Let me start off by stating that this is NOT supported…..

I wanted to attach a local drive to a VM, but wanted the ability to move this drive to a physical Windows server at a later time without the time consuming data migration or drive reformatting. Although there is no way to do this through the VIC, there is a way to do this in the console.

First we need to find the disk we want to use as an RDM. This is accomplished by running the following:

ls -al /vmfs/devices/disks/

In this example the disk I needed was vmhba0:1:0:0….. Take note of  the string starting with vml.

Now we need to create the placeholder vmdk we will attach to our vm. We do this with the following command:

vmkfstools -r /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.<String we retrieved above> /vmfs/volumes/<Existing DataStore>/<VM Path>/<NAME>.vmdk

Now the only thing we need to do is to add the existing disk to our VM. You will notice the summary shows the new disk as a “Mapped Raw LUN”

Fire up the VM and format the disk for whatever file system you require.

Enjoy

     Whether I am looking to test out a new capability or solution, or simply grabbing screenshots for documentation, I almost always turn to VMware Workstation in order to quickly and easily deploy a test environment in order to get this done. In this post I will show you how to deploy a test environment in VMware workstation. It is assumed that you are familiar with OS deployments and this will not be covered in this article.

Prepare Base OS VM

Open VMware Workstation and create a new Virtual Machine

I name the template with the OS type and “Template” as the suffix

Install the OS and configure this VM with any necessary customizations or base software.

Shutdown VM and create a snapshot.

Deploy VMs required to stand up test Environment

Create a Clone of the newly created and configured Base OS VM.

When asked for “Clone Source” choose “An existing snapshot” and select the snapshot created in the previous section.

For “Clone Type” choose “Linked Clone” this will allow you to deploy the new VM with limited disk space requirements.

Name the new VM

Click Finish and your new VM is created

Repeat this process for all VMs needed for your test environment. This will quickly deploy your test lab, with a minimum amount of disk space required. I will cover the use of “Teams” in a later article, but these steps can be used there as well.

     VKernel is offering perpetual license for their Capacity Modeler from now through the end of the year. I have not had time to take a look at the product, the price is definitely right to add to the bag of tools I carry around. I will write more on this once I’ve had time to take a look.

For more information visit VKernel

Now through December 31, 2009, you can download VKernel Capacity Modeler absolutely free — these are perpetual licenses for use on unlimited sockets.

VKernel Capacity Modeler is a free alternative to the expensive VMware vCenter CapacityIQ software, which can cost you upwards of $1,000 per socket.

The free VKernel Capacity Modeler software provides VMware customers the ability to quickly plan, simulate, and validate hundreds of real–world “what if” VM deployment and resource allocation scenarios in an interactive sandbox before going live in the production environment.

With VKernel Capacity Modeler, user can perform:

• Capacity Planning
• Interactive “What If” Modeling Scenarios
• Proactive Problem Prevention
• Predictive Capacity Impact Analysis

     I have been working in the application consultancy for quite some time and it is hard to remember the last architecture or implementation I have done that has not included VMware. For many of my customers, this was the first time the virtualization concepts became a reality within their datacenter. Although they were aware of virtualization, they had some animosity and overall fear that this technology could actually perform “real” workloads.  Often times it took some hard convincing before they would actually accept the proposed architecture.

     Like most, once the implementation was complete and they could actually touch, feel and interact with this new architecture, they quickly gained confidence and were looking for other avenues to leverage their new found love for virtualization. The biggest problem my customers faced was still maintaining the belief in dedicated resources for specific applications. They would deploy silos of ESX servers to support a specific application needs (SharePoint, Exchange, etc…). While this appears to be a logical approach, it does not leverage the virtual infrastructure to it’s fullest. Yes, they are able to achieve server consolidation and a reduction of power, HVAC, and rack space, but they cannot fully appreciate the drive to maximum utilization of their computing resources.

     The hardest thing to communicate to customers new to virtualization is that they not only remove the OS from the hardware, they also remove the dedication of assets from applications. Most customers maintain separate shops for applications. These divisions not only own the applications, but the hardware they are running on as well. It is hard to convince an Exchange admin that they no longer have to worry about which physical “box” their application is running on.

     I often try to communicate this new ideal by leveraging what my customers currently know about their SAN. They have a centrally managed set of disk resources that are presented and consumed by an application. The application admin, although they know how much storage they can use, cannot point to a rack of disks and show you which physical drives they actually “own”. With virtualization, computing resources can be managed in much the same way.

     With virtualization, physical servers are grouped together in a cluster, much like the physical drives in a SAN. The resources of these servers can than be managed as a single entity and presented to applications based on their requirements. These clusters can be leveraged to drive maximum utilization of the physical resources, while maintaining application requirements regardless of which “box” they are running on. This allows the individual application owners to focus on their application and remove the physical requirements they previously had to manage.

     While the end goal is not always achieved quickly, most customers are evolving their virtual infrastructure and driving toward  this end. Once they see the benefits virtualization brings to the table, the long term vision starts to become reality. Removing the physical boundaries normally associated with application deployment, maintenance and disaster recovery allows my customers to not only see a reduction in operating costs, but they also achieve less downtime and easier management.

Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks has posted a great article explaining the inner-workings of VMware DRS. Like he states in his article, I have never had to trouble shoot any DRS issues and have taken for granted that it just works. It is good to understand what is actually taking place under the hood.  Thanks Duncan!!

Paul Buckle over at xtravirt has created a very useful batch file for downloading all the VMware documentation. This makes a really handy offline reference library especially if you need the information at the speed of fast. You will need to register in order to download this, but it is worth the registration. Thanks Paul. You can find the download link here

I can watch this video over and over (I know.. I’m sick).. Who could of imagined that someone could create a music video about VMware virtualization. I guess they had to many late nights and redbull. My hat is off and Kudos to the creators.

Virtual Hardware Hotel!!!

     My team was deploying a new SharePoint portal for a customer and were seeing some strange behavior from some of our VMs. Our environment consisted of 3 BL685 servers running ESX and 9 VMs ( I know this is overkill, but our customer was very wary of the portal performance in a virtual environment, and our hope was to introduce a platform that could lead them into further virtualization and server consolidation). We were receiving some rather “interesting” errors while adding domain users to the local administrator group of some of the machines. While doing a “check name”, AD would return the account name along with some non-printable characters ( blocks, smiley face, etc…). We were also having issues copying files to the VM through UNC. Some would copy, others would not stating “source no longer available”. We were not seeing this behavior across all the VMs, which was disturbing as they were all deployed from the same template. We did manage to narrow it down to guests running on just one of the hosts.

     My initial thought was the possibility of bad memory installed on this host. After running some memory tests and the eventual replacement, our errors continued. We then replaced the host with another blade and swapped the hard drives so we wouldn’t need to reinstall ESX. After powering up the host and migrating a couple of VMs back, we were astonished that the issue still remained. It was then that we reinstalled ESX as we thought that was the only thing left.

   After reinstalling ESX, it was then that we found some additional problems. We added the host to the cluster and were attempting to configure HA. This would fail at random intervals with often different errors including, path not found, SSL errors, and others. It was at this point my attention turned to the network. This server was configured with 2 NICs with all network trunked and vlan tagged. I disabled one of the NICs and all traffic continued to work. I switched over to the remaining NIC and everything came to a halt. Finally, it looked like we were narrowing down the cause. When the blade was swapped out, the NICs were moved from the original. We swapped out the NIC and everything worked as advertised.

Although the initial errors did not point to the network, after all other troubleshooting did not result in success the NICs were the only thing left.

If you’re like me, you connect to many different environments at customer sites and your vSphere Client drop-down get’s fairly extensive and cluttered with the old connections you will no longer use.

If you want to get rid of them, break out your trusty registry editor and go to work.

Navigate to HKCU\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences

Edit the RecentConnections string and remove any unneeded addresses.

Now fire up the vSphere client and you should only see the current connections.

      Some how in my late night troubleshooting, I managed to delete the virtual disk (vmdk) file associated with one of my VMs. I was greeted with a very unpleasant error message attempting to power on my VM. Of course I had to try and power it on a couple of times (maybe it would fix itself…)

Looking at the storage, I still had the *-flat.vmdk file, which is the actual disk, but I did not have the configuration file. I decided to manually recreate the file and see if I could save my VM from eminent destruction. You can see the contents of the file below:

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=24a5eeb6
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 41943040 VMFS "Wordpress-flat.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.toolsVersion = "7299"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 92 45 db 09 47-c5 9d a9 22 a6 cd 24 e9"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "2610"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"

I created a new file called wordpress.vmdk, ensuring it was pointing to the correct -flat.vmdk file. I was then able to edit my virtual machine and assign the new disk and power up the VM.