VMware

Here’s the setup. We have a core switch of 2 Cisco 3750s, connected together for fault tolerance as a single logical switch; we also have several ESX 3.5 hosts with 4 Gigabit Ethernet NICs installed each. The Virtual Machines will all be on VLAN 8 (reserved for internal servers) and the VMKernel will be on VLAN 107 (reserved for VMKernel traffic like VMotion).  I want to create a load balanced, fault tolerant aggregate of these four NICs over the Core Switch.

Having just rebooted my laptop, I clicked on the link to open VMWare Infrastructure Web Access in the my browser and was slightly puzzled by the “page cannot be displayed” error. I figured it was probably the VMWare Server Web Access service not starting for some reason, so I opened services.msc and checked it out. The Web Access service was actually running, but the Host Agent service was not, so I tried to start it - it failed. Dutifully opening Event Viewer for some more information I found the error:

Having recently installed an ESXi server, I am getting to grips with the management and administration of it, one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was connect to the remote terminal through SSH.

I downloaded my SSH client of choice, PuTTY, and set about connecting, however the server refused the connection. It seems that SSH is not enabled out of the box for ESXi and you need to go through some steps to get there - I found some helpful hints here.These are the steps that I took, based on the advice and some other research.

We recently needed to upgrade one of our applications, and the new version requires an addition server instead of the application and SQL it requires a back end search, a front end web server and a SQL server. The specifications of the new server which are “required” to qualify for support are pretty high. The problem is that the actual processor usage is very light, and it is very hard to justify buying a whole new server that I know is going to be barely used.

I’ve just upgraded my VMWare Server install to the latest version of the VMWare Server beta, which I have to say, is looking pretty good! One slight niggle that I had was that when I opened the VMWare Remote Console it would tell me that I could not connect, with the error:

Error opening the remote virtual machine SM-00109:8333\16:  The host name could not be resolved.

Clearly THAT’s a pain in the proverbial. A quick trawl through VMWare’s forums reveals two solutions, one that is clunky and stupid, the other that works. For brevity, the one that works is…

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  <font size="2">&nbsp;Next time you boot&nbsp;the Virual Machine, you&rsquo;ll have to re-attach the .vmdk in it&rsquo;s correct location. </font>
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