After having a play with Virtual Flash and Host Caching on one of my lab hosts I wanted to re-use the SSD drive, but couldn’t seem to get vFlash to release the drive. I disabled flash usage on all VMs and disabled the Host Cache, then went to the Virtual Flash Resource Management page to click the “Remove All” button. That failed with errors:

“Host’s virtual flash resource is inaccessible.”

In case you missed it VMware have now released vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) in Europe! The first data center residing in Slough with more data centers planned across Europe in the near future.

Working in an SME that has several existing vSphere environments this was of real interest, as the need to scale out quickly from our Private clouds is rapidly becoming a requirement.

Having already spoken to VMware on the phone to get a rough idea on options and costs I decided to take a look at the Hands-on-labs to see how easy it really is to use and migrate VMs from an existing private cloud to vCHS.

For those of you unaware VMware recently released the  VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist

What does it do?

“VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.”

Problem

Fairly recently I came across this error message on one of my hosts “esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full”

Fallout

While trying to address the issue I had the following problems when the ramdisk did indeed “fill up”

• PSOD (worst case happened only once in my experience)
• VM’s struggling to vMotion from the affected host when putting into maintenance mode.

Temporary workaround

A reboot of the host would clear the problem (clear out the ramdisk) for a short while but the problem will return if not addressed properly.

Just a quick post on something that was not immediately obvious when it happened to me.

When deploying  vCSA 5.5 and trying to add it to the domain, I was presented with the following error.

I immediately did all the all the usual checks, making sure it had a static IP and correct DNS servers etc..

The one thing missing however was a FQDN for the hostname (in the network tab).

So what is VMUG?

The VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, global, customer-led organization, created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events.

Presently there are five VMUGs in the UK including the latest addition - South West UK VMUG - @swukvmug

Why am I involved and why should you come along?

I had been using VMware products for over 3 years and after joining twitter it was very clear to me the VMware user community was very friendly and also very helpful, it was there I learned about VMUG so the chance to meet and greet other users like myself and of course learn from the “rockstars” was to good an opportunity to pass up, after attending several meetings I was completely sold.

So this morning I took the VMware Infrastructure as a Service exam (VCPVCD510) to gain the VCP5-Cloud qualification. The IaaS exam is available for existing VCP5-DCV holders to take without any other pre-requisites. I am very pleased to say I finished the exam in good time and scored 466/500 – the pass mark is 300.

The Exam

The exam itself is 85 multiple choice questions, and gives you 90 minutes to do them. The last two exams I’ve sat were VCAPs, which require you to move very quickly through the questions, so I am in the habit of answering quickly: I finished with over an hour to spare! The questions and answers are not particularly wordy but it is important to read carefully and pick out the important information.

As a proof of concept I recently tried to virtualize OS X (Mountain Lion) - It is important to note that VMware is now licensed to do so and you can read more here .

The following is an overview of the steps I followed to achieve my goal in some cases it was trial an error as I am not a regular Mac user.

According to VMware, Infrastructure Navigator is

…a component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. It automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources.

Effectively it takes a look at the network connections that are running between your VMs (and physical servers) and works out which applications and services are running on each, and the dependencies – both upstream and downstream – for each VM.

There’s no doubt that vCOps is a great product for proactively monitoring your vSphere environment, but it’s a hefty package for the lab. The minimum recommended RAM is a whopping 16GB – in my lab that’s the whole of my management host! I recently needed to do some testing so I wanted to get it running in the lab with the barest minimum I could get working, and it turns out you can get working with just 4GB and 2 CPU…albeit you wouldn’t want to monitor much! I also want to use vFlash Read Cache to accelerate I/O in the lab – this requires upgrading VMtools and the VM hardware to version 10.