David Davis over at Happy Router is excited to say that his VMware ESX Server video training course is officially available! After creating the popular Microsoft Virtualization and VMware Server & Workstation video series, he has just finished VMware ESX Server. ESX Server is VMware's Enterprise grade, high-end virtualization product and it is in use by so many companies today. He spent 3 months researching VMware ESX Server and the Virtual Infrastructure Suite and made every effort to cover the VMware ESX Server applications from all aspects including designing, installing, creating virtual machines, virtual networks, SAN storage, VCB backups, and performance tuning. His VMware ESX Server Training is your complete video guide to mastering VMware ESX Server and Virtual Infrastructure. When you want to take a peak you can view a 7 minutes training video demo covering VMware ESX Server Installation & Using Virtual Center.
Wednesday, January 9. 2008
VI 3: Deploy, Secure & Analyse
From the 28th till the 31th of January I will deliver the VMware Infrastructure 3: Deploy, Secure & Analyse training course at XTG in Gouda the Netherlands. This deep hands-on training course continues to build on from the VI3 Install and Configure course. It focuses on performing scripted installations of ESX servers, Service Console security, monitoring of ESX servers, VMware HA, Distributed Resource Scheduling, VMware Consolidated Backup and fault analysis. This course also leads to VMware Certified Professional exam ‘VCP-310’ If you want to attend this training course please contact XTG or fill in the online course registration form.
Vizioncore now compatible with ESX 3.5
This month vRanger Pro, vReplicator, vCharter and vMigrator will all fully support VMware ESX Server 3.5. In December, VMware announced general availability of this major update in the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform. ESX Server 3.5 provides improved memory processing, reduced CPU overhead, and support for paravirtualized Linux to help improve performance of Linux workloads.
VMware has also introduced ESX Server 3i, which they are offering in addition to ESX Server 3.5, their market leading hypervisor. This product offers all of the same functionality but with a thin 32 MB footprint that provides unparalleled security and reliability, while integration as server firmware makes deployment fast and easy. ESX Server 3i will be available integrated in server systems from market leading server vendors. At this time, support for ESX Server 3i in Vizioncore's products is scheduled for Q2 2008.
As always, Vizioncore is committed to keeping pace with developments of the VMware Infrastructure platform. As a Community Source member and a Technology Alliance Program partner, Vizioncore remains at the forefront of development of the VMware platform. Vizioncore's solutions extend the business value of VMware investments for customers around the world.
Beware of SQL Express & undocumented loss
I found an interesting article from Warren in the VMware community about the limitations of using SQL Express as the VirtualCenter database server. Beware of SQL Express & undocumented loss of some important features in VirtualCenter, confirmed by VMware. Just a quick note to warn people away from "upgrading" to SQL Express with VirtualCenter 2.5. If you do, you will probably be sorry. Due to Microsoft removing the SQLAgent in this "lite" version, there is no automation. This means that there is no way for VirtualCenter to do things like roll up the daily data into weekly and monthly views, or perform scheduled truncations, cleanup or backups. They will be noting (some of) this in some future release of the documentation, but it's not in there today. Please see http://communities.vmware.com/message/832082 for details on my problems with missing performance data. In that thread you will find reference to a couple service tickets that you can reference in your communications with them, if you bump into this or related issues.
Mike Laverick Releases the ESX3i Guide
Mike Lavarick has written this guide using the beta release of ESX3i witch was handed out at the VMworld 2007 on a memory stick. When you take a close look at this guide you’ll see my name popping up in the acknowledgements, I’m so proud ;-). I was one of the first bloggers who published information about ESX3i. You can find my ESX3i articles here. The photo taken by Viktor van den Berg at the VMworld2007 in SF where I conducted an interview about the upcoming VI3 book.
Sunday, January 6. 2008
How can I read the ESX Core dump
The VMware ESX kernel is able to write a so called core dump if it crashes. This core dump records the state of the process at the time of the crash. gdb can read such a core dump and get information out of it. First you must unpack the vmware-core.gz file because it’s in a tgz archieve. Now it is time to start gdb to see what exactly happened when I try to start a VM on ESX 3.5 in Workstation 6.
[root@esx35 tmp]# ls
cimserver_start.conf hsperfdata_root vmware-core
cimxml.socket vmhsdaemon-0 vmware-core.gz
esx-install.sh vmkdump.log vmware-root
[root@esx35 tmp]# gdb
GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.3.0.0-1.138.el3rh)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-redhat-linux-gnu".
(gdb) core-file vmware-core
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0x000b8a6a in ?? ()
(gdb) backtrace
#0 0x000b8a6a in ?? ()
#1 0x000b8a6a in ?? ()
#2 0x00004020 in ?? ()
#3 0x00006484 in ?? ()
#4 0x00006400 in ?? ()
#5 0xb039b400 in ?? ()
#6 0x00000000 in ?? ()
(gdb)
What is a segmentation fault? When ESX 3.5 runs, it has access to certain portions of memory. First, you have local variables in each of the functions; these are stored in the stack. Second, ESX 3.5 may have some memory, allocated during runtime (using either malloc, in C, or new, in C++), stored on the heap (you may also hear it called the "free store"). ESX 3.5 is only allowed to touch memory that belongs to it -- the memory previously mentioned. Any access outside that area will cause a segmentation fault. Segmentation faults are commonly refered to as segfaults.