My Geek Finds

I just picked this up today – VMware Cookbook – A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

Most of the book was written while vSphere was still in beta so the book covers ESX/ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5.

I have only thumbed through it so far but it looks like there is a lot of good information. There are some pretty good tables with the configuration differences between 3.5 and 4 in Chapter 1. The command line reference in Chapter 5 should be useful to both versions, as well as the Security stuff in Chapter 6.

Looking forward to reading the book cover to cover.

New feature in vCenter Update Manager allows you to stage vSphere updates before installing them.

Use the Stage wizard to download the patches before using remediation. This downloads and prepares the patches while the host is still online. This decrease the amount of time the host is off line (in maintenance mode) will applying patches.

Stage and Remediate in Upate Manager

You can stage at the cluster and Data Center level to prepare all hosts in the cluster for remediation.

Update Manager Stage Wizard

Shortcuts in Home-Inventory-Hosts and Clusters

Stage and Remediate Host - Cluster and Data Center

Just updated to ESX 4.0.0 build 175625. Staging took about 3 1/2 minutes total and remediation took about 12 minutes per host (this include Entering maintenance mode, VM migration, patch installation, reboot, exit maintenance mode). Three and a half minutes of savings may not seem like much, and across three hosts it really isn’t that big of a deal, but across 20 hosts that would make a huge difference.

Awesome new vSphere feature!

Not sure why this is but Web Access to ESX 4 is disabled by default.

To enable it ssh to the service console and log in as root.

[root@vmware]# chkconfig –level 345 vmware-webAccess on

Verify it has been enabled for run level 3, 4, and 5

[root@vmware]# chkconfig –list vmware-webAccess
vmware-webAccess 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

Start the service

[root@vmware]# service vmware-webAccess start
Starting VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access:
VMware Virtual Infrastructure Web Access [ OK ]

You can now log in a root at https://vmwareESXhostname/ui/

Does anyone know why VMware disabled this by default?

These are very handy when trying to troubleshoot VM/vCenter/ESX issues. Just identify the path for the issue and read the KBs.

http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2009/05/resolution-paths-published.html
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Many common tech support issues in VMware products can be solved using what we call Resolution Paths. Resolution Paths are collections of modular steps that can be used to solve tech support issues.

These can be very handy and can save you having to make that call into Tech Support. Click the links below. There’s one for each potential problem area.
http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2009/05/resolution-paths-published.html

From installing ESX to VM guest backup the VI3 Reference Card is a great quick reference guide for any administrator working with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3.

How do you grow a VM disk? What tcp ports are need by ESX? How do you change the service consoles IP? How many hosts can you have in a virtual cluster? Quickly reference answers to these questions and more using the guide.

The latest version of the quick reference card can be found here – http://www.vmreference.com/vi3-card/

Download it and keep it handy.

This small but useful tool is a must have for any ESX 3.x/Virtual Center 2.x admin. It gives you easy access to tons of useful information about your virtual environment. How much disk space is available on what datastore, what virtual machines have snapshots, what virtual machines have the CDROM currently mounted, how many processors assigned to each VM, and a ton of other information with just the click of the mouse.

Download RVTools here – http://www.robware.net/

Here is the developers description:

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.x or ESX 3.x RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, datastores and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest version.