Eric Sloof

I’ve recorded an interview with the EMEA UCS specialist/trainer Ron Heheman.

VMware's Education Services has launched two new vSphere beta courses:

VMware vSphere: Design Workshop

This course explores a design methodology, criteria, and approach for designing a VMware vSphere™ 4 virtual datacenter architecture consisting of VMware ESX™/ESXi 4 and VMware vCenter™ Server 4. This course, by discussing the benefits and risks of available design alternatives, provides information which supports making sound design decisions.  This course also provides an opportunity to practice your design skills by working with peers on a design project.

VMware vSphere: Manage for Performance

This hands-on training course explores the management of performance in a VMware® vSphere™ environment.  It provides the knowledge and skills necessary to make fundamental design decisions that enhance performance and to meet performance goals in an already-deployed vSphere installation.  The course is based on ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0, and vCenter Server 4.0.

I often speak to people who prefer a virtual machine protected by VMware HA for hosting their vCenter Server instead of using vCenter Server Heartbeat but vCenter Server Heartbeat offers some real great benefits compared to VMware HA. VMware HA only works with virtual machines and protects the operating system and hardware. HA also needs shared storage. vCenter Server Heartbeat is able to clone, synchronize and do real-time replication. vCenter Server Heartbeat works with either virtual machines or physical machines and protects the operating system, the hardware, and the application. You don’t need shared storage but redundant storage. I’ve created a little demo movie showing the vCenter Server Heartbeat console and a real fast switchover to the secondary server.

http://screencast.com/t/MzJjM2E1

http://screencast.com/t/MWJkZjA4MG

I’ve created a new Virtualization EcoShell PowerPack with only one Script Node and it’s called “CPUID System Information“ which shows the VMHost CPU Info.  The inspiration for building this new PowerPack came from VMware’s evangelist Richard Garsthagen who has built the well known Visual Basic Application, VMware CPU Host Info.  “CPUID System Information” is completely based on PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI. The script is able to show you which features (CPUIDs) are available on your ESX server’s CPUs. Besides checking VMotion compatibility it also shows you:

• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) levels which simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. EVC automatically configures server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers.
• All the important CPU features like: VMX, MONITOR/MWAIT , SSE3, SSSE3 ,SSE4.1 ,SSE4.2 ,CMPXCHG8B ,CMPXCHG16B ,NX/XD ,Long mode support ,RDTSCP ,3DNow! ,3DNow! Extensions ,FFXSR ,Prefetch instructions.

I’ve three versions available for download.

The first one can be used as a PowerPack in the Virtualization EcoShell.

     http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/NTPRO.NL.powerpack

Getting a bit bored during the Christmas holiday? I’m going to show you how to manually create kernel panic on your vSphere 4 ESXi server using the vsish shell. First a warning, don’t use the following how-to in a production environment! You probably know how to get access to the ESXi busy box and enable SSH, if you don’t just Google for it. After getting access to the ESXi command line type vsish. You just opened an interactive shell which can be very useful for trouble shouting or making trouble. :-) To view a list of available commands, type help. Navigate to reliability and crashMe. Type set /reliability/crashMe/Panic and take a look at your ESXi console screen, pretty isn’t it.

Continue reading "Lets create some Kernel Panic using vsish" »

VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start after installing or updating the vCenter server. Error messages similar to the following might be written to the Windows System Event log.

The VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0x0). After some investigation, I’ve found the following error in the Apache Tomcat log at C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\logs

[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Procrun (2.0.4.0) started
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Running Service...
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Starting service...
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [994  prunsrv.c] [error] Failed creating java
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [1269 prunsrv.c] [error] ServiceStart returned 1
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Run service finished.
[2009-12-27 20:57:15] [info] Procrun finished.

When you’re encountering this error, just run "C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\bin\tomcat6w.exe" //ES//vctomcat

If the path to the Java.dll is empty and C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\jre is empty, download the Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment (JRE),  release JRE 6 Update 17 or later from http://java.sun.com/j2se. Change the install path to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\jre\
After that you have to select the option “Use default” in the Java tab at the VMware Virtual Management Webservices Properties and the service will start and function like a charm.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V provides a distributed, layer 2 virtual switch that extends across many virtualized hosts. The Cisco Nexus 1000V manages a Datacenter defined by the vCenter Server. Each server in the Datacenter is represented as a linecard in Cisco Nexus 1000V and can be managed as if it were a line card in a physical Cisco switch.

Cisco Nexus 1000V consists of the following two components:

Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM), which contains the Cisco CLI, configuration, and high-level features

Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM), which acts as a Line Card and runs in each virtualized server to handle packet forwarding and other localized functions.

The following software features are new in this release:

• GUI Set Up Following Software Installation
• Layer 3 Control
• Virtual Service Domain
• iSCSI Multipath
• XML API
• DHCP Snooping
• Dynamic ARP Inspection
• IP Source Guard
• MAC Pinning
• Static Pinning

This document describes the features, limitations, and caveats for the Cisco Nexus 1000V Release 4.0(4)SV1(2) software.

Next week I’m having an appointment with a client who wants to implement VMware ACE 2.6 and VMware with Workstation 7.0. Since those two products are fairly new, there isn’t much training material available at this moment so I’ve compiled a VMware’s ACE 2.6 Management Server Quick Start Guide. The information in this guide is taken from VMware’s ACE Documentation website which can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/ace_pubs.html

I’ve included some additional screenshots which were captured in my lab. The VMware’s ACE 2.6 Quick Start Guide can be downloaded here.

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/VMware_Ace.pdf

The Dutch VMUG event 2009 which took place at the Nieuwegein Business Center yesterday turned out to be a great success. On the 11th of December over 600 enthusiastic VMUG members have enjoyed a day full of virtualization, with lots of sessions and workshops. I uploaded the video impression which can be viewed here.

This morning at the end of my Virtualization EcoShell session, Scott Herold delivered a demo of Vizioncore’s vRanger PowerPack. I’ve recorded the last part of my session on my Flip.