Virtualization Team

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Note: If you have read this article earlier, please read this revised version of it as after getting multiple comments from different readers I have noticed that although the over all statement of the article was correct the calculation example was not fully accurate so I have gone through the Microsoft Licensing and the comments all over again and accommodated for this in my revised version.

In this post, I will show you a secret that you need to know if you are already using VMware vSphere or if you are planning to buy VMware vSphere. One call to Microsoft to recalculate your Windows/SQL licenses can give you a licenses cut on Microsoft licenses that will pay for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and still save you tons of money a side. That means you don’t show management that you got vSphere Enterprise Plus for no Extra cost, but as well saved them a huge amount on Microsoft Licenses renewal. I was going to name this post:

I know many of you out there want to practice on many VMware products specially vSphere & would like to build your own lab but without breaking the bank.

I have been able to build my own Home Lab for less than $600 buying the parts in Kuwait, which probably end up even cheaper on your side. Further, I thought I will share my VMware ESX White Box Configuration for others who want to build their own ESX white box, but they don’t want to risk it will not work. This configuration has been tested and it work perfectly with both VMware vSphere ESX 4.0/ESX 4.1/ and even ESX 4.1 U1.

Cut it short below is my Lab ESX white Box configuration:

Working for VMware has always been filled with surprises since the first day I joined. I really believe we have one of the greatest engineering departments out there. I mean when your engineering team create a plugin that allow vCenter to Manager Hyper-V in their own spare time, it just get you really proud to work for such a company. Before I get into details about what is going on, I must thank our great engineering team for their super dedication.

VMware has finally released its Hyper-V management tool as a “fling” (unsupported vCenter Plug in, personal projects built by VMware Engineers in their spare time), now available at:

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/xvp

Here is what our Engineering Team have to say about it:

vSphere 4.1 Update 1 has been released on Feb 10th. Below is what’s included in this update:

:

VMware ESX/ESXi Enhancements:

• Support for up to 160 logical processors
• Inclusion of additional drivers (ESX 4.1 Update 1 includes the 3ware SCSI 2.26.08.036vm40 and Neterion vxge 2.0.28.21239-p3.0.1.2 drivers, which were provided as a separate download in earlier releases.)
• Enablement of Intel Trusted Execution Technology (ESXi only)
• Additional guest operating system support (ESX 4.1 Update 1 adds support for RHEL 6, RHEL 5.6, SLES 11 SP1 for VMware, Ubuntu 10.10, and Solaris 10 Update 9 guest operating systems.)
• Bug and security fixes (For more information on Bug fixes included in this release, you can check vSphere 4.1 Update 1 Bug Fixes

I have been asked lately if NPIV could be used to attach a tape library to a VM, & as attaching tape libraries to a VM has never been well documented. I have decided to write a small post about it. I don’t want to be a smart A**, but I will start by asking why would you want to attach a tape to a VM? Why not utilize VMware Storage API for backup & move on with it. As any method that can be utilized to connect a tape Drive/ Tape library to a VM running on ESX will compromise on many feature & introduce many restrictions to your environment. That have been said let’s see what options are available & what option is just confusing people.

As many of you know VMware has included VMotion in vSphere Essential Plus 4.1, where it was not included in vSphere Essential Plus 4.0

I have been getting the question lately, how do I obtain VMotion in this case if I have a valid support. Do I have to upgrade or change my license?

The easy answer is all you have to do is upgrade your software to vSphere 4.1. The license key you used with vSphere Essential Plus 4.0 will still be valid and usable with vSphere 4.1 & in turn will provide you with the VMotion feature, without the need to do anything on the license.

I thought its worth mentioning a bit about what to upgrade:

I can see the above title bringing a lot of our competitors to read my blog for the next few days. I know many of them are already monitoring it daily, & as many of them still believe that there is still no upgrade path from our vSphere Essentials Kit & vSphere Essentials plus Kit might think I am shooting my self in the foot. I would love to disappoint them hard this time & point out that since vSphere has came out and the upgrade path from vSphere Essentials Kit & vSphere Essentials plus Kit has been available!!!!

Although this news has been released for over a month now, I believe it was not pushed hard enough. Now its the time for it to make it to my blog. After reading this post, cheaper can no more be an execuse to not choose VMware the leading Virtualization product for your datacenter. Its no more the argument of just VMware being more cost effective, but a very price competetive at the initial cost. VMware has just moved VMotion to its Standard edition. That means the competitors will be offering their customers at best the equivelant of VMware Standard edition. Further, with the low pricing of VMware standard edition its no longer more expensive than the competition.

I have got one of my customers today complaining that she can not access her laptop CD-ROM inside her virtual machine & that she keeps getting the following error:

“You do not appear to have a valid CD-ROM device. If this is a CD-ROM device, try enabling legacy emulation mode”

The easy solution for this problem was to change the virtual machine CD-ROM mode from PassThrough IDE to Emulate IDE as per the image below:

I hope this help some one avoid the same problem.

Today I have installed VMware ESXi on our Lab blades. While trying to connect to my ESXi 4 server using a vSphere client newly installed on Windows XP SP3 I had been hit by the below two errors:

Error parsing the server “server ip” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

and after I press OK buttom I was getting the following error:

The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception

Below are actual screen shots of the errors:

OK great!!! you might not care that I hit the same error that you did, but you might care to find out the resolution. Actually after searching the web about the problem I had hit the following VMware forum post that had the answer on the fifth page of it http://communities.vmware.com/thread/211081