A few years ago, we were one of the first/early adopters of UCS. At that time, it was clearly in it’s infancy and not ready for prime time, our local Cisco guys didn’t even know anything about it. If you care to read those previous posts, they can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I was fairly bitter when I wrote those, but with good reason. I ‘wasted’ a lot of time (read weeks or months) jacking with it and had nothing but problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Virtualization
Cisco UCS Blade System – Part 4 – A much needed update
Written May 11th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
No Comments »
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
No Comments »
Updated: Finding WWNs for HBAs in ESXi hosts, now with get-vmhosthba
Written May 7th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
1 Comment »
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
1 Comment »
This is an update to my original get-WWN script using Get-View. Get-VMHostHba was pointed out to me by Robert van den Nieuwendijk, vExpert 2012, so I wanted to provide an update to my original post HERE. I attached the ps1 file at the end.
With the addition of get-vmhosthba in PowerCLI, you can get this information somewhat easier. At line 46
$hbas = Get-View (Get-View (Get-VMHost -Name $vmhost).ID).ConfigManager.StorageSystem
becomes
$hbas = Get-VMHostHba -vmhost $vmhost -Type FibreChannel
Since that pulls only fibre channel HBAs, the foreach changes to simply $hba in $hbas, and the if statement is no longer needed (line 47-50):
foreach ($hba in $hbas){ $wwpn = "{0:x}" -f $hba.PortWorldWideName Write-Host -foregroundcolor green `t "World Wide Port Name:" $wwpn }
Here’s the new version –> Get-WWN.ps1
Installing Windows Server 8 Hyper-V 3 in ESXi 5
I found several posts regarding ‘nesting’ hypervisors (installing a hypervisor within a hypervisor), since I wanted to test out Hyper-V in a VM, and followed this one from William Lam. It worked to allow Hyper-V to pass validation, but after a few reboots, I’d get the dreaded “Windows can’t boot” screen. You have the option to continue, which only reboots to this screen; repair, which gives a command prompt and a few other options; or power off.
<– I would get this far, reboot 3 times, then Windows Server 8 would die, as follows.
<– First option would end up back here
<– Second option above ends up here
I tried the typical bootcfg commands, but it couldn’t read the boot.ini. Some other tests were showing the disk was read-only, which was strange. William’s post was for 2008 R2 and not Windows Server 8, but it worked for the most part. I did have a few other issues I worked through, continue reading for those and how I fixed them. Read the rest of this entry »
Script to join ESXi 5 hosts to Active Directory for Directory Services Authentication
I’m getting ready to upgrade a ton of our ESXi hosts to 5 and wanted a quick way to join all of them to AD after. I could probably do a fresh install and incorporate this into my ESXi Config Script, that’s a consideration, but for the time being, a script that targets clusters, folders, vDCs, etc, will work. The script can also target individual ESXi hosts, they do not have to be joined to vCenter.
Read the rest of this entry »
Where will virtualization be in 12, 18, and 24 months from now? Please respond with your thoughts…
Everyone has ideas of where virtualization is heading, what it will look like, and how everything’s moving to cloud computing. I’ve pretty much built our internal cloud, and it’s somewhat limited to PaaS, with a move to include SaaS. I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and virtualization overall over the next two years.
Creating Certificates for VMware SRM or vCenter using openSSL made easy, with Video!
Some of the documentation around creating certificates for vCenter or SRM seems to be lacking, so I documented a few steps for each and outlined the differences, also created a video :)
This can be done from any machine, as long as openssl is installed. If you’re creating/requesting multiple certs, create folders for each request and work from within there so you don’t mix them up. I use d:\cert\vcenter and d:\cert\srm. I added “D:\OpenSSL-Win32\bin\” to may path variable so it’ll work in any folder I’m in.
Function to convert VMs from thin to thick using #PowerCLI & #PowerShell
Most people want to go from thick to thin to save space. I, on the other hand, want to convert my VMs from thin to thick. Thin provisioning buys you time, basically, but what do you do when you’re vastly over provisioned and your VMs are filling up available physical storage? Sure, you can manually go to each VM and use the GUI to migrate them and convert each one to thick. I had a couple hundred that were thin provisioned and needed them converted to thick.
I’ve been moving from 500GB LUNs to 1TB LUNs, so I scripted it out to migrate VMs over, as well as convert to thick using the New-Object cmdlet.
VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start with error code 0
Tomcat Java Config
I did an in-place upgrade of vCenter to 5.0 from 4.1 and everything seemed to go fine. When I checked heartbeat, it was barking about some services, so I checked and sure enough, VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices wouldn’t start.
I checked the commons-daemon log file (located here Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\logs) and found this:
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Commons Daemon procrun (1.0.5.0 64-bit) started
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Running ‘vctomcat’ Service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Starting service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] Failed creating java
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] ServiceStart returned 1
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Run service finished.
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Commons Daemon procrun finished
I did some googling, which had suggestions such as lowering the VM heap size from 1024MB to 512MB, checking for port conflicts, etc. What fixed it for me was specifying the location of jvm.dll in the jre that came with the vCenter installation. It’s highlighted in the attached pic, which I installed on D, yours may be different. After that, vctomcat started fine.
NetApp SnapMirror & RDMs – Automated failover
A few months ago, a reader by the name of Tolga ŞENTEKİN came across This Post looking for something to do a little more. Tolga was looking to script out DR for some VMs he has that use NetApp with & without RDMs. He & I spent about three weeks putting a script together to do the following:
- Breaks snapmirror replication
- Creates flexclones of the replicated volumes (given you’re licensed for it)
- Map them to the esx hosts on the disaster recovery site
- Adds and resignatures the LUNs and adds the VMs inside them to the inventory
- After that, if you have RDM LUNs attached to the VMs, you first remove the old RDM Mappings from the VM and add the actual LUNs in the disaster site with the same LunID’s
- If it’s all done you can start the Vm’s in the disaster site.
Tolga wrote the vast majority of the script, with me only contributing some of the datastore, LUN, & iSCSI stuff.
I uploaded it and have provided a link, since I didn’t want it to get sauteed up from a C&P.
Click HERE to download a copy of the script (right-click, save-as). Obviously, you will need to edit & fine tune for your environment, but he & I wanted to share with the community.