Holy VM!

There were a lot of post last week during VMworld, so many I couldn’t keep up with the reading. So I just wanted to point out some of the blog post that had some great content.

• VMworld 2008 Day 1 Keynote by Scott Lowe
• VMworld 2008 Day 2 Keynote by Scott Lowe
• BC2621: Fault-Tolerant VMs in VI: Operations and Best Practices by Scott Lowe
• TA2668: VMware ESX Architectural Directions by Scott Lowe
• VD2422: Offline VDI by Scott Lowe
• TA2659: Managing ESX in a COS-less World by Scott Lowe
• VirtualCenter Directions by Rich Brambley
• Joint VMware and NetApp Best Practices for Running VI3 on IP Based Storage #TA2784 by Rich Brambley
• Linux Strategy and Roadmap #TA3201 by Rich Brambley
• VMworld 2008 | Question and Answer Session with Paul Maritz by Eric Sloof
• Live from VMworld 2008: Day 1 – Cisco Keynote by Alessandro Perilli
• VMworld 2008 New Feature Fault-Tolerant by Johan van Zanten
• VMWorld 2008 - Tech preview: vCenter Orchestrator by Huisman, Haverink, & Van Zanten
• VMworld Party Las Vegas Motor Speedway Video by Eric Sloof

So there’s the list, but trust me there was also plenty of other great post so check them out on Planet V12n

I thought since there are lot of questions on the VMware Community forums pertaining to HA errors I would document a list of troubleshooting tips:

• Check to make sure DNS is configured properly
• Check to see if you can resolve DNS
• Check DNS records
• Make sure you are using FQDN’s
• Check your /etc/hosts file
• Make sure your using lower case
• Check Service Consoles have the same names and networks
• Disable and Re-enable HA
• Select Reconfigure for HA on the ESX host

Out of these troubleshooting tips the most common problem with HA is a DNS issue, so it is best to start troubleshooting DNS first.

This is my first time at VMworld, so maybe my expectations are lower than others. So far the first day of the event has went quite smooth for a conference of 14,000. Registration was nicely organized and quick. The lab I participated in was “ESX/ESXi Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting. This lab was good John Hall presented some great information. There were no technical difficulties during the lab even though some of the instructions weren’t stated. So far I am expecting VMworld 2008 to be a great experience and hope everyone enjoys it as much as I am.

Please refer to the following post for troubleshooting HA Errors.

We recently just changed an IP on our second service console in ESX. After this we changed the DNS record to reflect the new IP. We then re-configured the ESX host for HA, and received the following error ‘An error occurred during configuration of the HA Agent on the host.’ So we removed the host from the cluster, and added the host back into the cluster.  We still got same error. So I tried to ping the host from a remote machine and it still showed the old IP, so I ran ipconfig /flushdns on the remote machine then tried to ping the ESX host again. This returned the correct IP address for the ESX host. Running ‘/etc/init.d/nscd restart’ to flush the DNS cache on the ESX host, then reconfiguring HA for the ESX host resolved the issue

HA errors seem to be a common question in the VMTN forum. So in my next post I would like to point out the most common errors and fixes with HA, and hopefully this will help some users out with HA problems.

After upgrading one of our ESX 3.5 Update 2 host I noticed the Health Status was missing. So after digging into this further disconnecting the host and re-connecting the host the Health Status re-appeared under configuration. This seems to be an issue with VC not picking up the new feature.

In all of VMware’s documentation, it says that you must use SQL Authentication with a Remote SQL Database.   In our environment all of our MSSQL servers are setup with Windows authentication. So we decided to try a remote Virtual Center Database with Windows Authentication installation. It seems the only thing you need to change in Windows is for the Virtual Center Service to use the Windows Service account that you using for the VC Database. This has worked flawlessly for a year now. The only thing I can say is if you have any issues with Virtual Center, VMware will point their fingers at this setup.  This is clearly an unsupported configuration, but hopefully in the near future VMware will support Windows Authentication since SQL Authentication is a legacy configuration for MSSQL Server.

One of the most annoying things I find when updating an ESX server is that you need to update VMware tools and then reboot the VM. In our company it is very hard to communicate downtime for any VM’s. So I decided to test if just restarting the VMware tools service in Windows would still apply the update. After restarting the VMware tools service Virtual Center showed that VMtools were updated. So far I have not seen any issues with doing this.  If anyone else has seen any issues or has recommendations please let me know.

Yesterday a colleague of mine asked how to rename a .vmdk file ,so it matches the VM’s name in Virtual Center.  This is actually the first time I had to perform this operation. So at first I thought I might just V2V the machine, but thought there must be an easier way to rename a .vmdk. So I performed the following steps to rename the VM’s folder and files on the Datastore to reflect the VM’s name in Virtual Center:

• Right click on the VM and select to rename
• Right click and select Migrate
• Choose the host
• Choose the Resource Pool
• Select  Move the VM files
• Choose a new DataStore rather then the one it is currently on
• Click Next
• Click Finish

Now you will have the new naming structure to match the VM’s name in Virtual Center

According to Network World Microsoft is expecting to have new licensing policies for virtual machines. Currently Microsoft considers VMotion a license transfer which can only be performed once every 90 Days. Under the new policy this restriction would be lifted. As Virtualization becomes more mainstream I think companies will become more accommodating in terms on Licensing Policies.

Tags: Microsoft, VMware, VMotion