When Creating a snapshot for a virtual machine fails
Or you receive the error:
File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore
Note: This error does not occur on ESX 3.5 or earlier.
ESX 4.0 is able to detect when a snapshot file at maximum size cannot fit into a datastore. Instead of allowing the file to be created, which may not work correctly if it grows to big, ESX cancels the operation and displays the above error.
To confirm if the snapshot files may be too big, compare the size of the virtual machine’s base disks against the block size of the datastore which contains the virtual machine’s working directory.
Note: If you are using Raw Device Map, you should compare the size of the RDMs instead of the base disks.
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Carlo Costanzo from VMwareInfo.com has posted the following helpful article:
The SVGA II driver installed by VMware Tools doesn’t work with 2008 R2 or Windows 7. Console sessions will randomly lockup.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/218244?start=105&tstart=0
According to the thread there is a WDDM driver in U1 that you can install manually to fix the problem by browsing to -
“C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video“
A good one 
When attempting to upgrade ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1, you may experience the following symptoms:
- Update Manager (VUM) upgrade operation fails or times out at 33%.
- Upon reboot, the host that was being upgraded displays a purple diagnostic screen with the following error:
COS Panic: Int3 @ mp_register_ioapic
Customers using VMware vSphere 4 upgrading to Update 1 with 3rd party management agents running.
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vSphere 4.0 introduces a new para-virtualized network device – VMXNET3. We recently published a paper demonstrating its performance characteristics, compared to that of enhanced VMXNET2 (the previous generation of high performance virtual network device from VMware).
Some highlights of this paper are:
(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.
(2) Dramatic gains across all configurations of IPv6 traffic, with significant CPU usage reduction and throughput improvement over enhanced VMXNET2.
In a nutshell, VMXNET3 offers performance on par with or better than its predecessors on both Windows and Linux guests. Both the driver and the device have been highly tuned to perform better on modern systems. Furthermore, VMXNET3 introduces new features and enhancements, such as TSO6 and RSS. TSO6 makes it especially useful for users deploying applications that deal with IPv6 traffic, while RSS is helpful for deployments requiring high scalability. Moving forward, to keep pace with an ever-increasing demand for network bandwidth, we recommend customers migrate to VMXNET3.
For more details, please read our full paper from here.
Performance problems can arise in any computing environment. In a virtualized computing environment performance problems can arise due to new and often subtle interactions occurring in the shared infrastructure. Uncovering the causes of those problems requires an understanding of the available performance metrics and their relationship to underlying configuration issues.
A new guide covering performance troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4, including ESX 4.0 hosts, is now available. This document uses a guided approach to lead the reader through the observable manifestations of complex hardware/software interactions in order to identify specific performance problems. For each problem covered, it includes a discussion of the possible root-causes and solutions. Topics covered include performance problems arising from issues in the CPU, memory, storage, and network subsystems, as well as in the VM and ESX host configuration.
The document is available on the VMware Performance Community.
vSphere has a new feature called Fault Tolerance that allows for a VM to be running in vLockstep on two physical servers at the same time. In the event of a failure of the primary VM, the secondary VM will immediately take over with no downtime for the VM. There is a great whitepaper that covers FT architecture and performance. There have also been a couple of blog posts on VROOM! recently that cover FT performance as well. One uses VMmark to show how FT has excellent performance in a heavily loaded multi workload environment. The other blog post shows how an Exchange VM maintains excellent performance while supporting 2000 users with FT enabled.
FT currently requires that 1vCPU VMs be used. This presents a challenge for some applications that have traditionally been run in 2vCPU VM configurations. At the same time, new processors have features that provide much higher performance than in the past. When combined with the performance enhancements of ESX 4, it is now possible to get much better performance per core.
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This article provides steps which may be useful when upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0.
Note: This article assumes that you have read the vSphere Upgrade Guide. This upgrade guide contains definitive information. If there is a discrepancy between the guide and this article, assume that the guide is correct.
Note: Read the VMware vSphere 4.0 Release Notes for known installation issues.
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Bij het configureren van VMware Data Recovery krijg kreeg ik bij het connecten naar de VDR Virtual Machine de volgende foutmelding: “Error: Connect:BeginSession: failed to authenticate Please make sure that the Data Recovery Appliance is turned on”
De VM draaide in hetzelfde subnet, geen nat of firewall aanstaan maar kon maar niet connecten.
vCenter + SQL database staat geinstalleerd op een Windows 2003 SP2 R2 64-Bit.
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Jaja, eindelijk is het dan zover, vanmiddag kwam UPS mijn nieuwe (tweedehandse) server afleveren. Dit pakket kost me denk ik 3 weken ziektewet (40 kilo) maar het resultaat mag er zijn:
HP ProLiant DL585 G1
CPU TYPE : Quad (4) AMD Opteron 64-880 Dual Core
CPU Speed: 8 x 2,4 Ghz
Geheugen : 8 GB DDR PC2100 (8 x 1GB)
Schijven: 2 x 72 GB 2 x 36 GB (15K)
2 x HP NC7170 Dual Port PCI-X Gigabit Adapter
Kon natuurlijk niet wachten met installeren..
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