In the world of virtualization good admins make snapshots of VM’s before making significant changes, right? Great idea except you need to be careful, because if you roll back a Microsoft Windows Domain Controller you could put yourself in a world of hurt. Here is an excellent article from Windows IT Pro magazine written by Greg Shields explaining why you should never rollback a snapshot of a Domain Controller.
Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category
“USN rollback comes back with a vengeance when Domain Controllers are restored using snapshots.”
July 31, 2010vSphere shows VMware Tools in Ubuntu as out of date
May 18, 2010I have updated my previous post http://bit.ly/afTX7f with instructions on how to address this particular issue.
Installing VMware Tools from vSphere’s install/upgrade feature on some Ubuntu versions doesn’t work. Instead manually install the Ubuntu VMware Tools package from within the guest. Once the package is installed, vSphere may not show the new VMware Tools as being ”OK”, instead it shows it as “Out of Date”. Not a big deal, run vSphere’s VMware Tools Install/Upgrade feature after the initial package is installed and it should change to “OK”.
Systems monitoring puzzle in the great VMware vCenter as a VM vs. physical machine debate
May 11, 2010The following article pretty much sums up my views on why I think running vCenter as a virtual machine is the best solution for most environments (notice I didn’t say all environments): http://bit.ly/awhXYb
What I didn’t see addressed in the article was concerns regarding systems monitoring when running vCenter as a VM.
Avoid 802.1q Native VLAN’s with VMware
May 5, 2010“VMware recommends you not associate any ESX Server virtual switch port group VLAN IDs with the native VLAN. Also, as long as you avoid using native VLAN for your VLAN port groups, there is no native VLAN related configuration necessary on the ESX Server systems.”
The easiest way to comply is to not assign any native VLAN the external switch port. In switching it is often a common practice to assign a desired data port VLAN as the native VLAN. But with VMware let the external switch go ahead and tag your VLAN(s) and then your vSwitches will be happy and behave as intended.
VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions (originally written for ESX 3, but applies to ESX 4)
The Great vSwitch Debate - A great series of articles on vSwitches
How-to install VMware Tools in Ubuntu
May 4, 2010Post Out-Dated
For up-to-date information visit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools
Update your package lists:
sudo apt-get update
Check to see if Linux kernel headers are installed:
apt-cache search linux-headers-$(uname -r)
If you do not see the “Linux kernel header” package after executing the above command, then perform the next step, otherwise skip it …
If Linux kernel headers are not installed:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Install VMware Tools
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools
Configure VMware Tools
sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl
Leave all answers as defaults
Restart Networking with vmxnet
WARNING: During the next five (5) steps you will temporarily lose network connectivity, you can optionally skip these steps and execute them at a more convient time.
sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop
sudo rmmod pcnet32
sudo rmmod vmxnet
sudo modprobe vmxnet
sudo /etc/init.d/networking start
Check to see if VMware-tools is running
ps -ax|grep vmware
You should see the following process running:
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin32/vmware-guestd –background /var/run/vmware-guestd.pid
Check to see if balloon driver is running on host
Click on the link to learn how-to check to see if balloon driver is running
Check to see if VMware tools is out of date
From the vSphere client click on the Summary tab for the VM and in the General block look to see if VMware Tools shows “OK” or “Out of date”.
If it shows Out of date then right-click on the VM and select Guest->Install/Upgrade VMware Tools. It will take a while for the task to complete, when it is done processing the VMware Tools status should show “OK”.
References
How-To Install VMware Tools in Ubuntu
How-To See if Balloon Driver is Running in VM
May 4, 2010SSH into the host where the VM is running.
Type ‘esxtop‘
Press ’m‘ for memory view
Press ‘f‘ to add a field
If there is no asterix by the ‘MCTL‘ item, press ‘I‘
Return to view
‘MCTL‘ column shows ‘Y‘ or ‘N‘ indicating whether balloon driver is running.
‘MCTLSZ‘ indicates the amount of guest memory reclaimed by balloon driver.
If the balloon driver is not running then install VMware Tools.
References:
ESX vs. Hyper-V R2
May 4, 2010How do you explain cloud computing to people who buy into vendor hype?
May 1, 2010“… a lot of things you will see will have cloud annotations. Why not? When something is not clearly defined and mostly misunderstood, it becomes one of god’s great gifts to marketers.” – John M Willis
“We’re marching out yesterday’s services as cloud services…it ends up blurring the lines and making adoption very difficult,” – Hamid Ouyachi, Labor Department chief technology officer.
The term “cloud computing” is so ridiculously overly used, and no pun intended - very nebulous. Marketing folks have had a field day with this buzz word, they have twisted the definition beyond repair – this in return makes it very hard to talk with certain folks about cloud computing.
VMware Data Backup & Recovery
May 1, 2010Here is a great tool for small to medium sized businesses at no additional cost if you have vSphere advanced version or above. It allows backup of the VM files to NFS, SMB, etc. Unlike VCB this doesn’t require you or someone else to write code to do the backups, it is a full blown end user application.
