News

I recently had to use Console / SSH to restart the Managment Agents on ESXi. This is not supported, but in this case, if I didn’t have it unlocked, I would have been up a creak..

Here is the page my google search turned up. ( thanks to VM-Help.com)

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With ESX it is sometimes necessary to run the command services vmware-mgmt restart should you not be able to connect with the VI client or if you need the host to re-read the esx.conf configuration file because changes you have made at the console are not visible in VirtualCenter. The services command is not available on ESXi and the supported method is to access the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and then to select the restart option from there as in shown in the first image.

If you have console access or have enabled SSH on your ESXi host, you can run the command /sbin/services.sh restart to accomplish the same thing as is shown in the second image. This will restart the agents that are installed in /etc/init.d/ and with a default install that includes: hostd, ntpd, sfcbd, sfcbd-watchdog, slpd and wsmand. It will aalso restart the VMware HA agent (AAM) if that has been enabled on the host.
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I would have liked to have the time to put together a like post with these, but Thanks to VMguy, I didn’t have to, ( not that I would have had time )

I am going to Quote more than I normally do because it warrants review, if nothing else for my self at a later date. Note that I take no credit.

Check out the full post here. Notable KB articles/Patches for the week

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First off, there were a number of different patches released this past week from VMware. Please check them out to see if you need to patch. You can find the patch page here . Additionally, if you want, you can be proactively alerted of new patches in your inbox by signing up here .

Each week I post a collection of KB Articles updated within the last week that I find most relevant and asked about by my customers.

This week’s collection of New/Updated KB Articles:

* Differences in Supported Networking Features Between ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i
* Virtualizing existing domain controllers
* Upgrading from VDM 2.1 to View 3.0 using a clustered setup
* Offline Desktop does not work if the virtual machine resides in an NFS datastore
* Update Manager Client is randomly disabled
* Unlocking View virtual machines in VirtualCenter
* Troubleshooting startup issues or manually reinstalling Fusion
* Jumbo Frames Are Not Available on VMkernel Networking Interfaces in ESX Server 3i
* Disabling access to VMware Tools
* Physical Serial and Parallel Ports Are Not Supported in ESXi version 3.5 and VirtualCenter
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Those of you out there that read my blog ( yes I think there is someone ) might not know that I am a huge fan of Zenoss , and that I use it to monitor our network, and all the devices on it. ( Shout out to Matt @ Zenoss ) Now, I use the community version, but not only do I love the features of Zenoss , but also the way the Product evolves.

On the Zenoss blog, I see that there is a new Zenoss Deksi mashup.

See New Zenoss/Deki Mashup Available

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There is a new Zenoss/Deki mashup now available for combining live Zenoss data with your Deki wiki installation. The mashup places live data from a Zenoss installation in the context of Deki wiki pages for taking configuration notes and other possible future mashups. It pulls live Zenoss device lists and events and creates dynamic wiki pages for the individual devices, populated with live information from Zenoss and you can add notes and attach files as needed. Lots of sysadmins keep a wiki around for tracking their changes to their systems, now you can put some live data in there!
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VM /ETC has a fantastic bit of info for free tools for ESX / ESXi check the blog

Free tools with VirtualCenter -like features

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So you’ve downloaded your free version of ESXi. Maybe you’ve built a couple of ESX Servers but you haven’t purchased a full VI 3.5 Enterpise license. You might even have an enterprise license but your VirtualCenter (VC) server will be a virtual machine (VM) and you want to build a template VM as a gold image first. These are some of several possible scenarios where it helps to have VC -like functionalities without VirtualCenter. This post is a summary of 3 freely available tools that can provide some of VirtualCenter’s features.

First let me state that there is not an exact substitute for VirtualCenter, and the automation and ease of management VC provides is well worth it’s cost. Now for some alternatives.

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These are really interesting to me, as of right now, we are running ESXi Only, with No Virtual Center, and even if we went that direction, I can’t see my self opting to shell out money for my test or unsupported ESXi boxes just to get VC control.

Thanks, I will have to try these out.

Roger

I updated the title, some how it go some messed up formatting, and when you added it to google reader it wasn’t readable. This should be fixed.

Thanks me to adding my own site to find this, haha.

I do have a few of you out there reading the site, thanks all!

UPDATE:

it is still adding the site that way, via rss, but it shows correctly in blog settings, I resubmitted the site index, if anyone has any idea’s let me know.

Thanks

Yellow Bricks has the following blog : Converting Domain Controllers

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Just noticed this great VMware KB article. The article deals about converting aka p2v’ing Microsoft Domain Controllers. Those of you who have done VMware implementations and migrations know that this usually causes problems and leaves the Active Directory in a faulty state. This will lead to replication not working properly anymore. My advise usually is: Create a new VM from a template and do a “dcpromo”, best solution to also get rid of the slack. Or do a “cold migration”, no and I repeat NO hot migration. This will kill your replication for sure. Anyway, read this KB Article for more info.

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Basically, do a Cold Migration

Yellow Bricks has a interesting write up titled : Inject a driver into ESXi

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I had my doubts about posting this one cause it definitely breaks your support. But a quick search on google revealed that it has been posted before so if you’re gonna do it why not use “my” procedure. Again I would like to stress that this should only be done for test purposes. Mark Erica was so kind to email me this procedure that they used to replace a faulty driver. The driver would be in the next version of ESXi or probably a patch but due to the severe problems they could not wait.
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I found this a great read, and to me it shows the future of ESXi.

http://blog.fosketts.net has a blog post on long term archiving titled : Thoughts on Long-Term Archiving

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I just completed my webinar for AIIM on long-term archiving. Excellent attendance (kudos to AIM!) and some great questions that, sadly, we didn’t get to during the session. I’ll try to tackle them here in hopes that their authors find these answers!
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Worth the read, even if you have been through the thought process before.

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com has a blog entry titled Prevent your LUNs running out of space

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Don’t we all know the time you forgot to monitor your LUN available space? The call at 3am in the night from the monitoring-room that a LUN has no free space and VMs are crashing (VMs with active snapshots). So had we. We now have configured addequate monitoring to alert when less then 20Gb free space. But despite this it could still occure that a LUN runs out of space.
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Some good stuff, check it out.

I like the fake data idea, but I would think that it would be a waste of space in a large environment, and what would happen if you where deduping?