Vmware

If you are close to the VMware ESXi storage path limit of 1024 paths per host, you may want to consider the following: local storage, including CD-ROMs, are counted in your total paths.

Simply because of the size and age of the environment, some of our production clusters have now reached the limit (including local paths) - you see this message in the logs

[2012-08-20 01:48:52.256 77C3DB90 info ‘ha-eventmgr’] Event 2003 : The maximum number of supported paths of 1024 has been reached. Path vmhba3:C0:T4:L0 could not be added.

I’m currently updating a very small 4-host cluster built for a specific application within our datacentre, the hosts are IBM HS22 blades. Since we have the VMware Update Manager infrastructure in place already, I downloaded the IBM ESXi 5.0 Update 2 ISO and imported it into Update Manager, created a baseline and then applied it to the cluster. I scanned the cluster with the baseline and was issued this warning for each host:

Just a quick script to set the Path Selection Policy on any LUNs on a host that do not have your target policy enabled. The script sets the server to Maintenance mode first, evacuating any VMs if you are in a full DRS automated environment. While this is not strictly necessary, it was required for my production environment just to be safe.

Recently I installed and configured a client’s new ESXi host, they’re a small company and only require a single host. The host in question was an IBM x3650 M3, an excellent workhorse for virtualisation and one of 5 or 6 of the same model that I’ve installed in the last year. In addition to the onboard Broadcom Dual Gigabit NIC, we always install at least a second Intel PCIx Dual Gigabit card for resilience/redundancy/performance.

Recently I had cause to configure iSCSI multipathing on a test ESXi server. The production environment servers use iSCSI HBAs to connect to the back end storage, so multipathing them is a straight-forward setup.

It’s good practice to separate VMotion, virtual machine and iSCSI traffic, it also helps you manage those logical and physical connections.

Connect to your ESXi server using the vSphere Client and select the host. Go to the configuration tab and click “Add Networking…”. Select a new VMKernel connection type.

vMA is available as a Virtual Appliance (OVF) from VMware. To install it on VMware Workstation 7, open Workstation and select Import or Export to import a new OVF, the URL for the latest OVF for vMA is on the vMA download page

As per this article on virtualkenneth.com, you need to edit the VMX file to change the SCSI card and OS type, otherwise you’ll have a kernel panic on boot.

I rebuilt an ESX host in my HA/DRS cluster today, following my build procedure to configure as per VMware best practices and internal guidelines. When the host was fully configured and up-to-date, I added it to the cluster and enabled HA and DRS. Then I went to generate some DRS recommendations to balance the load an ease off my overstretched host, but no recommendations were made.

I couldn’t manually migrate any VMs either – it was odd, because both hosts were added into the cluster, and could ping and vmkping each other from the console.

So you’ve upgraded your ESX 3.x servers to 4.0 and you’ve upgraded your vCenter server, now you want to access the shiny new hot-add feature to upgrade some running server’s memory. Except you can’t, the feature is no-where to be seen. Something to bear in mind though, your OS needs to support hot-add, so you’ll need a Windows Enterprise or Datacenter edition.

Here’s how to enable it:

Upgrade the VM’s tools, if you haven’t already. This requires a re-boot, but don’t reboot, shut the server down down, otherwise you’ll require another reboot to add the feature. The tools can be upgraded from the system tray icon.

I’m currently in the process of migrating a 2-host High Availability cluster of ESX 3.5u4 servers to vSphere 4. This is going to come in 3 distinct stages: Stage 1 is to upgrade VirtualCenter Server 2.5 to vCenter 4, which I am going to cover today. Stage 2 is to upgrade each host, and will be covered as I do it. Stage 3 is the upgrade of the Virtual Machines to the latest VMware Tools and then the new VM hardware.

I’m migrating some hosts off of an older storage LUN, but when I drag the disk to the new Datastore with the SVMotion plug-in the job fails with the following error:

The error occurs because the virtual disk cannot be moved without moving the source files, the .vmx, .vswap etc. Simply drag the entire VM, rather than the virtual disk to the new Datastore.