At VMworld 2013, VMware announced the public beta of its Software-defined Storage platform Virtual SAN. Today at the VMware NOW - Virtual SAN Special Online Event the final release date for Virtual SAN 1.0 was announced. Virtual SAN will be released in a few days, together with vSphere 5.5 Update 1. Unfortunately, there are still no pricing information.
Read More »VMware Virtual SAN General Availability Announced
The new coredump file feature in vSphere ESXi 5.5 creates a file to extend the coredump partition. This usually happens when you upgrade from a previous version to ESXi 5.5, or you install ESXi to a USB drive or SD card. This coredump file is created on a random VMFS datastoore by using a smart selection algorithm. This random placement causes different kind of problems, for example when you want to delete a datastore. Another problem might occur in an EMC VPLEX deployment where you want to failover VMs to the secondary site in a PDL situation (VMkernel.Boot.terminateVMOnPDL=1 / Disk.AutoremoveOnPDL=0). Datastores that had a coredump file configured can't get mounted back when the volume leaves the PDL state after a site failure has been fixed.
To workaround this issue you might want to permanently disable the coredump file. You can't just disable it, as it gets created automatically after a reboot.
Shell access to an ESXi host provides essential maintenance, configuration and troubleshooting commands. It can be used in cases that cannot be handled through the standard vSphere Client. In my case, I tend to have SSH activated by default. From a security perspective it is recommended to keep SSH disabled, but with the management network behind a firewall I feel secure.
If you are using SSH daily I am sure that you are familiar with the public key authentication. PKI is an authentication method that relies on a generated public/private keypair and enables the login without entering a password. This method is faster and more secure than entering a password manually because every administrator can have his own public/private keypair.
This post explains the methods how to enable and automate public key authentication with ESXi Hosts.
I wrote this little script snippet to export and import virtual machines from one vCenter to another. This might help for migrations where you have to add virtual machines from a datastore manually to the vCenter inventory. This script does not export any virtual machine disks or configuration files. It's only supposed as replacement for adding virtual machines from an existing datastore the the inventory.
KB1005576 explains how to enable or disable verbose logging on QLogic and Emulex Host Bus Adapters. With ESXi 5.5 and its Native Device Driver Architecture the option has been slightly changed, but is still available. This post explains how to enable verbose logging on QLogic and Emulex HBAs in ESXi 5.5.
The new native drivers and their predecessor are:
Emulex FC: lpfc (replaces lpfc820)
QLogic FC: qlnativefc (replaces qla2xxx)
Read More »Enabling verbose logging on QLogic and Emulex HBAs in ESXi 5.5
One of the most intresting topic from the last VMware Partner Exchange 2014 was definetaly Virtual SAN. There were pleny sessions about VSAN which will be part of VMwares SDDC Suite. I tried to collect all updates announced at PEX in this post.
PowerCLI, a set of PowerShell extensions for vSphere, is a great tool for automating VMware configuration and management tasks. It allows you to change a lot of ESXi host and vCenter settings. One powerful cmdlet is Get-EsxCli which allows you to run ESXCLI tasks from your PowerCLI console. ESXCLI is the main configuration command on an ESXi host. This post explains how to use the Get-EsxCli cmdlet.
When you want to test Android on your PC, Android-x86 might be your solution. Android-x86 is an open source project that has ported Android to x86 platform. This allows us to install Android in a Virtual Machine with VMware Workstation or ESXi. Driver support is very limited, so there are many problems around with Android VMs that cant access the network. This post shows how to install Android in VMware Workstation and how to solve Network Connectivity issues.
Read More »Solve Android x86 No Network Problems in VMware Workstation
VMware has just published a new App for Andorid and iOS: vSphere Mobile Watchlist. The App which has been announced at the last VMware Partner Exchange 2014 allows to monitor your virtual machines in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. I've tested the app on my HTC One to see how powerful it is.
Read More »vSphere Mobile Watchlist - VM Administration for Andorid and iOS
The open-source computer operating system ReactOS 0.3.16 has been released a few days ago. ReactOS is intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows 2000. The latest version is available as a prebuild VMware virtual machine. Unfortunately the developers published the vmdk and vmx directly, instead of an open virtualization format (ovf). This might cause some trouble when you try run it with an older version than ESXi 5.5 or VMware Worksation 10.