VMware

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:

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.

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!

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:

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!

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}

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. )