Today I got an error when selecting the “VMware EVC” option in the Cluster Settings at my vCenter 4.0 host with multiple HP Blades with same CPU. Error message:
Method not found: ‘Vmomi.HostSystemArray EVCState.get_BadSoftwareHostsBlockingEVC()’
Solution:
This issue occurs when a system installed with vSphere 4.1 and you use vSphere 4.0 Client on that system to access vCenter Server 4.0.
To workaround this issue, install a vSphere 4.0 Client on a system on which you have not installed vSphere4.1 Client earlier and then update the EVC cluster using the vSphere 4.0 Client.
Today VMware released the newest version of vSphere, version 4.1
Whats new:
Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting.
vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi.
Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported.
Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). ESX can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. With storage hardware assistance, ESX performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage fabric bandwidth.
Storage Performance Statistics. vSphere 4.1 offers enhanced visibility into storage throughput and latency of hosts and virtual machines, and aids in troubleshooting storage performance issues. NFS statistics are now available in vCenter Server performance charts, as well as esxtop. New VMDK and datastore statistics are included. All statistics are available through the vSphere SDK.
Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion.
Today I got some problems with backing up one of my VM’s using VMware Data Recovery. I was looking what was going wrong after a few failures.. And yes.. hanging snapshots
Trying to remove the snapshots was a little bit different. When I went into the “Snapshot Manager” there were no active snapshots and I couldn’t delete the files. But while browsing the Datastore I saw many active snapshots.
Last weekend I downloaded the OpenFiler v.2.3 iso to configure the Central Storage solution in my homelab. After installing the software in a new VM I figured out how to configure iSCSI targets and present them to my ESX servers…
I’m running both VMware ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 in my lab and both provide iSCSI functionality by default to connect through to an iSCSI target.
After I installed OpenFiler in a VM I connected to https://ip:446, you can manage your service account with the created root account and you can manage the OpenFiler with the following credentials Username: Openfiler Password: password
My configuration staps…
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Configure OpenFiler:
Create a new volume group:
1. Physical Volume – Assigning space on a physical disk for use in a Volume Group.
2. Volume Group – Contains Physical Volumes from which a Logical Volume will be created.
3. Logical Volume (LUN) – This is what is presented through to a server
- Select volume and give a volume group name (in my case VMpros)
Today I was playing with automatic installation of VMware Tools by using Active Directory Group Policy and Security Groups on my Windows 2008 test environment.
What did I do to realize the automated installation:
- Create a Security Group in AD called: “SW_VMware Tools 64-Bit”
- Create in Group Policy Management a new GPO called “SW_VMware Tools 64-Bit”
