Eric Sloof

The VMware knowledge base contains some useful articles regarding the new vSphere 4.1 release.

• Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1
• Troubleshooting ESXi 4.1 Scripted Install errors
• Recreate vSphere 4.0 lockdown mode behavior in vSphere 4.1
• vCenter Server 4.1 fails to install or upgrade with the error: This installation package is not supported by this processor type
• Migrating to the vCenter Server 4.1 database
• Update Manager 4.1 patch repository features
• Lockdown mode configuration after upgrading from ESXi 4.0 to 4.1
• Changes to VMware Support Options in vSphere 4.1
• Securing Credentials in vMA 4.1
• Overview of Active Directory integration in ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1
• ALUA parameters in the output of ESX/ESXi 4.1 commands
• USB support for ESX/ESXi 4.1

With the release of vSphere 4.1, storage IO Control allows cluster-wide storage IO prioritization. This allows better workload consolidation and helps reduce extra costs associated with over-provisioning. Storage IO Control extends the constructs of shares and limits to handle storage IO resources. The amount of storage IO that is allocated to virtual machines during periods of IO congestion can be controlled, which ensures that more important virtual machines get preference over less important virtual machines for IO resource allocation.

When Storage IO Control on a datastore is enabled, ESX/ESXi begins to monitor the device latency that hosts observe when communicating with that datastore. When device latency exceeds a threshold, the datastore is considered to be congested and each virtual machine that accesses that datastore is allocated IO resources in proportion to their shares and is set per virtual machine. The number can be adjusted for each based on need. Low priority VMs can limit IO bandwidth for high priority VMs and storage allocation should be in line with VM priorities.

This feature enables pre-datastore priorities/shares for VM to improve total throughput and has Cluster level enforcement for shares for all workload accessing a datastore. Configuring Storage I/O Control is a two-step process:

1. Enable Storage I/O Control for the datastore.
2. Set the number of storage I/O shares and upper limit of I/O operations per second (IOPS) allowed for each virtual machine. By default, all virtual machine shares are set to Normal (1000) with unlimited IOPS.

Duncan Epping        : Storage IO Control, the movie
Scott Drummonds    : Storage IO Control
VirtualMiscellaneous : Storage IO Control - SIOC

John Troyer and Luke Kilpatrick of VMware's Social Media Team give a full demonstration of the features and use of the VMworld 2010 Backpack.

Get your very own VMworld 2010 Backpack by registering and attending VMworld 2010 at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, August 30th - September 2nd or at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, October 12th -- 14th - http://bit.ly/bc9sqO

Fellow vExpert Eric Siebert has written a great article about affordable storage solutions which can be used as shared storage for VMware vSphere. In his article he sums up all the vendors followed by a nice comparison chart with things like the numbers of bays, support for iSCSI or NFS, the number of network connections and capacity. So check out his article with affordable shared storage options.

• Drobo
• Hewlett-Packard
• Iomega
• Netgear
• QNAP
• Synology
• Thecus

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/42004-VMware-vSphere-shared-storage-guide

Every once in a while you will experience problems that only can be fixed by visiting the ESX console, at least I do. When you finally have found the IP address or hostname and you’re using your favourite browser to load the MKS java applet, the information is scrolling fast and your keyboard isn’t mapped correctly. These two problems can be fixed easily, you have to fix the real problem yourself. :-)

First let’s start with the scrolling problem. When you issue a command like esxcfg-vswitch because you want to check out your vSwitch configuration, you only see the last part and can’t scroll back. You might want to redirect the outcome of your command into a file and use nano to walk through it.

esxcfg-vswitch -l >> network.txt
nano network.txt

This type of redirection pipes the output into the file network.txt.  The difference between this and the single-'>' redirection is that the old contents (if any) of network.txt are not erased.  Instead, the esxcfg -l output is appended to the file.

The second problem I have experienced a lot it an incorrect mapping of the keyboard. This problem can be easily fixed by loading a different keyboard translation table. The program loadkeys reads the file or files specified by filename.... Its main purpose is to load the kernel keymap for the console. 

Loadkeys us will do the trick.

Fellow vExpert Jakub Felinski over at the weblog “Virtualization in Practice” has posted a really nice article about using Nagios to monitor a VMware vSphere environment. Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better. Jacub has added all the necessary VMware modules to the Nagios virtual appliance which can be downloaded in OVF format at his website. He also created a description with the configuration changes at ESX level, it’s real easy to get it up and running. The original Polish article with download link can be found here and the Google translation can be found here.

By default, each ESX host gets a set of basic tests which include:

•  CPU usage
•  Disk latency (read write)
•  Hardware sensors
•  Disk operations canceled
•  State of network cards
•  Memory swapping
•  Free space in each Datastore