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Top 5 vSphere Best Practices missed by the Enterprise

November 11, 2012 by 3 Comments

As part of my job as a consultant at VMware, I get to deliver Health Check & Architecture Reviews engagement on regular basis. I have found quite few best practices that is generally missed by most & thought to document the top 5 in here for everyone to benefit. Maybe on the next round more enterprises will pass these best practices check. The list below is not ordered in any manner, its just how they happen to kick into my mind and all of them quite important best practice to follow unless you have a strong reason not to.

1- Change port group security default settings ForgedTransmits and MACAddressChanges to Reject unless the application requires the defaults. As well ensure promiscuous mode kept its default setting of reject unless your application require it. The reason why you want to ensure all these are set to reject is to increase your environment security as the last thing you want to allow in your environment is some one forge transmitting packages on your network or a compromised VM claiming to be some one else & crashing another VM and receiving packets meant to be sent to it.  Even worse if you have promiscuous mode set to accept then a VM can sniff all the data flowing on that particular port group.… Read More

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VMware Health Check Analyzer stuck

August 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Alright this post is dedicated to my colleagues at VMware as well VMware partners who got access to the VMware Health Check Analyzer and use it to help them collect data to include in their vSphere health check report. I have noticed when running the VMware Health Check analyzer with the default options against a larger environment it get stuck at the inventory data collection stage or some time even at the inventory discovery stage. Increasing the number of CPU and memory of the VHA or the machine where the virtualized heath check analyzer application run does not seems to resolve this issue.

After researching internally for sometime, I have found out that adding extra memory to the appliance itself does not automatically allow the vSphere Health Check Analyzer collector to use it. You will actually have to increase the collector process memory setting using the VMware Health Check Analyzer web interface. I have tested this with VHA 3.3.2, though it should work with most other versions out there.

The below procedure explain how you can increase the collector process memory setting for your vSphere health check analyzer tools.

  1.   In the Health Analyzer UI click the Admin menu and choose “Config Settings”.
… Read More
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Why VMware Load Based Teaming (LBT)

August 2, 2012 by 2 Comments

VMware load based Teaming (LBT) is one of the great feature that was introduced a while back with vSphere 4.1, though it seems many admins have over looked it. As part of my job in consulting, I get to see many customers environments through out the year. It is really common to see customers who never get their hands or heads around LBT. What surprise me the most that many of these are in a desperate need for a similar feature. Many of them already have the Enterprise Plus license which include LBT in it, & its just a matter of enabling to start benefiting of it. For these reasons, I have decided to share why the Load Based Teaming feature offered within our Distributed switches is a great feature and can be of a great use to many of you out there.

The easiest way to see how beneficial LBT can be is to look at the problem it solve. Imagine you are using a virtual switch with the default setting of “Route based on the originating Virtual Port ID” or “Route based on MAC addresses” for the teaming load balancing policy. The way  “Route based on the originating Virtual Port ID” & “Route based on MAC addresses” distribute VMs network load across your uplinks by distributing the number of VMs evenly across all the vNICs involved in the team.… Read More

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P2V windows 7 dell machine using VMware vCenter Converter

June 4, 2012 by 3 Comments

Although using VMware vCenter Converter is normally a breeze. Further, I have converted many Windows 7 machines before and imported them to vSphere without a glitch. I had an interesting task the other day of converting a Dell PC running Windows 7 to a virtual machine running on vSphere 5. The task seemed to me as tedious as converting any windows physical machine to a virtual machine & I have fired VMware vCenter Converter and ran the converting process as usual. One thing that I did not give much attention to was that the Dell PC had some kinda of a recovery partition which has caused the VM not to run properly after the conversion has completed.

As soon the conversion has complete I have noticed it has been completed with an error about the recovery partition failing to be assigned a partition letter. I have decided to ignore the error and run the VM and see what happen. Powering on the VM It did not detect a boot disk and was just trying to boot from the network. This was kinda a bad start, but after fuzzing a bit with VM I have discovered that the Windows partition is not set to a primary partition.… Read More

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VMware vExperts 2012 has been announced

April 15, 2012 by 8 Comments

At first I wanted to congrats every one who was elected as vExperts for 2012. Second I wanted to celebrate being on the list while being a VMware employee. As many of you know, that earlier years VMware employees could not be chosen as vExperts nonetheless of how much effort they spent in enlightening Virtualization & Cloud Computing. I am glad VMware has changed that and started giving some recognition to employees who take the extra effort to spread the words on blogs, VMware forums, Community, seminars, VMUGs & so on. Further, the election seems to be done separately for employees and non employees to ensure fairness. If you are not sure if you were elected as a vExpert for 2012 then you can have a look at the VMware vExpert 2012 list published at:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2012/04/announcing-vexpert-2012-title-holders.html

By the way, although I am on the list I still have not received any official e-mail from VMware informing me that. This means you might have already been awarded the vExpert title for 2012 and you don’t even know it which again should encourage you to search that list for your name. I did not know that I was on the list or that vExperts 2012 were announced till I received an e-mail from my colleague Hany Micheal this morning congrating me for being on the list.… Read More

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How to Export your VM Inventory list from vCenter

February 22, 2012 by 17 Comments

Time will come when you need a quick inventory of the VMs in your vCenter with their IPs, Computer name, power on status & all these simple things. You might just need that sheet b/c you need to keep an inventory of what you have or just the for the simple cause that the management had asked you for such one. In both cases you need to figure out the quickest and easiest way to do it. Yeah this can be achieved using power shell script or any other scripting language that vSphere support, but let’s keep that to when we require a more extensive inventory that is can not be generated using the GUI of vCenter. One question I repeatedly hear “why is the Export list in vCenter file menu is shadowed and can not be chosen?” Here I will show you the steps to get a simple inventory of your VMs using VMware vCenter GUI & following it will show you how to get the Export list in vCenter file menu in business.

Steps to Export your VM Inventory list from VMware vCenter

1- Open the vSphere Client and connect to your vCenter

2- From the top menu go to View ==> Inventory ==> VMs & Templates

3- From the inventory list on the left side choose the VMs you want to include in your inventory export or choose a top level folder that includes the VMs you want to export

4- Choose the Virtual Machines tab from the the tabs on the top of the right side.… Read More

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Virtual Machines vDS Network Interfaces configuration in VMX file is lost upon removing it from inventory

February 16, 2012 by 7 Comments

Note: This is no longer an issue in vSphere 5.1.

Today while doing a manual DR failback test at one of the customers sites where they use Virtual Distributed Switches, I have noticed when removing/adding a Virtual Machine to inventory it lose the configuration for its network interface of which port group its connected to and the like. As the customer was running vSphere 4.1u1, I went ahead and tested the same in my lab running vSphere 5.0  which end up  having the exact same behavior. Its important to note that this behavior only affect Virtual Machines that is connected to a Distributed Switch port group, & it does not affect port group configuration for Standard Switches. This behavior although look odd seems to be nothing but as intended by engineering as it makes the assumption that you are restoring the VM to a different Infrastructure where these Distributed Switches might not exist.

Agree or not agree is not the purpose of this post, but to confirm this behavior as well to be in front warning that you should keep that configuration handy before hand in case you need for any reason to remove your VMs from inventory. In my case was carrying out a manual disaster recovery fallback without involving vCenter Site Recovery Manager.… Read More

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VMware vCenter Server Appliance Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation.

February 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

While playing with VMware vCenter Server Appliance in my home lab, I have been surprised with the following error:

Error: VPXD must be stopped to perform this operation.

This error has came up while trying to change authentication to active directory authentication and kinda seen the same error when trying to change the database to an external database. For some reason the Server service stop button is shadowed as well which mean I could not stop it by the GUI interface. Although my lab setup is not ideal and it might just due to the way I set it up, though I will still document how I resolved this where the same mechanism can be used to stop and restart any other service used by the vCenter Server Appliance. Below are the steps I have followed:

1- SSH to your VMware vCenter Server Appliance using the root account.

2- Execute the following command to see the status of all the service running in the vCenter Appliance:   chkconfig

The output of all services will look something like below:

localhost:~ # chkconfig
after.local               off
apache2                  off
arpd                         off
atftpd                       off
auditd                       on
autoyast                    off
chargen                      off
chargen-udp              off
cron                       on
daytime                    off
daytime-udp              off
dbus                     on
dcerpcd                  on
dhcp6r                   off
dhcp6s                   off
dhcpd                    off
discard                  off
discard-udp              off
earlysyslog              on
echo                     off
echo-udp                 off
eventlogd                on
fbset                     on
gpm                      off
haldaemon                on
haveged                  on
irq_balancer             on
kbd                      on
ldap                     on
lsassd                   off
lwiod                    on
mdadmd                   off
multipathd               off
netlogond                on
netstat                  off
network                  on
network-remotefs         on
nfs                      on
ntp                      off
pcscd                  off
powerd               off
random               on
raw                      off
rpasswdd            off
rpcbind                on
rpmconfigcheck           off
sendmail                       on
servers                           off
services                         off
setserial                        off
skeleton.compat         … Read More

Filed Under: Management & Automation, Server Virtualization Tagged With: ,

VMware VMotion Improvement in VMware vSphere 5

October 22, 2011 by 2 Comments

As most bloggers when vSphere 5 arrived decided to cover the improvement on VMware HA, as it was totally revamped. I have decided to cover up the improvement on VMware VMotion in vSphere 5. VMware VMotion had as much improvement in vSphere 5 as VMware HA had, but seems to be forgotten by most bloggers. Below I will summarize some of the nice improvements VMware VMotion has gained with the release of vSphere 5.

– In vSphere 4 simultaneous VMotions were supported with up to 4 VMs if you have 1Gbps NICs & 8 VMs if you were using 10Gbps NICs. In vSphere 5 this has been extended to support multiple NICs for VMotion which increase the number of simultaneous VMotions allowed. At now a max of 4 10Gbps NICs or 16 1Gbps NICs can be used for VMotion in vSphere 5. Doing the math will show you that you can evacuate any ESXi 5 host really fast with that amount of simultaneous VMotions. Further, if you are not going to carry out as many simultaneous VMotions as allowed between your hosts, vSphere 5 can load balance the load across the free adapters to speed up the process.

– As memory must be copied during any live migration including VMware VMotion, busier VMs with high memory activity used to take longer in earlier version of vSphere.… Read More

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My Canadian move and job shift

October 20, 2011 by 6 Comments

If you have been following my blog for a while, you would have noticed a non normal pause in the past 2 months with no new articles on my blog. The reason behind this gap is my move from Dubai to Canada and all what that bring with it from finding a place to stay, buying a car, & starting to catch up with the new job hitting me all at once. I have spent a great year with the SE team in VMware Dubai. It is such a great team that I will definitely miss, though the great part I have managed to stay withing the VMware Family. I have joined VMware Canada PSO team earlier this month, & looking forward to meet with the rest of our Canadian team & customers.

As I am almost done with my move process & paper work going along with it. I am hoping to start putting more stuff soon. Please keep checking back, as for sure I will be working on some more interesting stuff now that I am in the Professional Services team.

At last a funny incident, is while checking my e-mail today I have came across Veeam Press release talking about Mazda success in Virtualizing their datacenter with VMware & using Veeam backup & replication to protect it.… Read More

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Who’s Really Stuck in the IT Past? VMware vs Microsoft?

September 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I have been enjoying my weekend, when a tweet popped on my Twitter that pointed out to Paul Rubens article titled: “Microsoft or VMware — Who’s Really Stuck in the IT Past?“ which was a respond by Paul on a video released earlier by Microsoft “Don’t get stuck in the IT Past” which can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hewedqvSWaI

The Microsoft video was really disturbing, but the first thing that got on my mind after watching it was the old quote: “If your house is made of glass don’t throw stones on others”. The great part Paul Rubens article agreed exactly with that quote. I really recommend reading Paul Rubens article found at: Microsoft or VMware — Who’s Really Stuck in the IT Past which give a totally independent view of the video as he is not a VMware nor Microsoft employee unlike the video maker as well he is totally independent of both companies. I believe Paul Rubens article was a great respond to the video, but below are just few reminders for people watching the video.

1- Microsoft still build their hypervizor based on their Operating System, just like they do for any other Solution Microsoft produce. Have Microsoft not looked into the future, where Operating Systems will not be as important & solutions that are Operating Systems independent will have a better chance of surviving.… Read More

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VMware Transformation from Virtualization Company to an Overall Solutions Company

August 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Nonetheless the diversity of Solutions VMware is delivering today, many people still know VMware as a Virtualization Company. The efforts and solutions released by VMware over the past 2 years outside of the virtualization Arena has been as huge as the one to keep the lead of the Virtualization Solutions. Its no longer true that VMware is solely a Virtualization Company, but VMware is turning into a great overall IT Solutions Company.

The below video of Paul Maritz(VMware CEO) at VMworld 2011 Explain VMware Transformation from a Virtualization Company into IT Solutions Company.

For more VMworld 2011 Videos and the full Paul Maritz VMworld 2011 Keynotes, please check the below link:
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions… Read More

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vSphere 5 is now available for download

August 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

With all the enhancements and new features were announced with vSphere 5, many of you waiting patiently for vSphere 5 to be available for download. The good news that the long waited vSphere 5 has been announced available for download yesterday. You can download the vSphere 5 installers at: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_0

vSphere 5 has a tons of enhancements & new features, below just a summary of the major new features:

  • Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform.
  • VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. It makes stateless ESXi possible.
  • New Virtual machine capabilities. 32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Software support for 3D graphics, and more. Did anyone say I need a larger VM? Dare you to say that now!!!
  • Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts.
  • Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. For those of you used to DRS and how it load balance VMs across hosts, Storage DRS do the same but for storage.
… Read More
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VMware vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Amendment

August 19, 2011 by 1 Comment

In reaction to the huge demand of VMware customers after the announcement of the new vSphere 5 vRAM licensing Schema, VMware has announced the changes of its vRAM entitlements  & few other licensing items to respond to customers demands. In this article, I will be covering just that. Its important to note, I am a bit late on bringing the news here as it was announced on August 3rd. The reason on me being late to report this, I have been really busy lately covering for my two colleagues who went on vacation for the past 2 weeks. OK, so what has changed & why?

If you have not heard about the new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Schema you might want to start by reading my following article first:  7 reasons why VMware vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing is not as bad as it Look at First Glance. After the initial vRAM licensing announcement, although most customers did not have a problem with the approach and were not affected many had a concern about the vRAM entitlements and Large VMs. VMware had listened to its customers, & modified its vRAM Licensing Policy Accordingly. Below is a summary of these changes:

1- Increasing the vRAM entitlement in every  Edition, where many of the entitlement has even doubled from the original announcement.… Read More

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7 reasons why VMware vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing is not as bad as it Look at First Glance

July 18, 2011 by 14 Comments

Note: VMware vSphere 5 vRAM has dramatically been amended since the original announcement. For more info about what was amended then please check my following article: vSphere 5 vRam Licensing Amendment. Further, this article has been updated accordingly.

While others have decided to cover up all the nice features that is coming up with vSphere 5 & vCloud Director 1.5, I was quite busy explaining to customers that most of them are not affected by the new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Schema. Actually none of the existing customers who called me asking about the licensing change was near being affected by the new licensing schema. Let’s be honest when I first heard about the new licensing schema I had panicked too, but only few hours laters of research I have discovered it actually make sense and not as bad as it look at first glance.

I don’t blame our customers for not grabbing the idea of our new VMware vSphere 5 vRAM based licensing as it take to understand the new licensing model to read beyond the surface to find out how it really work. Therefore before you complain about it, please make sure if you are affected by reading the Understand the vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Model.… Read More

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