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!

One of the new features of vSphere is the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS). Basically vDS allows you to create, manage, and provision your virtual network across all of your vSphere hosts in vCenter. vDS is available under the Enterprise Plus license.

Here is how I set up my vDS. I basically used the 3 host configuration example in What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Virtual Networking white paper as a guide.

First I created a new vNetwork Distributed Switch in Inventory->Networking.

I configured it for 8 dvUplink ports. Why 8? Well I have 8 NICs in each of my host, and I would like to be able to use and manage all eight of them across one vDS.

I added each of my host to the vDS but did not add any physical adapters yet.

After the new vDS is created I created my port groups. One port group for the Service Console, one for vmotion, and one for each of my production VLANs.

When creating these port groups I just used the defaults except for changing the VLANs where needed.

Now that I have my vDS set up, time to migrate the host networks to the new switch. In Inventory->Hosts and Clusters select the host Configuration tab then Networking and the Distributed Virtual Switch button.

First i migrated the Virtual Machine networks to the new vDS. I took one NIC out of the port channel on the physical switch and added that physical NICs to the vDS. I did this for each of my hosts.

Then I use the Migrate Virtual Machine Networking wizard to move all of my VMs from the vSwitch port groups to the new vDS.

After this is done I add the rest of the physical NICs associated with my VM network to the vDS and recreate the port channel on the physical switch.

Now on to the vmkernel ports. I used the Manage Virtual Adapters wizard to migrate my VMotion VMKernel adapter to the new vDS.

I then did the same to my service console. Before I started making changes to the Service Console I put the host in maintenance mode. I created a new service console with a new IP address on the same subnet on my management port group and made sure I had connectivitiy (OK I did not do this the first time, messed up and lost the Service Console connectivity to my host – had to go CLI to fix it, but that is a completely different multi-page post in itself – very thankful for the spare NIC I have in each host).

Since my vMotion vmkernel port and Service Console are now on the vDS I attached their physical NICs to the new vDS and then added them to the port channel on the physical switch.

vNetwork Distributed Switch Screenshot

The only issue I had was with the iSCSI vmkernel ports. I was not able to get them to work on the vDS so they are still configured on a vSwitch on each hosts.

Not sure why I could not get it to work, but I will tackle that another day.

After I verified everything works, I deleted the old Virtual Switches from each host.

Just a quick overview of how I set up my vDS. Hope you find it helpful.

TGIF!

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!!!

VMware vSphere Evaluators Guide

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

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.

At least that’s what the post says… http://vsphere-land.com/news/vsphere-the-missing-links-every-vsphere-link-you-need-to-get-started.html

Every link or not, there are a bunch of great resources for vSphere 4.

I am just back from EMC World and I have a lot information I will be posting soon about the conference but right now I am going to enjoy the holiday weekend. Have a great one!

Details on the migration from VI 3 to vSphere 4.

vSphere Update Center

Check out the step-by-step vSphere migration videos.

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/