Storage

http://www.yellow-bricks.com posted a Blog Entry titled : Create VMFS volumes from the command-line

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I just had to create a couple VMFS volumes from the command-line on a local disk. It’s pretty straight forward but I needed to document it anyway, here it is:

1. fdisk -l (check what the last partition is)
2. fdisk /dev/sda
3. n (new)
4. default (start block)
5. default (end block)
6. t (partition type)
7. 10 (partition 10, just created)
8. fb (vmfs type)
9. w (write config)
10. reboot (Reboot the host before you format the newly created partition)
11. vmkfstools -C vmfs3 /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba0:0:0:10
12. Go to VI Client, Refresh storage view and rename the newly created volume

I was looking for this the other day, and was asking about alignment before the last VMware Roundtable. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/podcasts/

Full post http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/12/15/create-vmfs-volumes-from-the-commandline/

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com , and author Scott Lowe Posted a Blog post titled : Internal vs. external guest virtual machine storage Full Blog Post Here : http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1342097,00.html

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Numerous articles have been written about various storage protocols that can be used with VMware to store the files that make up a virtual machine (VM). Little, however, has been published about storage within the VM, such as what the best options are for providing storage to guest VMs and which option is best in a given situation. It is almost guaranteed that the operating system (OS) instance for a particular guest VM will be found within a Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) stored on a supported data store, but that’s not necessarily the case for the data managed by that guest VM. Users have options in how that data will be stored and accessed by the guest VM. In this tip, I’d like to explore some of the options for providing additional storage to guest VMs and when these options are most applicable.

There are essentially two options for providing storage to guest VMs. Users can either provide internal storage by provisioning additional VMDKs at the VMware ESX layer and attach them to the guest VMs, or users can provide external storage by configuring guest VMs to use software iSCSI and attach to an iSCSI-based array.

Each of these options has its own advantages and disadvantages. The reasons for using one approach versus the other lie within these advantages and disadvantages. First, let’s explore these options in a bit more detail.
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Full Blog Post Here : http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1342097,00.html

A good read, Thanks Scott.

Edward L. Haletky put up a new Wiki page.

Titled: Virtualization Bookshelf ( site http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization_Bookshelf )
The essential books and references for the Virtualization Professional

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VMware

• Edward L. Haletky. VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers. Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (January 8, 2008).

  Buy from InformIT.com

• Ron Oglesby, Scott Herold, Mike Laverick. VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide & Advanced Operations Guide. The Brian Madden Company; Second edition edition (August 1, 2008).
• John Arrasjid, Karthik Balachandran, Daniel Conde, Gary Lamb, and Steve Kaplan. #18: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure. USENIX Association; 2008.
• David Marshall, Stephen S. Beaver, Jason McCarty. VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center. Auerbach Publications; 1 edition (August 25, 2008).

Xen

• Jeanna N. Matthews, Eli M. Dow, Todd Deshane, Wenjin Hu, Jeremy Bongio, Patrick F. Wilbur, Brendan Johnson. Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization. Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (April 16, 2008).
• David Chisnall. The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor. Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (November 19, 2007).

Security

• Himanshu Dwivedi. Securing Storage: A Practical Guide to SAN and NAS Security. Addison-Wesley Professional (November 21, 2005).
• Michael Howard, David LeBlanc, John Viega. 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (July 26, 2005).
• Gregory N. Purdy. LINUX iptables Pocket Reference. O’Reilly Media Inc; 2004.

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Thank you Edward!

All credit to Edward.

More Xen
Update: see blow comment ” Running Xen book http://runningxen.com “

http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php has a posted titled Get VMware Disk Usage with Powershell( http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/vmware/get-vmware-disk-usage-with-powershell/ )

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Using VMware seriously requires a lot of (shared) storage. This kind of storage (on a SAN for instance) is quite expensive. So you might want to check if you are wasting a lot of this space. When you look at the storage in VMware, it consists of multiple abstraction layers. A virtual machine has one or more Logical Disks, which are indicated by driveletters. You can use WMI to determine the amount of used and free space (Win32_LogicalDisk). One or more logical disks are contained in a partition. One or more partitions reside on a physical disk. That physical disk is really a virtual disk, a vmdk file to be precise. One or more vmdk files reside in a Datastore, which can be found on a LUN on your SAN.
The following script enumerates most of these layers (from logical disk to datastore) and calculates the used and free space. The final line exports the results to a csv file for use in Excel. And the script also helps you to calculate the average free space by showing the totals without the duplicates (don’t try to average the averages in excel, that’s not accurate because datastores contain duplicates and averages should be weighed).
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This is something I want to try, and I will post results, I am currently trying a Eval of ESX 3.5 U3.

Post your comments if anyone uses this or something like it to monitor disk usage.

Refer to the Full Post to see the code

http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/vmware/get-vmware-disk-usage-with-powershell/

I thought this were worth reading, as it is better to read and experience, than the later.

Creating a second root user account

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005278

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1. Run the adduser -u 0 -o -g 0 -G 0,1,2,3,4,6,10 -M root2 command from the ESX server console.
   
   Omit the -M if you want a home directory created.

2. Run the passwd root2 command to create a password.

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Guidelines for Extending a VMFS Volume

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1884

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An extended VMFS volume may contain from two to 32 physical extents. Each extent is either a primary partition, or a logical partition within an extended partition. These extents can be on one LUN or on multiple LUNs. In the latter case, some of these LUNs can have multiple extents on the volume.

To safely extend a VMFS volume:

1. Perform a backup of the VMFS volume.
2. Shut down all except one of your ESX Server machines.
3. On this active ESX Server system, shut down all virtual machines that access the VMFS volume.
4. Extend this volume. Keep in mind that this procedure reformats the volume you choose as the extent candidate, which overwrites any existing data on that volume.
5. After the volume extension has successfully completed:
   • Restart the virtual machines that you shut down in step 3.
   • Restart your other ESX Server machines.
6. Schedule regular backups for the extended VMFS volume.

   Warning: If one extent is corrupted or damaged, the entire volume becomes unusable.

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Hardware and Firmware Requirements for 64-Bit Guest Operating Systems

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1901

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VMware’s virtual machine monitor has traditionally used segmentation to provide isolation between the guest operating system and the virtual machine monitor. This is necessary because the guest operating system and virtual machine monitor share the linear address space.

A limited form of segmentation was reintroduced in long mode, in revision D AMD64 processors. As a result, AMD64 processors must be revision D or later to run 64-bit guest operating systems.

VMware distributes a free utility that can be used to determine whether or not your CPU is suitable for running 64-bit guest operating systems. You can download this utility from the VMware Web site at http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/drivers_tools.html (scroll down to Processor Check for 64-Bit Compatibility). VMware Server includes this utility in its product distribution, so you don’t need to download an additional tool.

Workstation 5.5 and higher and VMware Server (all versions) support virtual machines with 64-bit guest operating systems only on host machines that have one of the supported 64-bit processors:

• AMD Athlon 64, revision D or later
• AMD Opteron, revision E or later
• AMD Turion 64, revision E or later
• AMD Sempron, 64-bit-capable revision D or later (experimental support)
• Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors (experimental support)

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Is Running Older VMware Tools in ESX Server Guests Supported?

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1834

“When you install a patched version of ESX Server, VMware expects you to upgrade VMware Tools to the latest version, included with that release. If you report a problem with a virtual machine that has an older version of the VMware Tools installed in the guest operating system, VMware Technical Support may ask you to upgrade the VMware tools to the version included with the ESX Server Patch in the process of troubleshooting that problem.
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Unable to boot after ESX upgrade

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005078

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1. Determine if you can boot into Linux/Troubleshooting mode.
2. If you can boot in to Linux/Troubleshooting, run the following commands:
   
3. • esxcfg-boot -p
   • esxcfg-boot -b
   • esxcfg-boot -r

4. If booting into Linux/Troubleshooting mode fails, ensure that the storage is disconnected and do a fresh installation. Ensure to select Keep Virtual Machines and VMFS Volumes intact.
5. Reboot the ESX host.

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blog.scottlowe.org has a nice post titled Continuing the FCoE Discussion

Lunk : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/09/continuing-the-fcoe-discussion/

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Tonight, after reading a blog post by Dave Graham regarding FCoE vs. InfiniBand, I started thinking about FCoE again, and I came up with a question I want to ask. I’m not a storage expert, and I don’t have decades of experience in the storage arena like many others that write about storage. The question I’m about to ask, then, may just be the uneducated ranting of a fool. If so, you’re welcome to enlighten me in the comments.

Here’s the question: how is FCoE any better than iSCSI?
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I tend to get slightly fired up about this and I did post a comment, which is awaiting moderation.

I will quote it here

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slowe,

I tend to agree with you, additionally, it is very easy to scale iSCSI, where you are stuck with one controller on a EMC / Netapp FC array, each iSCSI array ( EQL) has it’s own controller.

Therefore, if you have three racks of EMC or Three Racks of EQL, ( 12 per rack ) the array each have two controller’s each ( or at least most that I have seen do ) where the , EQL iSCSI, would have something like 36 controllers, vs three EMC controllers for the same amount of storage.

Now Even if you had 8 GB FC, wouldn’t you be limited to 8GB X 4ports X 3 Controllers = 96 GB

To make it even, lets say you had iSCSI sans with 10 GB controllers, 10 GB X 2port X 36 Controllers = 720 GB

Hence, if you had a Six top end switches @ 10 GB, Connected to 36 10 GB Sans all on the same switch back plane, wouldn’t the EQL have better throughput than FC Over Ethernet?
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Jason B, talks about open snapshots:
Know thy open snapshots

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VMware snapshotting is a wonderful and powerful technology that affords IT and Developer staff great flexibility and recovery options with virtual machines (VMs) that weren’t so flexible with physical machines or flat out did not exist. With this technology comes the responsibility of using it properly and knowing its limitations. Snapshots have a shelf life that varies somewhere between the moment the snapshot was created and infinity. Boy, that was real helpful wasn’t it?
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Jason go’s into some detail of how open snaps work, and how much storage they can take, as well introduces a couple of third party tools to use with ESX.

Thanks Jason.