Demitasse

I visited a client in November who was having a few issues with their Virtual Infrastructure.  One of the minor inconveniences they mentioned was that the VI client was timing out tasks a lot.  Sometimes this is due to WAN issues, however here the whole infrastructure was in one city.  It turns out that the issue was really Service Console memory starvation, to recognise SC starvation take a look at VMware KB article 1003496.

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I’ve been playing with ESXi a bit and wanted to put together an automated build of an ESXi host.  You’d think that this would be easier than automating the build of a full ESX server, but you’d be wrong.  The lack of a service console means that only remote tools are supported, so configuration is dependent upon the Remote CLI and the Perl Toolkit.  I had hoped to only need the RCLI, but found that it was a bit lacking in features & I needed the Perl Toolkit as well to get everything.  Follow on for the script & details of what it does.

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I’d been meaning to write this post for ages, then I found Scott Lowe had linked to Gabe’s Virtual World where Gabe posted an outline in January of how to relocate the VUM patch store.

The patch store is a directory structure that holds the patches that VUM has downloaded for the systems in your Virtual Infrastructure.  As you’d imagine it grows in size over time & can get quite large if you have a diverse range of operating systems in your VI.

When installed automatically with Virtual Centre the default the patch store is in the "All Users" profile on the system disk of your Virtual Centre server, it’s quite a good idea to put it on another partition where it’s growth won’t cause any issues. 

If you do a custom install of VUM then you get to choose a disk to hold the patch store and the installer complains if it is less than 18GB in size.

I’ve had a couple of questions about interesting issues from students in the Deploy Secure Analyse course I’m teaching in Sydney this week.  They’re interesting so I’ve decided to post them here as well as discussing them in the class.

The first was about identifying which process was locking a file on a VMFS datastore, this comes up when a VM fails to shutdown properly on an ESX server.  The information is in this document posting on the VMTN web site, it’s not a simple process but it is doable.

The second question was about performance of Exchange on ESX servers, my favourite note is about having 16,000 mailboxes on a single ESX host from the VROOM! blog.  The same blog also has information about scaling web server loads.  The other reference area for Exchange on ESX is on VMWare’s main site

For those who are interested there is a white paper on SQL performance on ESX that is good reading.

The other good web site I mentioned and regularly follow is XtraVirt, I especially like the look of their two node clustered iSCSI target using local storage on the ESX server.  The question in the class was about setting difficult to set advanced config settings on ES servers from the service console, the latest tool in ESX 3.5 is mentioned in this blog post.

The final question that came up on day one was about Jumbo Frames support with iSCSI on ESX 3.5 update 1, as far as I could see in the release notes it’s not there, nor is 10GBE for IP storage.

A further question has come up, that of VLAN security.  As you may know I’m a big fan of VLANs so I went looking for some information about VLAN security.  The summary seems to be that the default configuration is not secure and you need to follow some instructions like those in this Cisco white paper.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I like to make a small custom boot CD to launch unattended ESX server installs using network located install files.  I even promised to blog about the way I do that CD, well here is that blog.

The first thing to know is that we are using the excellent ISOLinux to get started, this is used by Linux distributions to get boot from CD working.  The normal ESX install uses ISOLinux and as of ESX 3.5 the normal install CD even contains a cut down minimal 3 MB boot CD image, this is what we will use as our basis.  We will then customise the boot options and menu from this CD and make a new one with our own options in it.  Read on for the process

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This post was triggered by the VI3.5 Deploy Secure Analyse course I ran in Wellington last week, I realised at the end of the course that I hadn’t provided the guys with the template unattended file on the CD as I usually do.

The Ananconda Kickstart file reproduced below is an example  which builds the configuration used in the HP Virtual Labs in the VI3 Install and Configure course with a few of the security settings from the DSA course added.

Due to the lack of a suitable editor in the HPVL this script has not been tested.  The post section of the script is a Linux shell script and does not take kindly to DOS type “carriage return / line feed” end of line markers.  To create your scripts on Windows I would suggest using an editor like Crimson which respects Unix format text, alternatively use a Unix editor!

I am still planning to post about making a custom boot CD to make your automated builds even easier and using a central script store as well, hopefully I’ll get some time to test & write those soon.  Meanwhile follow the break for the unattend script.

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I’d been meaning to write about the issues with “insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover levl”  in VC 2.5 environments for a while.  Those who’ve been on recent courses know the outline.

Today I found a link to a fresh VMWare blog called VirtualGeek which looks great.  It includes a great writeup of the issue which saves me the effort of writing and the guilt at not writing.  It looks like Chad’s blog will be one to watch.