Great Morning Geek Tweets

Just a couple of great tweets this AM.

@Marksteelenz had this to say: Having nerdgasms over VMware. This shit is awesome

and this is an awesome one by @FrankDenneman – apparently eating, having a private life and sleeping is not business critical behavior.

Have a great day! It’s almost FRIDAY!

Great Tweet…

This came across my twitter feed yesterday and I thought it was spot on…

@ChildRoland67 tweeted: My @VMware environment has been so stable for so long, I’m not sure I’d know what to do anymore if it broke.

Our VMware environment is also very stable and the issues that we do have from time to time are usually self-induced

My Week in Geek – January 21, 2011

A weekly post (hopefully!?) of blogs, articles, sites, gadgets, and other stuff I have found that is of interest to me (and I remembered to bookmark).

1. I started off the week receiving my VCP welcome package from VMware including my certificate. Very cool! Sorry to brag but I am pretty proud of this.
    
2. A Compendium of Concerns About ESXi – about two weeks ago we migrated our environment from ESX 4.0 to ESXi 4.0. This is a great post that addresses most of the concerns/differences between the two hypervisor versions.
    
3. Last Thursday night The Blinky Light (TBL) had their first AskHarley twitter Q&A. Harley Stagner is a VCDX that works for TBL and they had folks tweet (or email) questions for Harley to answer. I participated with a few questions about storage multipathing for a project I am working on. A transcript of the chat session can be found here. I thought this was a great idea and hopefully TBL will have more of these Q&A sessions in the future.
    
4. Do you really need vMA? This is an interesting post asking about the need for the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) since most things can be done using PowerCLI. Though I do not use it that often I do use the vMA for troubleshooting and management. I have not really looked that deep into PowerCLI. Here is a great reply to the post from Duncan Epping @ Yellow-Bricks.com.
    
5. Check out Eric Sloof’s Online VMware Training Podcast which is now available on iTunes.
    
6. Enabling Tech Support Mode on ESXi Nice step by step how-to on the different ways to enable Tech Support Mode (TSM) on ESXi.
    
7. Depending on where you work the following video may not be safe if you have your sound turned up, but I don’t give a flying F*ck!
    
8. Starbucks launched their Card Mobile App this week for iPhone and Blackberry. I have all my gift cards from Christmas loaded up in it. Handy since I am always forgetting to put the cards in my wallet, but I always have my phone. The only issue is you cannot use it at the drive thru (at least not at the Starbucks I stop at on the way to school), something about them not being able to touch the phone for liability reasons. HEY STARBUCKS – FIX THIS!!!
    
9. vCenter and Memory Metrics is a great post that explains the different memory details that are reported in the vSphere Client.
    
10. Since I am trying to gain some familiarity with the PowerCLI, I found this post about Post configuration of ESX with PowerCLI pretty interesting.
     
11. CNN Money’s list of Top 100 Best Companies to Work For was released this week. Several tech companies on the list including Google, Microsoft, and NetApp. You can compare it to last year’s list here. If you work for any of these guys that is great, I don’t but I think where I work is a pretty great place (most days anyway).
     
12. Using PowerShell? Make your PowerShell For Loops 4x Faster!
     

Hope you had a great week!

VMware Cookbook

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.

Enable Web Access on vSphere ESX 4

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?

VMware vSphere Evaluators Guide

VMware vSphere Evaluators Guide

Awesome resource for anyone looking into deploying or upgrading to vSphere 4.0

vSphere Upgrades – vCenter and ESXi

We upgraded our vCenter server on Tuesday AM and all is well so far. Our production ESX servers are still on 3.5 Update 4 and vCenter is managing them fine. We have tested the storage vmotion and converting vmdks from thick to thin – so far so good. The management interface is a little different but I like it. The new inventory views of Networking and Datastores are very handy.

We upgraded our test ESXi server this AM to ESXi 4.0 using the vSphere Host Update Utility. The upgrade went very well. The only real problem we ran into was with an older NIC that was not supported. No problems other than that.

Our test ESX server is a HP DL380 G4 with 2 3.6GHz Xeon CPUs (Single Core) and 4 GB RAM. This is managed as a stand alone server, it is not managed by vCenter.

If all goes well we will probably upgrade production ESX host this Sunday night.

Hope to have at least an overview of what I did at EMC World posted in the next day or so, just too busy right now.

VMware Resolution Paths

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
–
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

Virtualizing Cisco Unity on ESX

Just doing a little reading on the possibilities of running Cisco Call Manager (Unified Communications), Unity, and CRS (UCCX) in a virtual environment.

Cisco actually supports running Unity as a virtual machine guest in ESX. The Desgin Guide is here http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/unity/virtualization_design/guide/cuvirtualdg010.html

Cisco does not support Vmotion, HA, or iSCSI attached storage for a virtualized Unity box. They also do not support a physical to virtual conversion of a Unity server. Hopefully Cisco will support Vmotion and HA at some point.

I also found some interesting information on running an older Call Manager version (4.x) as a VM – http://www.blindhog.net/cisco-install-call-manager-4x-with-vmware/

Here is some info I found on UCCX – http://tannerezell.com/cisco/?p=85

VMware Launches vSphere 4

Introducing VMware vSphere 4 – The Industry’s First Cloud Operating System http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/04/introducing-vmware-vsphere-4-the-industrys-first-cloud-operating-system.html

VMware vSphere 4 Launch Supported by Broad Virtualization Ecosystem http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/04/21/vmware-vsphere-4-launch-supported-by-broad-virtualization-ecosystem.aspx

VMware vSphere 4 Provides “Always On IT” for SMB and Branch Office IT Environments With Low Cost, High Availability Solutions http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/04/21/vmware-vsphere-4-provides-always-on-it-for-smb-and-branch-office-it-environments-with-low-cost-high-availability-solutions.aspx

A random collection of what’s new vSphere eye candy http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/04/20/a-random-collection-of-whats-new-vsphere-eye-candy/

VMware Launches vSphere – http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2009/04/vmware-launches-vsphere.html

Yellow-bricks.com has put together a great list of vSphere links: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/04/21/vsphere-linkage/

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