.
Make sure you check it out for the first session which was recorded yesterday and is already active on the page.
Please leave any comments on that page to help shape the future of the online VMUG.
PowerCLI is a great tool to manage your vSphere environment. No discussion about that!
The package contains cmdlets for, let’s say 80% of your vSphere day to day tasks, and for the missing 20% you can always fall back on the vSphere APIs (or ask in the PowerCLI community).
The only problem that pops up from time to time is the performance of some of the PowerCLI cmdlets.The Get-Vm cmdlet is one of these infamous cmdlets which, when executed in a decently sized (number of guests) vSphere environment, tends to be quite slow.
But as with the 80%-20% rule above, you can fall back on the vSphere APIs to speed things up a bit.
Add to that some medium to advanced PowerShell features and the time gains you can reach are impressive.
The problem at hand was that we needed a script to update a number of custom attributes on our guests.
A quick method of doing this would be something along these lines:
|
Get-VM | Set-CustomField -Name “MyField” -Value “new-value”
|
Duncan recently posted a nice license script which checks every ESX Host for the availability of the license source, in his post he challenged me to write a script which checked the state of the license server service and sent an email if it was not running.
How could I let this pass without an answer, so I finally found time, the below script will get the license server from the VI server and then check to see if the license server service is running, if its not it will drop you an email, the idea of this is to run it as a scheduled task.
Unless you have been living in a cave in the middle of the woods with no internet access you will know that today VMware released the long awaited and the worst kept secret of all time, vSphere.
Along with vSphere comes alot of other lowercase v starting words including vCompute, vNetwork, vStorage and vPowerCLI, actually hold on, they seam to have forgotten the v with this one, PowerCLI it is! PowerCLI is the new look all improved VI Toolkit.
(Personally I love the name – much better than VI Tookit. Nice one C-Dawg !)
So what’s new ?
Lessons so far in this blog post series:
So, we now have our host added to virtual center, we have it syncing the time with our central time server, we have the firewall adjusted to meet our needs and we have some virtual switches created, our vmotion vswitch and portgroup created and associated with some nics. Now what ?
PortGroups !
As this will obviously be different for each configuration I will show you a couple of ways of doing this. If your not starting to guess the format of the cmndlets by now then there is no hope, turn back and start again from lesson 1, if you can already guess the cmdlets we will be using then please continue to Go and collect £200.
Last week at the UK London VMware User Group they tried something different, in the UKVMUG forums there had been a few threads from people interested in learning more about the VI toolkit or as it is now known PowerCLI.
I was contacted by one of the UKVMUG leaders and asked if I would be interested in giving a presentation/class for an hour before the normal UKVMUG for those who were interested in learning… I jumped at the chance as love to pass on my experiences and show people the easy way to learn both PowerShell and PowerCLI as there are a few shortcuts and things I have learnt over the past 6 months.
I have just had an email from the guys at icomasoft letting me know they have released a PowerCLI Reference Card much like my reference card release earlier this year, this is in a real nice PDF format and has some powershell basics as well as the PowerCLI cmdlet references and examples.
This looks like a great sheet to download and keep with you for reference, its a 4 page doc which covers an awful lot of information.
I have mentioned this to a few people now and recently performed a survey on my site to see if people would be interested, the results were very good, thanks to all who gave me feedback.
Based on your feedback I would like to announce the first Unofficial Online VMware User Group.
The Agenda at the moment is as follows:
This meeting is being hosted over Microsoft Live meeting, if you have not installed the client it is recommended you do this 15 mins before the meeting.
Video: Video will be delivered via the Microsoft Live Meeting client.
Audio: For attendees, audio will be delivered via the Internet using your computer’s speakers. There will not be a call-in number for this meeting.
The meeting will also be recorded for people who are unable to attend.
Meeting Details:
Date: 1st June 2009
Time: 08:00 PM GMT / 03:00 PM EDT
Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/winserver_usergroup/join?id=QP5K5Q&role=attend&pw=8%5E-%5CzqX
Meeting ID: QP5K5Q
Attendee Entry Code: 8^-\zqX
Registration Link:
http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=138358
I have been performing a fair few P2Vs recently and came across an interesting issue with VMware vCenter Converter v4.0.0 Build 146302 when virtualising a Redhat 4 server over to our ESX environment.
I’m adding it here as something to keep an eye out for as its not visible straight away so please double check this after your linux migrations.
The issue we had was that after a successful migration through the converter wizard we were unable to access some of our websites hosted on the linux server, I raised this with VMware and after sending them the log files and some nice diagnosis by the linux team where I am currently working it was found that we had issues with the permissions on some of the files and directories on the server. Continue reading
