VM /ETC - Go Ugly Green! - Latest Comments

Re: Video Of Working Windows DirectX Games in VirtualBox 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.0.4

Igor — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:33:56 -0000

Thank you, very useful for me

Re: VMware Data Recovery 1.1 Release Supports File Level Restore

vmdoug — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:29:34 -0000

Interesting...I'll have to take a look at it ;-)

Re: vSwitch With Multiple VKernel Portgroups for vSphere iSCSI Round Robin MPIO

rbrambley — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:48:54 -0000

Thanks for the info on Dell iSCSI

Re: vSwitch With Multiple VKernel Portgroups for vSphere iSCSI Round Robin MPIO

Pasi Kärkkäinen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:28:58 -0000

Dell talks about multiple vmkernel ports per NIC because that way they get to utilize all of the eth-interfaces of the Equallogic arrays. Each separate iSCSI session from each vmkernel port will get redirected to the 'best' interface in the Equallogic group (of possibly many arrays).

If you're doing random IO then you're not limited by the gigabit ethernet interface speed, but disk/spindle speeds and controllers.

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

rbrambley — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:57:28 -0000

Devang,

Thanks. I look forward to your "presenting" post.

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

storagenerve — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:50:51 -0000

This is a great list of things you mention. I plan to write about presenting to the crowd later this week or early next week in terms of what my experiences have been with the GestaltIT Techfieldday.

Always good reading your blogs!!! Keep writing....

Re: MDS and Xsigo Power VMware GETO Mobile Demo and VMworld Booth Rack

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:43:38 -0000

Disclosure - with the techfieldday fire hose opened wide and aimed straight at me I missed that point about the disks.

Thanks Chad!

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:38:03 -0000

You and I see things a little differently then our other GestaltIT delegates, and vice versa. Like any good IT team, the group gets so much out of the discussions together!

Re: MDS and Xsigo Power VMware GETO Mobile Demo and VMworld Booth Rack

chadsakac — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:36:24 -0000

Disclosure - EMC employee here..

Happy to support Randy and my VMware brothers and sisters :-)

One of the reasons we were able to support that extreme density was use of Enterprise Flash disks in the CX4/Celerra. We also hot-added the 10GbE iSCSI and NFS connectivity.

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:34:07 -0000

Sunshine,

Thanks, glad to help. I love to give my opinion. Sometimes, you don't even have to ask! ;)

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

AbsoluteVista — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:39:10 -0000

Excellent points, Rich.

The problem, as you adroitly put it, is the disconnect between the three tiers of managers of the data center: servers, storage, and networking.

Re: Tech Field Day: Thoughts About Presenting To Engineers

sunshinemug — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:17:39 -0000

Rich,
This is great feedback--particularly (for me) the suggestion of showing where the appliance fits into the data center. It's something that would add a great deal and which I'll be sure to talk to clients about for future events. Your presence at the event was significant and throughout, you seemed very engaged--offering highly relevant and constructive thoughts and questions. Thanks for continuing the conversation!
--Sunshine

Re: ESXI U4 Ends Free Version Read and Write Access from the RCLI

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:39:05 -0000

All read only access should be enabled. Hope that helps.

Re: ESXI U4 Ends Free Version Read and Write Access from the RCLI

sant0sk1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:19:01 -0000

Does this also apply to access provided via the SDK? All I need to do is programmatically mount/unmount NFS datastores & if I can accomplish that via the SDK then I'll surely give it a go.

Re: VKernel Capacity Modeler Free Until End Of Year (2009)

rbrambley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:33:43 -0000

Ettore,

Thanks for the heads up. That explains why I got an email over the weekend about by download. Somebody took advantage and avoided their own email address!

No more!!

Re: VKernel Capacity Modeler Free Until End Of Year (2009)

Ettore — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:23:20 -0000

You might want to check those links. There seems to be some personal information embedded.

Re: Don’t Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del On the ESX 4 Console

twitter-27825765 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:01:20 -0000

> It's standard and expected behavior.
Well at least it is not a standard behavior for ESX3.x up to COS kernel version 2.4.21-57
For me it is a 'new' feature, althought very usefull in UNIX world, not really in an ESX environment. I think it's an error to leave that feature turned on, that's my thought!

It becomes clear why VMware is phasing out ESX, and recommends ESXi, too much little gotchas with the COS...

Cheers,

Re: Don’t Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del On the ESX 4 Console

Dracolith — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:15:15 -0000

It's something you control when you're configuring ESX under
Configuration > Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown.
Just the same as if you right click the host in the VI console and choose "Reboot", click yes, then okay.

The default is "power off guest"
You can change it to "shut down guest operating system" if you like

If most VI admins are Windows admins, I think ESXi is more appropriate for such deployments.

The benefit of ESX is to provide a linux-based management console.
It's harder for a Windows admin to use period...

you can't just press "F2" and configure network settings, etc..
have to know Linux and ESX-specific command line commands.

The linux defaults are a good idea for a linux-based management console..
and I doubt that many ESX admins are unaware of what ctrl+alt+del does,

but IMO VMware should certainly explain how to change the defaults in the setup guide,
or even provide an option during installation...

Re: Don’t Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del On the ESX 4 Console

Jason Boche — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:02:09 -0000

Very easy to test but my guess is the VMs are powered off ungracefully unless power down/power up is configured. And we know it's a power off if no VMware Tools are installed in the guest.

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

rbrambley — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:09:43 -0000

Thanks for all the comments so far. I need to sit down with the calculator and come up with the average ratio again!

Re: Don’t Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del On the ESX 4 Console

rbrambley — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:07:48 -0000

Dracolith,

Whether or not ctrl+alt+del is helpful on a Linux box or not, the reality is that most VI admins are probably Windows admins used to a window prompt given to them before chooising an action when using this key combination. It's also a major difference to be on the console of an ESX host with running VMs instead of a single server console (as you mentioned).

IMO, it's best to keep the default disabled for ESX - you can't invoke an auto shutdown. It's also unclear to me if the VMs are hard powered off or cleanly shutdown. Therefore, the potential to damage multiple OSes is too great.

Re: VMware Studio 2.0 and OVF Exports: Blurred Products or Outside The Box Thinking?

rbrambley — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:59:31 -0000

Komal,

Thanks for the clarification. I assume this VMware Communities employee profile is yours? http://communities.vmware.com/people/komal

Re: VMware Studio 2.0 and OVF Exports: Blurred Products or Outside The Box Thinking?

Komal — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:55:36 -0000

There is no such restriction. In fact in future we plan to integrate VM template as input for Studio to generate VMs.

Re: Don’t Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del On the ESX 4 Console

Dracolith — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:26:30 -0000

What do you mean 'throwback'? It's standard and expected behavior.
Ubuntu 9.10 does this. Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.4 does this.
A lot of folks would be quite unhappy if the default changed.

It is very convenient, and generally a feature. It allows junior techs to cleanly reboot a server in an emergency, if network connectivity is lost, and login is impossible for one reason or another (for example, server out of memory, getty broken or cannot spawn a shell).

Otherwise, they would be forcing an unclean shutdown every time.
Standard procedure when you need to take down a Linux system: plug in a keyboard, hit control alt delete, pull the plug as soon as it's back to POST.

However: avoid plugging a Unix machine into the same KVM as a physical Windows server, use a dedicated KVM, so there's no accidental action by a Windows admin. Better yet, run all Windows machines as VMs, or use only iLO, DRAC, ALOM, or other on-board management for ESX: that way logging into ESX is a deliberate action.

Admittedly, rebooting an ESX server is a bit bigger a mistake than accidentally rebooting a Linux server. But pulling the plug uncleanly (if management is lost) is also more severe.

It would be nice if you could customize the keystroke.
Like it or not... Ctrl+Alt+Del has never been the same since MS started using it for server login.

Best fallback option may be
kernel.sysrq = 1

in /etc/sysctl.conf

And use Ctrl+Alt+SysRQ s
Ctrl+Alt+SysRq f
Ctrl+Alt+SysRq i

And hope you kill whatever was stopping you from being able to login at console...

Re: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin

william bishop — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:25:39 -0000

rbrambley, VMsprawl is a huge problem with us...people come to us more frequently, because we no longer have a 2 week lead time (or longer), but rather minutes. The 2 of us that do the VI work spend probably 20% of our week on vmware admin duties alone...the rest of it is our other work (I am the storage admin, vmware admin, server admin, and the team lead (project planning and paperwork mostly). It's not as time consuming as I feared, but we've been overloaded from the beginning. It's far better than physical servers in any case, I replaced my virtual center yesterday, and it was an all day affair, because it was hardware. If it had been virtual it would have been at most a couple hours.

Sprawl is a huge problem and no one seems to be inclined to rein it in at all.