News

Eric Siebert at Techtarget has a write up on Snaps ( part 3 ) titled Troubleshooting VMware snapshots

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Virtualization administrators can use snapshots on VMware ESX to travel back in time and figure out what went wrong with their virtual machines (VMs). In part one of this series I discussed how to use VMware Snapshots. In part two I explained how to delete snapshots without wasting disk space. But what do you do when your snapshots start acting funny? In this tip, we’ll troubleshoot potential problems that may come up when using snapshots on ESX.

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Eric, overviews ways to track snapshots, and provides some nice resources for trouble shooting, another nice read.

Eric Siebert at Techtarget has a write up on Snaps ( part 2 ) titled Deleting virtual machine snapshots without wasting disk space

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Taking snapshots of your virtual machines is a useful way to preserve and restore ESX configurations; however, proper management is needed to avoid performance problems. In this tip, we’ll explore advanced snapshot management topics. (For snapshot basics or to review how snapshots work, see my previous tip.)

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Eric does a great job of explaining the disk space used when deleting a snapshot, and performance factors.

Eric Siebert at Techtarget has a write up on Snaps, titled How VMware snapshots work

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A disk “snapshot” is a copy of the virtual machine disk file (VMDK) at a certain point in time. It preserves the disk file system and system memory of your VM by enabling you to revert to the snapshot in case something goes wrong. Snapshots can be real lifesavers when upgrading or patching applications and servers. This article will go over everything you need to know about using snapshots with VMware, including what they are, how they work and advanced techniques.
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Another must read to uderstand snapping. Thanks Eric

Virtual Geek posted a write up on DPM and ESX server lifespan.

Does VMware DPM shorten ESX server lifespan?

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The inimitable MikeD (http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/) pinged me and some of my colleagues this week with this question – he was starting to hear it, thought it sounded like FUD. The question is:

“Does the Distributed Power Management power-on/off cycle cause the boot LUNs of the ESX servers to fail prematurely?”

BTW – if you’re not a DPM expert, this video highlights it’s incredible promise (it’s currently an experimental feature in VI 3.5).

The answer in a word? NO. DPM does not shorten ESX server’s lifespan due to drive failure.
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Those of you new to DPM, this is a good read.

Yellow Bricks posted Leave Powered On…

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On Friday I got a question about the “Leave powered on” setting for HA. This setting is used for the Isolation Response. In other words, what does HA needs to do when a network isolation is detected. The question was pretty straight forward:”What happens when a host is isolated from the network or a host dies completely?”.

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Interesting read on a little known setting, at least to me.

Yellow Bricks posted Snapshots, the revision

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I was reading Jason Boche’s blog on snapshots yesterday and noticed a misunderstanding. I tweeted Jason about this and his blog was updated in a sec. But I thought it might be handy to actually outline the basics again especially because during the VMTN Experts Podcast there was a huge discussion on snapshots. Unfortunately I could not join the call via audio so I decided to respond here.

I thought this was a good follow up to my last post.

The Zenoss Blog has a interesting article, New Community Zenoss Tray Applet

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Zenossian Nathaniel McCallum has written a new tray applet for monitoring Zenoss installations remotely. It sits in your desktop tray and shows the current count of events and the highest severity. From there you can view event details, acknowledge them, add notes and send them to history. It can also be used to monitor multiple Zenoss installations. It is currently only tested on Linux, but porting it to other platforms should be fairly straightforward since it’s GTK and support exists for Windows, OSX and other platforms. Eventually it should be ported to more platforms, add more features like alert sounds and whatever the community can come up with. More developers are encouraged to pitch in, this is already a very handy applet!

Thanks Nathaniel!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zapplet/
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I can’t wait to try this out.

Tom, at http://planetvm.net/blog/ has a post titled : The Black Screen of Death!!!!!!

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I had a VM that whenever you tried to access the console or RDP into the server it just displayed a black screen as shown below

You could do a ctrl-alt-del and if you tabbed just right, and it was a big if, you could log into the server. Once logged in the server functioned correctly. Well I did the standard Google searches and checked out Microsoft’s knowledgebase but had no luck. I knew it must have something to do with the default profile as that is the one that is loaded before a user logs on.
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Check out the full post The Black Screen of Death!!!!!! ; for the fix, thanks Tom!

Tom Howarth has a new blog called PlanetVM

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Welcome to the new home of PlanetVM.

I hope you will find my ramblings on VMware, VDI and desktop and server management in a Virtualised environment interesting.

Kind Regards

Tom Howarth

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Best of luck Tom