vSphere - 6

After installing the Symantec ApplicationHA Console it’s time to roll out the Symantec ApplicationHA Guest components.  You can use a wizard to configure monitoring for applications, services, and processes running on virtual machines. After completing this wizard, you can start, stop, and monitor the configured components from the VMware vSphere Client or using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

You can also perform the application monitoring operations directly from a browser window using the following URL: Https://<virtualmachineNameorIPaddress>:5634/vcs/admin/application_health.html?priv=ADMIN To view the Symantec ApplicationHA view, launch the VMware vSphere Client, select a virtual machine from the Inventory pane, and in the Management pane on the right, click the ApplicationHA tab. If you have not configured single sign-on for the virtual machine, specify the user credentials of a user that has administrative privileges on the virtual machine.

If a component fails, a configurable number of attempts are made to restart it on the machine. If the component does not start, the virtual machine itself can be restarted by VMware HA, depending on the configuration settings.

It’s also possible to configure application monitoring for custom services, processes, and storage mount points on a virtual machine. You can either choose one or multiple components simultaneously.

- Configure multiple services and processes in a single wizard workflow
- Configure storage monitoring to control storage availability on the virtual machine
- Configure dependency to control orderly start and stop of components

     

In this example I’ve chosen to configure application monitoring for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 instances running on a virtual machine. Now I’m able to:

- Monitor SQL Database Engine service, Analysis service, and FILESTREAM
- Monitor and control the availability of SQL databases on the virtual machine
- Perform a graceful start and stop of SQL services and databases

Symantec ApplicationHA provides an interface, the Symantec ApplicationHA tab, to configure and control application monitoring. The Symantec ApplicationHA tab is integrated with the VMware vSphere Client. Use the Symantec ApplicationHA view to perform the following tasks:

- Configure and unconfigure application monitoring
- Start and stop configured applications
- Enable and disable application heartbeat
- Enter and exit maintenance mode

I’ve just recorded a real cool video which shows you how to install and configure ApplicationHA. This new product from Symantec and VMware is able to monitor applications within the virtual machine. I’ve uploaded a High Definition version of the video to ScreenCast but you can also watch the video at Vimeo or YouTube.

Symantec ApplicationHA is an easy-to-use availability solution for virtual environments that provides application visibility and control. It is based on the industry-leading Veritas Cluster Server technology and provides application availability in coordination with VMware HA. Together Symantec and VMware work to help customers move business-critical applications into VMware virtual machines.

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/10/20/ha-the-missing-link/
http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2010/10/applicationha-bridging-the-gap.html
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1622-Technical-White-Paper-ApplicationHA.html

This white paper provides an overview of the challenges that organizations face in virtualizing business critical applications given their current tools and processes. Specifically, it focuses on the high availability requirements of these applications and the difficulty and compromises organizations have to make due to lack of an effective solution. The paper introduces a new joint solution from Symantec and VMware called ApplicationHA that addresses the challenges without forcing organizations to make difficult trade-offs between fully protecting business-critical applications, exploiting virtualization capabilities, and minimizing operational cost and complexity.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp4-virtualize-biz-critical-apps.pdf Continue reading "Technical White Paper: ApplicationHA" »

This article describes how to inject drivers into the VMware ESXi 4.1 installer. It’s written by Ernst Cozijnsen, he already published a great article regarding Deploying VMware ESXi 4.1 in the enterprise. All you need is a Fedora core 13 32 bit virtual machine which can be downloaded from http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ . This website contains many ready to run virtual appliances with all kinds of open source operating systems.

The following part will show you how to:

- Extracting the driver from driver cd/dvd/floppy/tape/ls120/zip/jazz
- Extracting sys.vgz ESXi installer ramdrive
- Moving the driver(s) into place
- Compressing the newly build sys.vgz structure
- Inserting driver package in the imagedd.bz2 file

Continue reading "Injecting drivers into the ESXI installer" »

My ex-colleague and virtualization friend Ernst Cozijnsen who works a virtualization subject matter expert over at Capgemini did something awesome this week. We philosophised about unravelling the ESXi boot process in a few (long) phone calls the past few days and just before the start of the VMworld he actually did the unthinkable. Here’s his description about deploying VMware ESXi 4.1 in the enterprise.

Ok for us the time came to start deploying VMware ESXi 4.1 on some massive servers that rolled into or datacenter. Normally we use RDP (Altiris) for deployment of ESX (native) so naturally we also wanted to deploy VMware ESXi 4.1 in such a way. This article from Eric Wannemacher describes a way to inject ESXi into your RDP PXE boot menu and so giving you the possibility to PXE boot the ESXi installer and start your install.

The downside of this article is that the installer starts directly after booting the ESXi installer and destroys everything in its way including all files on your destination drive. The margin of error when using this specific method is very small and a catastrophic failure can be made very easily without any way of having a safety net. Since these kind of failures can have enormous consequences in a large enterprise environment we had to come up with a way that was more inside our "comfort zone".

Continue reading "Deploying VMware ESXi 4.1 the enterprise way" »

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.

Many admins rely on using serial port console connections to manage physical servers. These connections usually provide a non-graphical and hence low-bandwidth remote console approach for administering physical servers. Administrators use physical serial port concentrators to multiplex connections to several hosts. vSphere 4.1 enables support for virtual serial port concentrators to provide similar functionality for virtual machines. The feature allows you to redirect virtual machine’s serial ports over a standard network link using telnet or ssh. This enables solutions such as third-party virtual serial port concentrators, like the new virtual appliance-based Avocent Cyclades ACS 6000, for virtual machine serial console management or monitoring. Providing a suitable way to remote a VM’s serial port(s) over a network connection, and supporting a “virtual serial port concentrator” utility, thus, gives VI administrators a first-class support for the traditional server management approach. Furthermore, these console connections are also considered more secure for virtual machines since the traffic is only on the management network. The Virtual Machine settings user interface has been modified to allow serial port configuration.

Implementing the Avocent ACS6000 Virtual Serial Port Concentrator

Using a Proxy with vSphere Virtual Serial Ports