According to the KB 1038827 “Enabling Jumbo Frames for VMkernel ports in a virtual distributed switch”, VMware says that you have to recreate the vmkernel port to set the MTU for jumbo frames. This is not true if you use powerCLI, I do not know exactly how it is done beneath the hood but it is very easy to configure using quite a few lines scripting.. By the way, there is no way in the GUI to edit this.
$cred = Get-Credential
Connect-VIServer ESXhost.test.loc -credential $cred
Get-VMHostNetworkadapter -name vmk2 | Set-VMHostnetworkadapter -Mtu 9000
Get-VMHostnetworkadapter -name vmk2 | ft Mtu
Setting the Mtu on the vmkernel port is basically not different using a standard vSwitch or a distributed vSwitch.
Of course you can connect to a vcenter and add a foreach loop to set the Mtu for more than one host vmkernel port.
I have had the opportunity to do some PowerCLI scripting on an installation where we have vDS (virtual Distributed Switch). In the PowerCLI there is not so much cmdlets for the distributed switches, that is kind of awkward as there is so many cmdlets for everything else.. Luckily LucD had made some nice functions for me to use when creating the port groups.
I used his function for creating port groups, as the customer had about 20 vlans that needed to be added it was a perfect match to do it by powerCLI because setting up this manually is boring! So i had a csv file with the name and vlan id which i ran through in a foreach loop, then all was done.
But then we realized that we needed to change some settings with both the security and load balancing so i had to remove all my port groups and start over.. I did not want to remove them manually and the powerCLI cmdlet that removes standard port groups could not be used on a vDS, I did not find the code from LucD in his blog to remove a vDS port group so i came up with the brilliant idea to use Onyx, it is a tool from VMware Labs that interprets the traffic between the vSphere Client and the vCenter and transform it to powerCLI code or .Net or SOAP or Javascript.
I then after starting this tool connected to my vCenter and through the vSphere Client removed a vDS port group, i got the powerCLI code (which I probably could have found out being a bit smarter in powershell/powerCLI without Onyx, but now I´m not :-P) So i did a small script to find all my vDS port groups and remove them.. Note that i cannot remove a vDS port group that already has been populated with connected VM´s.
# Remove vds port groups
#
# Niklas Åkerlund / Real Time Services AB
$vlans = Import-Csv vlan.csv -Delimiter ";"
$PGs = Get-VirtualPortGroup
foreach ($vlan in $vlans){
foreach ($PG in $PGs){
if ($vlan.Name -eq $PG.Name){
$destroy = $PG.Id
#Write-Host $destroy
$pek = Get-View -Id $destroy
$pek.Destroy_Task()
}
}
}
And now i could run the add script again with the added parameters for more security and load balancing.
There is quite a buzz out on twitter and blogs about the new features that has come to Windows 8 and the new Hyper-V version. I want to give you a little heads up about how it works to create network team with NICs (yes it works with different nic cards. in my case a Intel and a Broadcom)
I have now installed the server on my test-machine in our office and was eager to test the NIC teaming, at first i did not understand how it was working and tried to bind two nics together in the network connections window in the control panel, as i later realized and read in Aidan Finns´s blog, that it is done through the LBFOAdmin.exe (this is opened when pressing Nic Teaming Enabled/Disabled)
There you have to highligt your server to configure it, as the new server manager can handle remote servers and you can configure several workloads at the same time and you do not have to log in to each server to administer it.
I have named my team to NET2000 and added the two nics, i have also set it to be switch independent (i have actually set it in a simple 5 port switch), you can also chose LACP or Static Teaming. For Load Distribution mode you can chose Address Hash or Hyper-V port (now i am sharing the team with the management and a hyper-v switch so i am using the Address Hash.
As yo can see i can then add several virtual nics with different vlan id. I really hope that the fix one issue though, as you can see here i have a virtual nic interface called VMnet, when i then want to add this in the hyper-v manager it does have a different name as you can see in the next screenshot. It would have been wonderful to be able to se the Name also in the virtual switch manager.
As i before had to use the same network cards from the same manufacture and use their teaming software this is a giant step forward with the win 8 and the built in teaming functions. One thing to test later when i get my hands on a nic that can handle SR-IOV is how that feature works with a team, but that is another blog post!
The past two days i have been upgrading a Platespin Forge from 2.5 to 3.1 on a Forge 510 Appliance, this runs VMware VI 3.5 Update 4.
I think that the Forge appliance is a really good product for companies that have a need for a Disaster Recovery solution. If you want to read more about it click here.
The customer had bought the appliance for two years ago and has not had any time to set it up and start replicating workloads.
The appliance is a customized Dell HW with a custom VI 3.5 installation, We could not upgrade it to vSphere, the only update on the Novell site is the VI 3.5 U5. We tried to upgrade via the vSphere Client Host Upgrade Utility but got a failure, we also tried the hostupgrade.sh script also failing. We have started a support case asking novell how to do and i will update the blog when i get the right procedures.
The next trouble we went into was when we tried to upgrade the Forge Management VM software from 2.5 to 3.1, The installation succeeds but when we check the gui we do not have an protect container which is kind of vital because without it we cannot start any protection of workloads, if we checked with the Platespin browser executable we could see it there but not in the web gui. The not so obvious solution to this was to do a two part upgrade, first update all windows patches and then upgrade to version 3.0.2 and verify that the container for protection was still there and working, after that we could proceed with the upgrade to Forge 3.1 (which is of today the latest version) and after this the protect container was there and refreshed correctly. Thank God for VM snapshots that we took after each step so we easily could go back after each failed step!
Although the upgrade steps in the documentation did not work for us i can recommend it because Platespin has always done a good job on writing and explaining in their product documents.
Some strange issues regarding when we add the Management VM to their domain and install AV is left but that is another support case.
After the vacation this summer i have had much to do and not any time for blogging, i will try to behave better and keep you readers updated in my findings..
I just want to clarify for those of you running several vCenter installations for your different virtualization platforms and use vCenter Update manager for updating your hosts.
When you install the vCenter update manager you can only add one vCenter and there is no support for using the same Update manager for several vCenter instances. From a management point of view it would have been a nice feature to be able to use the same vCenter Update Manager for several vCenter instances in a linked mode, as you would only have one to handle.
In the Update Manager documentation it clearly says : “The Update Manager installation requires a connection with a single vCenter Server instance. ” link to vSphere 5.0 vum installation documentation is here , This is not new for the 5.0 and is also the case for earlier versions of vCenter and VUM
Today I have helped a customer with ther vCenter database and the rollup jobs that was not present..
Yesterday i noticed that they had missed to update the stat jobs when moving their database to another server (I gave them the KB 7960893 link so they could move the db. allthough they missed step 5 in that list.). This was leading to an growing database and that the performance stats where not being updated. ultimately if the database grows to much and fills the disk the vCenter server will stop. I showed them the KB 1004382 that descripbes how you update or create new stat rollup scripts for your vCenter database, this was not successfull because they did not select the right database for the creation of the jobs..
Again i used the wonderful tool Teamviewer and connected to the customer and helped them to correctly create the jobs.
One important thing is to select the right database when running the script or it will not work when it is going to run.
As you can see on the screendump, for one that is not to familiar with SQL management studioi you must select the database beside the ! Execute before executing, the script will run and create a stat rollup job but it will not work because it is looking for stored procedures that are in the vCenter database..
If you not have logged on as the owner of the database (your vcenter service account) you should edit the jobs to be run as that account!
I have now tested the script that Hugo Peeters has made for checking what licensing needed with a vSphere platform when upgrading to V,
Of course this is a small platform and we do not have so much machines running, but the point is that it is a cool script that gives you a hint where you are and what your platform need in amount of licensing.
Not allowed to mix different vSphere editions in the same vRAM pool, if using more than one edition managed with vCenter it will create different vRAM pools
for each license model there is a vRAM entitlement 24 GB for standard, 36 GB for Enterprise and 48 GB for Enterprise+, these are shared when connected to a vCenter so if you have a virtual machine on a host with 2 pCPU 192 GB physical RAM (with E+ you have 96 GB vRAM) and this VM has been configured with 128 GB vRAM and in your vmware vSphere cluster that this host resides have 3 other hosts with same setup and that will give you 384 GB vRAM in the pool, 384 – 128 equals 256 GB left to use for other VMs before bying more licenses. Also if you have a linked vCenter and hosts with vRAM that is also included in the pool to be used. What i am trying to say is that although you have used more vRAM than assigned for one host you are still compliant as it is part of a pool.
As in all virtualization design you must calculate for host failures and its vRAM can be used when one host is down for maintenance or failure.
In the above example you can add more licenses for getting more vRAM, these licenses can later be used for adding a new host and for that physical CPUs.
I have been investigating some things that need to be considered when deploying a Microsoft Cluster on a VMware platform.
As you can see on the graph, there are some different supported configurations. The kb 1037959 shows more information, i will try to highlight some things below.
Why i started this was because i was looking at the Multipathing polices for a customer and we discussed in the office that we preferred the Round-Robin policy, This is as you also can read on the KB not supported for the RDM shared disk, so if you already have Round Robin as default on your hosts you have to set another policy on that specific LUN.
This can be done by powerCLI or by the vClient GUI, and as i am a big fan of powerCLI i will show you the command for it
If your default multipathing policy is set to one you do not want you can edit the default both with VMware CLI and powerCLI, as for the last there is a script that Stephen has made and can be found on the VMware Communities forum. otherwise you will have to change policy on every new datastore you add manually.
If you have a iSCSI SAN you will use in-guest iSCSI connection to the shared storage, then there is no need to change multipathing polices, what i do not understand and have not got any good information about is when i use in-guest shared storage, why do VMware have a limit of two cluster nodes that they support? As I see it the limit should be what MSCS has as a limit and that is 16 nodes, maybe there is no need for such a big cluster as you already have HA in your virtualization platform. If the setup as you can se in the graph is a cluster without shared storage it is not any limits set on number of nodes.
You will also need to edit your VMs scsi controller, for the Win 2008 you must have the LSI SAS controller installed, there is a KB 1002149 for that where the steps are outlined. The shared disk must reside on a dedicated scsi controller.
You will also have to setup Anti-Affinity rules in DRS to keep your cluster nodes apart, if you have for some reason decided to setup a CIB (Cluster in a Box) then you will need to setup an affinity to keep them together on the same host. For the VMs that are used for clustering you should set the DRS to partially automated.
Yesterday i heard from a colleague that he had been exposed to a hack attack that is very sophisticated and probably could have been successful if not my colleague had worked in IT.
What happened was that he got a call and the other party asked for his wife (this means that they in some way have target their attacks as they said her name), he said that she was not there and asked if he could be in assistans, the one on the phone informed my colleague that he was calling from Microsoft and that they had noticed that his computer was reporting lots of errors and that they could help him fix it. As he is working as an IT professional he became interested and let the man on the phone explain, which he did and told my colleague to open the event viewer and directed him to some common errors through filtering. When they found the errors the “Microsoft” represenative said that he could help him to fix this and directed him to a remote desktop software site ( a real website that had been copied and changed url by one character ), this evil site installed a Java tunneling trojan which his antivirus software did not find with the real time scan, after this my colleague said thank you and hung up and disconnected his laptop and investigated it.
Today he heard of an 80 year old lady that had been attacked using the same technique.
I can safely say that Microsoft will never ever call you and tell you stuff about your computer and ask to remote administer it!! AND FOR GOOD SAKE DO NOT ACCEPT JAVA OR ACTIVEX plugins/programs that does not come from a legitimate site
watch this youtube clip and get scared about how easy anyone can get hold of your computer. Also look at the follow up clip that shows when he set up an account and run RDP to that session..
Last week I attended the MCTSummit in Stockholm and the TTT course that was held there. Several experienced senior MCT instructors (Thomas Lee, Johan Arwidmark and others) gave us great information about how to be succesfull in the class or when presenting. The course was held by the MCT Europe with instructors Daniel Sörlöv and Mattias Lind. It was a course that was originally for three days but we had it in two which meant quite a fast pace and long days. The final day we had an exam presentation that was limited to 20 minutes and a jury of up to eight senior MCT instructors to judge. I have taken several certifications but this was one of the most difficult to pass.
This was my exam presentation.
I can honestly say that i still have much to learn about how to present and get the message through but no presenter gets perfect and always need to work on their skills..
Bill Chapman said on the first day of the Summit, “Regardless of what happens keep going”, also he said some other important stuff as you should use a video camera and film yourself presenting or teaching.
