Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m sure this has been said before.  But I really want to know WHEN VMware will support VMDK disk sizes larger than 2TB – 512 bytes.

I have found that this is one of the main reasons people go to using Physical and Virtual RDMs in their environments.  But these just make things complicated and nasty.

Datastore sizes have increased to 64TB but where is the love for the lowly VMDK that supports all of our Guest OS VMs?

I’d love to know how many people are having to work around this issue by using RDMs or mounting iSCSI LUNs or NFS mountpoints from within thir VMs.  While the monster VM is available via Memory and CPU nowadays what about the Monster Data VM.  You know you have at least one.

Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Doing some late night Twitter and email follow-ups I was surprised to see an offer by an astounding group of people. TrainSignal has offered VMware 2013 vExperts a one year unlimited access pass to their training.  Their training covers VMware products and other vendors such as Cisco and Microsoft.  Thanks much TrainSignal and those involved in getting this to happen.

If you are on the list of 2013 vExperts follow this link to get signed up.  They will verify you are a vExpert so don’t expect that you can just get free stuff.

Sometimes you come across a VM that thinks it still is installing VMware Tools and you cannot vMotion or Storage vMotion this VM.  Yet the option to cancel the installation is greyed out from the GUI menu and you may not even have the option to edit the VM settings.

How do you kill this installation that seems to be in limbo?

On the host that is running the VM you will need to enable RemoteTech Support mode or SSH and then login using a SSH client such as Putty.

From the command line you then run the following command:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

This will give you a list of all currently running VMs and their ID

With this information you then execute the following:

vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall vmid where vmid is the number you got from the previous list that matches the VM you are working with.

This kills the VMware Tools installation instance on that VM.  This will let you vMotion the VM to another host.  Since the installation is cancelled you will need to verify if VMware tools installation had been successful or retry the installation.

I recently was informed that I was being recognized as a 2013 Dell TechCenter Rockstar.  This is a wonderful honor to be included in this for a second year.  To be grouped with so many others who have a passion for technology and a desire to help others is incredibly inspiring. The list of 2013 TechCenter Rockstars is here.

Yesterday I was informed.of my inclusion in with 580 others who just love the things VMware has done and continues to do.  This recognition as a VMware vExpert for 2013 is much appreciated.  The full list of the 2013 VMware vExperts is located here.

I just completed an upgrade cycle of our VMware vCenter/SRM environment.  This upgrade was a nightmare of unknowns, hidden ice bergs and a tar baby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby) or two.

First during my first week I was asked to install a vCenter in one of our Data Centers. This vCenter was to support some new ESXi vSphere 5.1 hosts.  So I went ahead and installed this to a VM that had been already provisioned.  I found out that this system name had previously been used as part of a vCenter Linked Mode environment for vCenter 5.0.

Ruh-Oh!

Just so you know don’t mix versions of vCenter in Linked Mode.

Secondly as I was unfamiliar with the site/environment I installed this as a Simple vCenter install which uses VMware SSO in basic mode.

Ruh-Oh!

I found out that someone had already installed SSO on another server running vCenter 5.0 and this “new” vCenter should have been installed in multi-site mode.  Acutally I found out later that the SSO installation was not completed sucessfully.

As this installation “broke” linked mode and was causing people to upgrade their vSphere clients but then not allowing them to login properly I went ahead and removed/uninstalled linked mode from all of my vCenter installations.

Ruh-Oh!

This did not work properly.  I ended up using VMware KB 2005930 to edit my Linked Mode at each location using ADSI Edit. This restored access to all locations but isolated each vCenter and caused additional administative headaches.

During the next week I worked on documenting the Primary and Secondary vCenters that were running with SRM.  During this documentation and planning period I was kindly asked/told to go through with the upgrades at both sites. This is where the real night mare began.

At the primary site after downloading the vCenter installer ISO and the SRM installers I ran into issues getting SSO installed and running and then having the Inventory Service and Web Server service recognize the Primary SSO installation.  I finally resolved this by completely uninstalling all VMware components and keeping the vCenter 5.0 database.

Once the vCenter was installed and some basic AD groups added for permissions the secondary site was on the spot to be upgraded.  This installation was fairly seamless.  I was able to connect these two sites in Linked Mode with no SRM functionality.

Management had done their own research and thought that SRM 5.0.x would work with vCenter 5.1.0b.  I informed them prior to starting that to have SRM working would require an upgrade to SRM also. So thus began the upgrades to SRM.

There was no documentation within the IT organization as to what was being protected by SRM.  Of course… There never is documentation.  I attempted an inplace upgrade of SRM 5.0.x to 5.1.0.  The SRM DR service would never continue to run on the Primary server.  This necessitated opening up an SR with VMware support.  After working through this issue with multiple support engineers involved and uploading logs and escallating the case we found that when using our existing SRM Database the service would terminate a few seconds after being started.  But when we used a new empty database the service would run properly.

Wow.  But I didn’t know what Protection Groups had been created and what VMs were in each protection group or what Protection Plans were in place with possible customized IP addresses.  Did you know there is no tool to migrate the data from an existing SRM DB to a new SRM DB except during an installation?  Well there isn’t…  But VMware SRM Support did have an excellent support engineer who was able to help pull the data from the older SRM 5.0.x database using Microsoft SQL Server Managment Studio.  He was able to pull together the data showing our Protection groups  -> VMs and that we had no customized protection plans.

This was great!  We could install SRM with an empty DB and then “fairly easily” recreate the Protection Groups with VMs and Resource Groups and Storage and Networks and…. to get SRM up and running again.  But!  I also needed to be able to see the protected storage arrays.  This required an upgrade to the SRA for EMC RecoverPoint.  To work with VMware SRM 5.1.0 you need to be using SRM for EMC RecoverPoint 2.1. Ok sounds doable.  But to have the SRA work you need RecoverPoint to version 3.5 or later.  Sounds simple.  It’s not.  RecoverPoint is not a user upgradable solution at this moment.  It normally takes at least 5 business days to work through the EMC Change Control process for a RecoverPoint upgrade.  During this process all sorts of things are documented and verified.  Since we use SRM to move production workloads this process was shortened to less than 2 days.  The upgrade itself is fairly painless in that you upload an ISO from EMC and a special installer uploads this to the applicances and then moves the Protection groups from RPA 1 to RPA 2 and commits an upgrade of RPA 1.  At the completion of the upgrade of RPA 1 at each site the installer moves the protection back to RPA 1 from RPA and commences the upgrade of RPA 2 at each location.

At this point I was able to add the RecoverPoint appliance as a protected array pair in SRM.  Then I could create the Protection Groups and then I was able to test a Protection group failover.

What I did not know at the time of the RecoverPoint upgrade was that we were using Replication Manager to protect non-vmware Oracle DB workloads running on Solaris m5000 hardware.  And that Replication Manager needed an upgrade to version 5.4.2 or 5.4.3 to work with the latest version of RecoverPoint.  We did the upgrade on the Replication Manager server and the agents on the various hosts and it refreshed with current version info but the Replication jobs failed when trying to mount a RecoverPoint snapshot image to our Recovery target m5000 server.

After uploading numerous logfiles and support troubleshooting with EMC Replication Manager engineers it was identified that we needed an EMC Engineering hotfix for our source host to allow this to complete.  This was a known issue that will likely be resolved in the next release of Replication Manager.  To get a Hotfix you need to cool your heels a bit and let EMC Engineering spin up a version specific for your environment.  Once we had this and had it installed on our Solaris m5000 host the Replication Manager job completed and the data was available at our secondary site.

The point of this is that while PLAN is a four letter word.  If you FAIL to PLAN you are really PLANNING to FAIL.

I’ve started a new job handling some of the day to day operations and VMware Architecture at Aviat Networks (www.aviatnet.com)

I wanted to reach out to the various sponsors that I have for this years VMworld conference.

First I have to thank VMUG Leadership for arranging for all VMUG leaders and co-leaders to have the ability to get a pass for VMworld this year.  If that’s not a reason to get involved I really don’t know what is.  Goto www.vmug.com and signup for your local chapter.  Get involved.  Also while there look at the VMUG Advantage subscription.  It saves you on Training and Certifications with VMware and provides access to pre-recorded training for some products.

Next I need to thank 2 companies for sponsoring my wife’s VMworld Guest Pass.  Yes there is such a thing and yes some spouses do go to VMworld!

Zerto and RES Software have graciously sponsored my wife’s guest pass and have sent her shirts.  She plans on “blinging” these out so that they aren’t so plain jane Techie shirts.  If you see someone wearing a Zerto or a RESSoftware shirt with Rhinestones on it – thats my wife!

Thanks to both Steve Thomsen of www.Zerto.com and Mat Keenan of www.ressoftware.com  for arranging this.

I’m looking forward to seeing the many vendors and others at VMworld this year.  There should be some major announcements from VMware about new products/versions and acquisitions.  Also there will be some discussion regarding the change in VMware leadership and what role Paul Maritz will play at EMC.

Most of all I am extremely excited that I will be defending my design for the VCDX certification.  This has been a major goal for the last two years.

Again I do really want to thank those involved at RES Software and at Zerto.

• I have several goto areas that I thought I’d mention.On a weekly or even daily basis I visit and participate in these groups (Note these are in no particular order):

  The VMware Communities Podcast http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/19367

  Dell TechCenter Weekly chat and blogshttp://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/default.aspx

  ProfessionalVMware Weekly Brownbags http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/

  VMware Communities – Please tell me you already know about these and visit often!!! http://communities.vmware.com/index.jspa

  Twitter! Involve yourself in this medium as many of the movers and shakers of the Virtualization community are found here. You can get just about any VMware and Virtualization topic answered quickly.  Beware though.  You need to have researched it first or you may be made fun of!

BMC has over 13K VMs up from less than 4K VMs since 2008. They have used CLM to analyze the churn rate on their VMs. They typically allow 180 day life cycle on their VMs that can be extended through an approval process.

They are using a multi-tenant style management process along with chargeback models to proved virtualizattion on the “cheap.”

VMware liason Eddie Blackwell hints that there will be big news at VMworld. More news to come at the next VMUG post VMworld. Cloud cloud cloud? Look to more Labs at VMworld. He says to start looking at the news about Project Serengeti.

DynamicOps can be a cohesive glue between types of various cloud providers. This will eventually link in with how the Nicira acquistion may be used to provide a method to mesh these various products. There will be some overlaps in DynamicOps and vCD until the product features/code are merged.

VMworld will be huge! BIG BIG announcements!!! Plus the have this old guy Bon Jovi at some tiny little party.

Next up is EMC BC/DR product group with an Avamar product presentation.
VM level deduplication in Avamar is between 96% for image level backup and up to 99% for guest level backups. They offer bare metal recovery with all VM backups. With Image level it uses VMware Changed Block Tracking to reduce backup times. Files can be restored from either Image Level or Guest based backups for both Windows and Linux guests.

Now onto the Movie! We had the opportunity to see The Bourne Legacy. I’ll let you read those reviews elsewhere.

I am going to attemp to try and develop my blogging skills.  This may be a interesting period as I find my voice from within. I will see if I can create enough content and techniques to make this worthwhile to you.  I plan on taking this task with me to VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.  While there I am going to be defending my VMware VCDX design.  I’m looking forward to connecting with my fellow VMware vExperts and VMUG leaders and catching a few of the various conference speakers and topics.