VSPHERE DESIGN WORKSHOP DIARY

Boche.net is giving a good diary type accounting as he goes through this class.

Day 1, Day 2, 

HP BLADE-SERIOUS KB OUT

VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 host with Broadcom bnx2x (in-box driver version 1.54.1.v41.1-1vmw) experiences a loss of network connectivity and a purple diagnostic screen:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1029368

We have not experienced this and we are using the 1.54 driver (it replaced the 1.48 driver when we did the vSphere 4.1 upgrade). 

I called VMware tech support today, and they will have a 1.6x driver out 2nd week of November which should address this and other issues.

Vmware tech I spoke to said use the 1.6 driver and not the older 1.48 driver.

We still have a open ticket because we are not getting any networking performance info in vCenter using the 1.54 driver.

VCAP4-DCA LAB TEST VIDEO TUTORIAL

Hi folks...sorry...but I have been swamped at work. 

VMware education has released this video showing how the test for VCAP4-DCA is performed using a LAB environment setting!

GETTING THIN DISK SMALL AGAIN

I was recently approached on can we shrink a Thin Disk after is gets expanded. Originally I didn't think this was possible. The scenario that was given was I have a thin disk, a large amount of data is copied which fills the disk and grows the this disk....then this data is deleted inside the guest vm.

I found this documented process to get the thin disk small again...but be aware very labor intensive and probably causes an I/O storm during the process.

http://www.virtualizationteam.com/virtualization-vmware/vsphere-virtualization-vmware/vmware-esx-4-reclaiming-thin-provisioned-disk-unused-space.html

VSPHERE 4.1 PASSWORD SECURITY ISSUE!!!!

I just learned from http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/07/esxi-41-major-security-issue.html that apparently there is a bad security bug in password authentication. The bug checks for only the 1st 8 characters of a password, ouch! Learn more at the link above or see this KB 1024500 for workarounds.

VCLOUD DIRECTOR TRAINING VIDEOS

You should start exploring this new product with these excellent training videos.

http://www.hypervizor.com/2010/09/a-lot-of-videos-on-vmware-vcloud-director/

POWERCLI POSTER AND QUICK REF PDF

You should grad this resource!

http://blogs.vmware.com/files/powercli-poster.pdf

VSPHERE TEMPLATE PROBLEM WITH 4.1

A combination of datastore maintenance (I removed some datastores--one that actually had ISOs that might have been attached) and possibly vsphere 4.1...I noticed I was getting "Call "PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents" for object "propertyCollector" on vCenter Server"

See the link below. Removing the vm from inventory and adding it back fixed the issue. I have two templates though that so far this had not worked on.

http://snipurl.com/184uyd

STORAGE I/O CONTROL (SIOC) TIP:

In short, if you have vSphere 4.1 running in an entire cluster...turn it ON!

SOIC watches I/O latency across the datastores shared in a VMware Cluster and enables each VM it's fair share of disk resources in times of contention when a certain latency value is exceeded (30ms by default). This ensures one disk intensive VM doesn't impact other VMs disk performance. You can also "tweak" and say some VM need priority access in times of contention as well (at the expense of the other vms on that datastore though).

·         Storage I/O Control is supported on Fibre Channel-connected and iSCSI-connected storage. NFS datastores and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) are not supported.

But check out these links for more info: 

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/09/29/storage-io-fairness/

http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/vmware-vsphere-4-1-storage-io-control-sioc-understanding/