vSphere

William Lam over at virtuallyghetto has posted a great article with a lot of in-depth knowledge regarding the secrets of the vsish shell. While I was reading trough the article I discovered a link to a DeepDive training that deserves a post of its own. The two slide decks are created by Iwan Rahabok who works as a Senior Systems Consultant at VMware and can be found here:

vSphere 4.1 (DeepDive) Delta training.zip (8.9 MB)

In this white paper, VMware shows some of the great new performance features for vCenter Server that come with vSphere 4.1, hardware sizing guidelines and software requirements, performance best practices with performance tuning, monitoring, and troubleshooting tips, performance monitoring tools, and case studies to demonstrate the performance improvements made in vSphere 4.1. Some highlights of the performance best practices for vCenter Server 4.1 include:

• Make sure you size your system properly according to the inventory size.
• The number of network hops between vCenter Server and the ESX host affects operational latency. The ESX host should reside as few network hops away from the vCenter Server as possible.
• Effective resource planning and monitoring is necessary when using HA, FT, DRS, and DPM.
• Monitor Web Services and make sure the max heap size for Java virtual machine is set correctly according to Inventory size.
• For the vCenter Server database, separate database files for data and for logs onto drives backed by different physical disks, and make sure statistics collection times are set conservatively so that they will not overload the system.
• Be aware that the number of clients connected to vCenter Server affects its performance.
• Use performance monitoring tools to ensure the health of your system and to troubleshoot problems that arise. Performance charts give you a graphical view of statistics for your system.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp_41_perf_VC_Best_Practices.pdf

VMware vCenter Update Manager Performance and Best Practices

VMware vCenter Update Manager delivers the most full‐featured and robust patch management product for vSphere 4.1. This white paper displays test data and recommends various performance tips to help your Update Manager deployments run as efficiently as possible.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp_41_perf_UpdateManager_Best-Practices.pdf

In this (HD) video I’ll show you a new vSphere 4.1 feature regarding configuring USB Device Pass-through from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine. You can configure a virtual machine to use USB devices that are connected to an ESX/ESXi host where the virtual machine is running. The connection is maintained even if you migrate the virtual machine using vMotion.

When you attach a USB device to a physical host, the device is available only to virtual machines that run on that host. The device cannot connect to virtual machines that run on another host in the datacenter. A USB device is available to only one virtual machine at a time. When a device is connected to a powered-on virtual machine, it is not available to connect to other virtual machines that run on the host. When you remove the active connection of a USB device from a virtual machine, it becomes available to connect to other virtual machines that run on the host. host.

When you migrate a virtual machine with attached USB devices away from the host to which the devices are connected, the devices remain connected to the virtual machine. However, if you suspend or power off the virtual machine, the USB devices are disconnected and cannot reconnect when the virtual machineis resumed. The device connections can be restored only if you move the virtual machine back to the host to which the devices are attached.

I’m back from my camper trip through France and decided to finally upgrade my ESX 4.0 hosts to version 4.1. One of my ESX servers is hosting the virtual machine with vCenter (local storage) and you cannot use the vSphere Host Update utility to upgrade ESX 4.x hosts. This utility is only for standalone ESX 3.x and ESXi hosts. A standalone host is an ESX  host that is not managed by vCenter Server. So I had to find another way to upgrade this ESX host. The resolution for this problem is the esxupdate Command-Line Utility available in the service console.

The first step is to download the following zip files from VMware’s website and copy the files to the service console:

pre-upgrade-from-ESX4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release
upgrade-from-ESX4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip

The second step is to install the pre-upgrade using esxupdate, this can be done without a reboot and without maintenance mode.

esxupdate --bundle=pre-upgrade-from-ESX4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip update

Now you have to put you ESX host into maintenance mode, this can also be done with the command line otherwise you will get this message: Description - Maintenance mode is not enabled or could not be determined.

vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

We can finally upgrade the ESX host to 4.1 with the following command line:

esxupdate --bundle=upgrade-from-ESX4.0-to-4.1.0-0.0.260247-release.zip update

The update is completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the
changes to be effective.

Reboot... vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit Done :-)

After finishing this article I discovered a similar one written by Tomi Hakala over at vReality, great work Tomi.