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Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on VMware ESX 4

March 11, 2010 by 2 Comments

After installing or upgrading to VMware ESX 4, the Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on Intel systems that support EPT technology or AMD systems that support RVI technology. This issue might cause the memory alarms in vCenter to go off spuriously even if the guest is not actively accessing a lot of memory.

I have today visited another customer who had a problem that their virtual machines are always reporting a very high memory usage in vCenter while their OS task manager & TOP command in Linux machines were showing a very low memory usage. They did not face this problem before upgrading to vSphere which has made them unhappy with the upgrade. Fortunately, I was aware with this problem & was able to apply the magical VMware patch that has restored the customer happiness & confidence in VMware. The require VMware ESX 4.0 Patch was ESX400-200909401-BG: updates vmx and vmkernel64.

I have already seen a dozen of similar cases in the past 2 months, & thought I will share the patch info with you all. You can download the patch from the following VMware KB:  http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014019

If you still have false memory alerts after applying the update,  go to the Top-Level in Vcenter,  & click “Alarms” and then “Definitions”.… Read More

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Running vCenter in a virtual machine within a distributed switch is not supported

March 11, 2010 by 16 Comments

Update: This post has been updated on Feb 23, 2011 as I have been kicked right and left by my colleagues at VMware, as this post used to be titled  “Running vCenter in a virtual machine within a distributed switch is not supported”, where its actually supported. Unfortunately, this info was communicated to me by VMware support when I was working at a partner before joining VMware but that was at the early dates when vDistributed Switch was first released. So here I am correcting my statement & mentioning its actually supported, but I still don’t recommend connecting your vCenter VM to the distributed switch it manage. The way I normally recommend doing things is actually to utilize a standard vSwitch for Management/VMkernel port groups where vCenter (running as a VM) connect to the Management port group. This configuration usually help avoid pitfalls. The below post has been updated accordingly.

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Many companies have always considered running Virtual Center in a virtual machine due to many advantages found below:

· Server Consolidation: instead of dedicating an entire physical server to VirtualCenter, you can run it in a virtual machine along with others on the same ESX Server host.
· Mobility: by encapsulating the VirtualCenter server in a virtual machine, you can transfer it from one host to another, enabling maintenance and other activities.… Read More

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Configured DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver error while upgrading to vCenter 4.0

February 6, 2010 by 10 Comments

One of the errors my customers repeatly complain about while upgrading to vCenter Server 4 or even when trying to install it from scratch is the following error:

“The DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver. Please re-configure your DSN to use one of the supported drivers.”

If you face this problem the first thing to do is to ensure that you are running a supported Database. Hint! Hint! SQL 2000 is no longer supported. If you are running SQL 2000 then you must upgrade to SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 before upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0

If you have a supported database & still got the error then you must download & install the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client for your particular platform. You can use this link to download Microsoft SQL Server Native Client. See the Image below to see what the download link look like:

choose the odbc version suitable for you

After installing the required Microsoft SQL Server Native Client you will have to create a new ODBC connection using the just installed Microsoft SQL Server Native client as per the image below.

create new ODBC connection using the new driver

After following the above steps, you will have to restart the installation of vCenter Server 4 using the newly created ODBC connection.… Read More

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Another Secret reason why you should purchase VMware Storage VMotion

December 1, 2009 by 4 Comments

As most of you already know VMware Storage VMotion is the ability to live migrate a virtual machine from one storage to another without any downtime. The usage most IT Professional relate to VMware Storage VMotion is the following:

The ability to move your virtual machines from a storage or datastore to another for maintenance reason or storage replacement without downtime. Though I had just came to discover another reason where it became vital. Thanks to Vladan as he brought it to my attention when he commented on my previous post:  VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space

Yes, you will require storage VMotion in VMware ESX 4 to be able to reclaim Thin Provisioned disk unused space without downtime. As this is not a documented use of VMware Storage VMotion any where in the VMware Documentation I thought I will share it with all of you. If you had seen my earlier post VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space, you will find out that you need to use Storage VMotion to reclaim thin provisioned unused disk space. Ok, there is other ways to reclaim Thin Provisioned disk unused space, but these require downtime. Below are one alternatives to VMware Storage VMotion to reclaim Thin Provisioned disk unused space, but remember it will require a downtime.… Read More

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VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space

November 25, 2009 by 39 Comments

Disk Thin Provisioning & its ease of use in VMware vSphere has been one of the most used features. Although Thin provisioning has allowed customers to avoid allocating space upfront & saved them tons of space, it does not unallocate space when files are deleted from the Virtual Machine, this is due to the way Windows & other operating systems handle file deletion.

In many cases, the customer will create a Thin Provisioned disk with 80GB & use 10 GB out of it. At this time that Virtual Machine will only use 10 GB on the ESX host. Few days later, he might require to use another 50GB for a temporary purpose. Now he will have the Virtual Machine using 60 GB on the ESX host. After few days he go and delete the files that is occupying the temporary 50GB, then he will discover that the virtual machine does not shrink as he delete files from it & he still has a 50GB of wasted space.

Next step, the customer will call his vendor for a resolution. For that only I have written this article to show how to shrink a windows virtual machine VMDK size after deleting the files in Windows.… Read More

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IF I was VMware CEO, ……

November 19, 2009 by 4 Comments

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the current VMware CEO as well the VMware team as over all. My post is more of a message to the VMware Team & specially the CEO. I believe this below tip can help VMware crush the competition, though they have to study it carefully as it require a brave decision.

Since VMware started & it has been successfully gliding of the nice waves. It has always lead the competition by the quality of its product, as well the essential feature that no one else had. Although no one else had succeeded on over come the reliability & performance of VMware yet, many of the essential features has been replicated in many other Virtualization products in the market. Nonetheless VMware has always been able to innovate new features that customers will desire, customers started thinking that they could wait a year more and get this feature in a cheaper product, which has enough features for their current setup. Yes, I will spell it out many are looking at Hyper-v in this manner.

I have been meeting with many customers who are not ready to look over the initial cost of both VMware vSphere & Hyper-V.… Read More

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VMware vSphere Virtual Machine still show old datastore after storage vMotion

November 13, 2009 by 21 Comments

Before I start with the article, I have to point out this is not a VMware bug. Its the VMware admins doing what they are not suppose to do. VMware ESX 3 & VMware ESX 4 Administration Guides mention clearly that you should not VMotion or Storage vMotion a Virtual machine before disconnecting it from CD Media & ISO images that is only available to the first host or Datastore. Actually it will even warn you when you trying to do that.

That has been said, I still have a good number of customers who call me about their Virtual Machine summary still showing that it has a disk on the old datastore after Storage VMotion it to a new datastore. In most cases, it end up that the customer has carried out a Storage VMotion on a virtual machine that is connected to an ISO Image on the old datastore (probably where they have installed the VM from) see the image below.

ISO Image from the original Datastore attached to VM

Luckily the solution is quite easy, all you have to do is just change the Virtual Machine CDRom setting to Client Device & Hit OK as per the image below:

changing Virtual Machine CDRom Settings to client Device

Now you should only see the new Datastore in your Virtual Machine.… Read More

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Sony VAIO laptops disabled Intel VT

August 23, 2009 by 6 Comments

This article title say “Sony VAIO laptops disabled Intel VT“, but what should that mean to you. It should mean the world to a lot of us. It should mean think twice trice before you buy a Sony VAIO laptop, due to the amount of limitation that come with disabling Intel VT. Ok, let’s see some of the most obvious limitation:

1- Sony VAIO Laptops will not support Windows 7 XP mode, which require enabling hardware Virtualization:

Windows 7 will be offering a great feature which is called XP mode, which will allow you to run most of XP applications on Windows 7 without having to worry about application compatibility with Windows 7. As Windows 7 XP mode requires Hardware Virtualization which Sony has decided to disable on their laptops. This means if you are upgrading to windows 7 then Sony VAIO laptop might not be for you.

2- Sony VAIO Laptops will not support MS Hyper-V.

If you are the average Joe, & you don’t care about testing stuff and Virtualization is only a buzzword to you then this might not affect you. Though if you care even a bit of running Hyper-V on your laptop for testing Hyper-V it self or test multiple OS on your laptop at a time then again Sony VAIO is not the laptop for you.… Read More

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vCenter Server linked Mode. Error 28039. Setup cannot join vCenter Server to the linked mode group

August 3, 2009 by 6 Comments

vSphere Virtual Center Linked Mode Prerequisites:

Well, yes this article has two headers or titles. Guess what they are almost identical.

I have seen “Error 28039. Setup cannot join vCenter Server to the linked mode group” all over the net & without any one posting resolution for it. hmmmm, how did I find out about this error and what made me looking for resolutions, well I had faced this same ugly error in my own lab. The resolution for it was nothing more than following the pre-requisite to vSphere Virtual Center Linked Mode which most people ignore. Below is the pre-requisite that you must follow for a successful installation of vCenter Linked mode & I will highligh the mostly missed one.
All the requirements for standalone vCenter Server systems apply to Linked Mode systems. In addition, to the following requirements:

The following requirements apply to each vCenter Server system that is a member of a Linked Mode group:

  1. DNS must be operational for Linked Mode replication to work.
  2. The vCenter Server instances in a Linked Mode group can be in different domains if the domains have a two-way trust relationship. Each domain must trust the other domains on which vCenter Server instances are installed.
… Read More
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VMware vSphere – VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch bug or limitation

August 3, 2009 by 2 Comments

Many of you have already heard about the new VMware vNetwork Distributed switch. It has been a really great innovation by VMware. I believe most of us has already learned something about its benefit like:

1- Simplify Virtual Machine Networking: As you get to create one switch per cluster & create the policy across all your ESX hosts at once instead of repeating the process endlessly.

2- Enhance Virtual Machine Networking:

  • VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch maintains network runtime state for VMs as they move across multiple hosts, enabling inline monitoring and centralized firewall services.
  • It provides a  framework for monitoring and maintaining the security of virtual machines as they move from physical server to physical server
  • It enables the use of third party virtual switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1000V to extend familiar physical network features and controls to virtual networks.

I agree that VMware has succeeded greatly with the VMware vNetwork Distribute Switch, but there is a bug or shall I call it a limitation that really bug me and many other VMware Implementers & admins. Read below to find more about this bug & I hope someone of VMware give this post an attention and resolve this issue in the next release.… Read More

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How to enable VMware EVC on VMware vSphere & VI3 without downtime

July 30, 2009 by 4 Comments

If you don’t know what is VMware EVC or you need to find out more about it, please look at my last post VMware EVC enhanced VMotion Compatibility enable VMware VMotion across CPU generations

Ok, if you had read that and now wondering how to get it setup without having to shutdown your virtual machines. Then this small tip is for you.

As you know & I had mentioned that in my previous post on this topic that VMware will request you to shutdown all the virtual machines you have running on the cluster you want to enable VMware EVC for. To avoid having to shutdown your virtual machines what you can do is to create a temp cluster with few temp servers on it & VMotion your VMs to these servers. Enable VMWare EVC on your evacuated production cluster. Then again VMotion the Virtual Machines back to your original production cluster.

Although this seems to work, If possible to take the downtime & follow the proper procedure then you might be better of doing just that. Good luck and hope this help.… Read More

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VMware EVC (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility) enable VMware VMotion across CPU generations

July 30, 2009 by 5 Comments

Everyone who had been using VMware for a while, would appreciate VMware VMotion. Actually VMware VMotion have always been a distinguished feature of VMware ESX servers. Despite of VMotion has always been a great feature, people using it at earlier stages used to have a tough time when having to use it across different CPU generation. That meant companies had to actually put similar hardware server in the same cluster, to guarantee that VMotion work smoothly. This was not possible at all the time, and was a tough call for implementers as they had to cheat masking manually in order to avoid VMotion not accepting to run between different CPU genrations.

Although VMware EVC (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility) has been around for a while, many VMware administrators still does not know about it or just over looked it. VMware EVC is actually the defacto solution for VMotion across hosts with different CPU generations. It will automatically masks the non compatible features of different generation cpus from the hosts, which give you the ability to VMotion across hosts with different CPU generations. Please note VMware EVC has been supported since VMware ESX 3.5U2, but was highly Enhanced in VMware vSphere.

Ok, now I got your attention & you want to know how to actually enable VMware EVC & what is the pre-requisite for it.… Read More

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VMware vSphere does not support VMware SRM & VMware View

June 4, 2009 by 1 Comment

It had been asked so often lately, if VMware vSphere support SRM & VMware View yet. I had even got calls from customers who tried to integrate the two together. The VMware statement is quite clear in this regard, both VMware Site Recovery Manager(SRM) & VMware View are not supported yet by VMWare vSphere 4.0. They will be supported by sometime in the 2nd half of this year. To check the support matrix & when its going to happen for most VMware product with vSphere, please check out the below document:

VMware vSphere 4.0 Software Compatibility Matrix

If this post has saved you from wasting your time integrating non-supported products or risk your environment of being in a non-supported configuration, please be kind enough to leave us a comment. If you have any update on this topic, I would appreciate if you leave it in the comment as well. Share the knowledge :).… Read More

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