HiperLogic

Virtualization, High Performance Computing, Enterprise Computing

I had a customer that needed to uninstall a broken vCenter plugin, uninstalling the offending application was not unregistering the plugin and it showed up with errors.

The easy way to do this is to login to vCenter with the following URL:

  https://<vCenter>/mob/?moid=ExtensionManager

You will see a list of extensions below, click on the image to expand it:

Now type the name of the extension between the double quotes, and click invoke method to unregister like the screenshot below.

You may need to re-login to the VIC client to see the update.

vSphere 4.1 is now released! A slew of new features. Join the webinar on Friday at 3:00 EST that goes into a deep dive on the new features, sign-up at A list of documents related to this release:

VMware vSphere 4.1 Presentation – Whats New Technical

VMware vSphere 4.1 Brochure – EN

VMware vSphere4.1 DataSheet – Standard Edition EN

VMware vSphere 4.1 Whats New Flyer – Enterprise EN

VMware vSphere 4.1 Whats New Flyer – SMB – Now with VMotion!!!

VMware vSphere 4.1 DataSheet – Essentials Editions EN

Download links vSphere 4.1:
vCenter: http://bit.ly/9M6Rcz
ESX: http://bit.ly/9ypsFj
ESXi: http://bit.ly/arqXl

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NetApp has released a fantastic PowerShell kit to automate operations with their filers.

To get started, download the DataOntap.zip and install.ps1 from the NetApp NOW site, and place them in c:\temp\ on a Windows box with PowerShell ( I am using 2008 R2 with PowerShell Version 2 )

Start PowerShell, and type the following:

set-executionpolicy remotesigned
cd c:\temp\
 ./install.ps1

after that, start PowerShell again and type

     Get-Module -listavailable

to make sure you see DataONTAP installed.

Now you can type

Import-Module DataONTAP

To access the DataONTAP cmdlets in your session. You will need to do this each time you start PowerShell, or you can add the above command to your PowerShell profile to automatically load them.

To see help and examples, you can use the following command:

Show-NaHelp

For detailed help on a cmdlet, use get-help as you normally would with PowerShell:

Get-Help Connect-NaController –full

There are MANY great cmdlets available to automate common NetApp administration tasks.

A great example is a script mixing both NetApp and VMware PowerShell automation by Jase McCarty here which automatically provisions and mounts storage on all ESX hosts.

I modified Jase’s script slightly to work with PowerShell 2.0 and to use root access instead of AD credentials. This script must be ran from VMware PowerCLI to work:

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# Add the  DATA ONTAP Module
Import-module DataONTAP
# Set my variables. Change for your site
##########################
$vCenter = "192.168.15.70"
$Filer = "192.168.15.3"
$aggr = "aggrx"
$newvol = "volx"
$narootpasswd = "netapprootpasshere"
#########################

#Connect to NetApp as root
$password = ConvertTo-SecureString $narootpasswd -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList "root",$password

Connect-NaController $Filer -Credential $cred

# Create a new 6GB volume
New-NaVol $newvol $aggr 6g

# Set some options for the new volume
Set-NaVolOption $newvol no_atime_update yes
Set-NaVolOption $newvol fractional_reserve 0

# Set the SnapShot Reserve to 0
Set-NaSnapshotreserve $newvol 0
Set-NaSnapshotschedule $newvol -Weeks 0 -Days 0 -Hours 0

# Add an NFS export
Add-NaNfsExport /vol/$newvol -Persistent -ReadWrite all-hosts -NoSuid -SecurityFlavors sys,krb5

# Get all the vSphere Hosts and add the NFS export. This requires VMware PowerCLI

# Connect to vCenter
Connect-VIServer $vCenter

$Hosts = Get-VMHost
ForEach ($h in $Hosts)
{
New-Datastore -Nfs -VMHost $h.Name -NAME $newvol -Path /vol/$newvol -NfsHost $Filer;
}

While vSphere 4.1 is not out yet, there are numerous leaks and announcements on the forums and other blogs on what to expect in 4.1

A partial list of features expected include:

1. ESX and ESXi direct support for Microsoft Active Directory through Likewise technology
2. Memory Compression for even higher VM density per host.
3. Scripted installations for ESXi making large rapid deployments supported and quick.
4. Storage I/O Control – Think of this is shares and limits for storage I/O to make sure important VMs get priority.
5. DRS VM Affinity – Restrict VM placement to particular hosts inside of an ESX cluster.
6. New HA dashboard for monitoring your ESX HA cluster.
7. Up to 8 simultaneous VMotions.
8. Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 guest operating systems for VADP
9. QoS engine that can prioritize between virtual machines, vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT) and IP storage traffic.
10. Support for USB pass-through

Should be a very nice release!

The new Veeam Sure Backup Technology that checks that your VM will be able to recover from a backup is shown in this video. VERY cool, good example of how you can backup a system that is corrupted and have a false sense of security that it can be recovered without the use of SureBackup:

Storage I/O Control is a new feature coming in vSphere 4.1 that will allow the admin to control and throttle VM throughput to the datastores when a VMs latency crosses a certain threshold.

This is an entertaining video made by someone else that demonstrates this ( pre-release ) technology:

This is a great site for keeping track of VMware build information:
VMware Release Build Information

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[vSphere 4.0 Update 2 is out which includes updates for ESX/ESXi hosts (build 261974) as well as the vCenter Server (build 258672).

This update primarily has more hardware support and guest OS support, and the ability to see more performance statistics for NFS datastores, along with the usual bug fixes.

To see the new NFS stats use (r)esxtop and hit "u" to see the NFS datastore stats like below:

esxtop

esxtop

NOTE: If you are using VMware View, do NOT upgrade at this time. See this article for the latest info on this issue: 1022830

UPDATE June 14th: If you are using EMC CLARiiON, make sure and read This EMC Post Before upgrading.

Update July 9th: Another nice feature in this update is how “Delete All” snapshots is handled, reducing the amount of space required and lowering the chance you fill up the datastore. See Yellow Bricks for more details

HiperLogic offers hardware solutions from HP ( and other vendors ), and for Virtualization we are a big fan of the HP DL380 G6. We have noted during our VMware health check service that many DL380 G6 installs that were done by our competitors were not ordered and/or configured for maximum performance. This post is to assist customers in getting it right.

Memory
Not having an optimal memory configuration can drastically reduce performance. HP has engineered the DL380 G6 to support large amounts of RAM and still keep the memory speed at 1333MHz (With 95W CPUs ). The memory configuration on new Nehalem based systems is no longer a simple matter of just picking a capacity and running with it like in the old days. If you want to configure your own memory see www.hp.com/go/ddr3memory-configurator. A good presentation on memory configuration is here.

Disk

Next is disk performance. You should purchase a Battery Backed Write Cache Module with any DL380 G6 for vSphere ESXi or you will have performance problems, see this HP advisory. Even if you are running ESX today, ESXi may in the very near future be the only path forward, so better to spend a few dollars to future proof your investment.

BIOS

Having the wrong BIOS settings can really make a huge difference in performance. For example you may consider setting:

Turbo Boost On
HP Power Profile to Maximum Performance
HP Power Regulator to Static High Performance
Thermal Configuration Increased Cooling

Local Disk

HiperLogic also likes to have some fast local disk, the DL380G6 has plenty of internal storage for putting lots of fast disk. Having fast local disk is great even if you use a SAN as you can always storage vmotion to a local VMFS volume when testing or debugging VM disk I/O or VM disk performance issues, and for temporarily working around SAN issues etc. Disk is cheap, and it is nice to have the flexibility.

Finally always check the VMware HCL, for the DL380 G6 that is here

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Rodney Mach of HiperLogic was selected as one of the VMware vExperts for 2010.

The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community.

Rodney runs the Ann Arbor Virtualization User Group ( http://aavug.org) and blogs here on the HiperLogic blog http://hiperlogic.com/blog and at http://rodmach.com/blog on Virtualization technologies. Thanks to VMware for the honor!

Recently a customer noted that many of their VMs were still showing up on an old datastore after doing a storage vMotion to a new datastore. Browsing the actual datastore showed the VM was not there, but the VIC continued to report it was.

The issue was the customer had Storage vMotioned with ISO images connected, which you should not do. The simple fix was to disconnect all the ISO images from those VMs. This is easy through the VIC GUI, but to automate it and make sure none were missed we used Power CLI:

Get-VM  | ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

Or to just do this for a particular datastore:

Get-VM  -DataStore mydatastore | ForEach ( $_ ) { Get-CDDrive $_ | Where { $_.IsoPath.Length -gt 0 -OR $_.HostDevice.Length -gt 0 } | Set-CDDrive -NoMedia -Confirm:$False }

To restart HPC Server 2008 specific processes on compute nodes using just Powershell:

$nodes = Get-HpcNode
$services = "HpcManagement", "HpcNodeManager", "msmpi"

foreach ($node in $nodes) {
  foreach ($service in $services) {
     (gwmi win32_service -filter "Name='$service'" -computername "$node").stopservice()
     (gwmi win32_service -filter "Name='$service'" -computername "$node").startservice()
  }
}

A customer was trying to back up a VM with a 20GB OS vmdk and a 1TB vmdk on two different VMFS datastores over iSCSI with a 1MB block size and 8MB data size respectively, and received the error below when trying to snapshot the VM:

File <unspecified filename> is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore <unspecified datastore>

To check the block size of a VMFS datastore go to the VI Client, with vSphere:
1.Select an ESX host that contains the datastore.
2.Click the Configuration tab.
3.Click Storage.
4.Click on the datastore.
5.The block size is identified in the Details window under the Formatting subheading

The basic block size to virtual disk size is below ( in vSphere, which is DIFFERENT than ESX 3.X )

Block Size VMDK Size
1MB 256GB-512 Bytes
2MB 512GB-512 Bytes
4MB 1TB-512 Bytes
8MB 2TB-512 Bytes


To fix the issue, the OS VMDK residing on the 1MB block size VMFS datastore must be migrated to a datastore with a 8MB block size (It is a best practice is to have all VMFS datastores with the same block size to avoid such issues.)

blocksize

Note this issue does not apply to NFS datastores.

Veeam Backup has an option to write the last backup time to a vCenter attribute. This is a nice feature that enables anyone using the VMware VIC client to see the last time a VM was backed up.

This feature makes it easy to write a script to ensure all VMs are backed up by querying this attribute with PowerCLI. Veeam emails you the status of all VMs it knows about ( that are in backup jobs ), but it is possible someone could add a VM that does not get added to your existing Veeam backup jobs.

The script to check for this issue is below.

1. Modify the script below to have the name of your vCenter server in $vCenterServer
2. Configure your Veeam Backup job to write to the “Backup” attribute on completion ( The default is Notes attribute, which is often used by Admins for other items ).
3. This script assumes that every VM is backed up at least once a day.
4. Run this script at the PowerCLI command prompt. See this 5 minute guide to PowerCLI to get started.

function get-backedup ($vm)
{
# This should be one line
$val = $vm.CustomFields |where {$_.key -eq "Backup" } | select -Property Value
$today = Get-Date -Format "M/d/yyyy"
$backupDate = $val.Value

return ( $backupDate -like "*$today*" )

}

Connect-VIServer $vCenterServer 

$vms = get-vm
foreach ($vm in $vms)
{
  if (get-backedup($vm)) {
      write-host -foregroundcolor green "$vm is backed up"
  } else {
      write-host -foregroundcolor red "$vm is NOT backed up"
  }
}

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Installing VMware Tools in a Windows or Linux VM increases the I/O timeout for all disks to help the guest OS survive a short SAN/NAS storage outage.

If you wish to increase this value from the VMware default ( or if you don’t install VMware tools for some reason), there are couple ways to automate this. Jason McCarty last week posted a nice PowerCLI script to automatically set Windows Guest timeout registry setting to the NetApp recommended value of 190 seconds: http://www.jasemccarty.com/blog/?p=691.

If you are running RHEL5 with vSphere U1 VMware tools installed, the default is set to 180 seconds in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vmware-scsi-udev.rules. You can increase this if you want by editing this file, or manually set /sys/block/sda/device/timeout in /etc/rc.local to avoid a VMware tools upgrade from changing your settings.

Many customers use the the Notes: field in the VMware vSphere client to track a variety of information, like what the VM is for.

Unfortunately, a few different 3rd party products overwrite the Notes: field by default with their application specific data.

If you find yourself re-creating all your Notes: field after having a 3rd party blow them away, here is how you can back them up and restore them to prevent this in the future, using PowerCLI .

If you aren’t familiar with setting up and getting started with PowerCLI, See the 5 minute guide to VMware PowerCLI by Rod Mach.

To export all your Notes field and store them in c:\temp\notes.csv

Get-VM |select Name, Description |Export-Csv C:\temp\notes.csv

To import all your Notes field back in:

Import-Csv “C:\notes.csv” | % { Set-VM $_.Name -Description $_.Description -Confirm:$false}

Pano continues to make the simplest desktop virtualization solution on the planet, with their award winning “ZERO” client that has no operating system, moving parts, firmware, CPU, or other components that could fail.

The new Pano System 3.0 solution has the following new features:

1. Support for Windows 7 (32-bit)
2. Support for multiple desktops per user. A use can choose between their XP and Win7 desktop, or have different desktops for different projects.
3. Easily deploy desktops into their own OU without scripting.
4. Wizard driven Active/Passive Pano Manager configuration eliminates single point of failure.
5. Silent Install of Pano DAS
6. Tighter integration with VMware View 4 ( Optional )
6. Continued abstraction of the hypervisor, most administration can be done through Pano Manager.

Current customers contact HiperLogic for detailed information on upgrading from your current release, this release is free for all customers on current maintenance.

Rodney Mach of HiperLogic was featured as the cover story for Storage Virtualization solutions in Channel Pro Magazine.

The great thing about VMware is never having to give up that Windows 2000 box that is running some legacy app that you just still have to keep around. Simply turn it into a VM, or create a backup VM copy in the event the physical hardware would die.

A couple tips that might help you if you are having a problem with VMware vCenter Converter with Windows 2000:

1. Make sure the VM is Windows 2000 SP4 ( Required )
2. Use the latest Converter client, vSphere U1 has several fixes for converting W2K.
3. If the VM doesn’t boot after the conversion, make sure when you do the conversion you choose
SCSI as the target disk type, if you choose IDE or it picks IDE then the VM will convert fine, but won’t boot.
4. If the VM is not on your domain for some reason ( I have seen this at a customer site where legacy boxes where not joined to the domain) make sure that the host can resolve in DNS both vCenter AND the ESX host you are converting the VM to. If it doesn’t, put the ESX host and vCenter in the hosts file on the W2K box before starting the conversion.
5. After the conversion, make sure and delete all the old legacy devices, especially the stale network adapters, or you may have unusual issues. To do so:

1. Open a Windows command prompt and type the following:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
This tells the device manager to show all non-present devices.
2. At the same command prompt, type
devmgmt.msc
3. In the device manager, select View menu, and then check
“Show Hidden Devices.”

You can get the latest download info for the Windows 2000 sysprep files that vCenter Converter requires at VMware KB 1005593

That’s it! If someone has a tip they would like to share, comment here.

A note to customers, when you buy a server with the new AMD Magny Cours chips with more than 6 cores per socket, you must have either vSphere Advanced OR Enterprise Plus. This is a licensing issue, all other editions of VMware limit you to 6 cores per socket.

See:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

There is also an explanation here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html

Likely VMware will be forced to fix their licensing scheme now that 8-core and 12-core servers are available. The document states “VMware will revisit its licensing policies as x86 processors with a greater number of cores become available.”

If you already have Advanced or Enterprise Plus, you should be fine. Otherwise, be aware you will need to upgrade your VMware licenses until which time VMware changes their licensing ( assuming they do. )

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