Daz’s bits and bobs

I’ve played with many storage technologies at home, ZFS being one of my favs when it comes to performance. But i’ve been looking for something that suits a typical home environment where power usage and capacity is usually more important than performance. Thats where UNRAID has come in…

UNRAID give me these advantages;

• Different sized disks in a single pool (only requires largest disk as parity)
• Files are distributed over all the disks – so even if you lost more than a single drive you still still have some of your data. Note : with parity drive you can handle a single drive failing without loosing anything, sorta like RAID4 – non distributed parity.
• Power usage, since the files are stored on specific disks not all the disks need to power on to give you your file.
• Runs on a USB stick – no large operating system required.
• Crashplan module can be installed to provide backup options.

http://lime-technology.com/

Sometimes you might want to run a hypervisor on a hypervisor for testing purposes…. this is how you pass through the required CPU extensions in ESXi 5.1

Remember you will also need to enable promiscuous mode on the networking side also.

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/08/how-to-enable-nested-esxi-other.html

There are some changes with Nested Virtualization in vSphere 5.1 also officially known as VHV (Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization). If you are using vSphere 5.0 to run Nested ESXi or other nested Hypervisors, then please take a look at the instructions in this article. With vSphere 5.1, there have been a few minor changes to enable VHV.

1. The new Virtual Hardware 9 compatibility will be required when creating your nested ESXi VM, Virtual Hardware 8 will not work if you are running ESXi 5.1 on your physical host. You will still need to enable promiscuous mode on the portgroup that will be used for your nested ESXi VM for network connectivity.
2. vhv.allow = “true” is no longer valid for ESXi 5.1 to enable VHV. A new parameter has been introduced called vhv.enable = “true” that is now defined on a per VM basis to provide finer granularity of VHV support. This also allows for better portability between VMware’s hosted products such as VMware Fusion and Workstation as they also support the vhv.enable parameter.
3. You can now enable VHV on a per VM basis and using the new vSphere Web Client which basically adds the vhv.enable = “true” parameter to the VM’s .VMX configuration file.

Neccesary commands to get vmware vsphere power cli scripts runnign in power cli;

(post installation of vsphere power cli extensions)

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction “Ignore” -Confirm:$false

http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2011/06/back-to-basics-part-1-installing-powercli.html

The first one (that caused the outage) was due to a bug in the tg3 driver on the ESXi hosts (1gbit broadcom cards in the new hosts). If the network card is put under load and netqueue is enabled it will sometimes decide to drop all traffic. Essentially i’ve disabled netqueue and the problems have gone away…. as per this vm kb :

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2035701

The isues will present themselves as log entires like so;

2012-11-19T18:58:52.137Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: RX NetQ allocated on 1
2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0]
2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: RX NetQ allocated on 1
2012-11-19T18:58:52.138Z cpu17:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0]
2012-11-19T18:59:12.139Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ remove RX filter: 1
2012-11-19T18:59:12.139Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1
2012-11-19T18:59:22.137Z cpu24:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: RX NetQ allocated on 1
2012-11-19T18:59:22.138Z cpu24:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:71:46:87 0]
2012-11-19T18:59:42.138Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: NetQ remove RX filter: 1
2012-11-19T18:59:42.138Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic7: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1
2012-11-19T18:59:42.140Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: NetQ remove RX filter: 1
2012-11-19T18:59:42.140Z cpu21:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic4: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1
2012-11-19T19:00:02.139Z cpu28:4155)<6>tg3 : vmnic8: NetQ remove RX filter: 1

You might be able to do this via “host profiles” but if you do not have the licensing for it, this is the alternative. Very handy if you have over 50 or so port groups. It can be re-run to add to additional hosts as needed.

Install powercli, run the following to obtain your current list of virtual port groups off existing host;

Get-VirtualPortGroup -VirtualSwitch vSwitch0 -VMHost esx-01

Grab the output and place into CSV file or copy straght into Excel…

Following the formatting of the following “esx_switching-generic.csv” import the required data from aboves output. Note : the top line is the headers and should always be at the top of the CSV file.

Type,HostName,SwitchName,NIC,PortGroupName,VLAN,IP,Subnet,KernelGW
Portgroup,esx-02,vSwitch0,,Test_Network1,510,,,
Portgroup,esx-02,vSwitch0,,Test_Network2,511,,,

Place this file in a location that is called by this script –

#This script is designed to allow you to configure switches on multiple hosts by
#importing information from a prepopulated .csv file. vMotion switch created based
#on Mike Laverick's posting http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?p=1514
#!!!!!!!Values passed for Type are Case sensitive since comparisons are being made.!!!!!!!

$getinfo = Import-Csv "D:\esx_switching-generic.csv" #need to input locatin of .CSV file

#Connect-VIServer -Server #Need to input appropriate vCenter Server

$getinfo | % {
$Type = $_.Type #!!!! Case Sensitive !!!!!!
$gethost = Get-VMHost -Name $_.HostName
$SwitchName = $_.SwitchName
$PortGroup = $_.PortGroupName
$Nic = $_.NIC
$VLAN = $_.VLAN
$IP = $_.IP
$Subnet = $_.Subnet
$kernelGW = $_.KernelGW

If ($Type -eq "Switch") {
$gethost | New-VirtualSwitch -Name $SwitchName -Nic $Nic
}

#Gets Switch object based on the value for SwitchName (required for several cmd-lets that do not accept Strings)
#'If' statement is used since a vMotion type does not already have a switch configured which will throw up an error.
If ($Type -ne "vMotion") {
$getswitch = Get-VirtualSwitch -VMHost $gethost -Name $SwitchName
}

#Add additional NIC to vSwitch to create a Team
If ($Type -eq "Team"){
$getswitch | Set-VirtualSwitch -Nic $Nic
}

$vmhostnetwork = get-vmhostnetwork $gethost
set-vmhostnetwork -network $vmhostnetwork -vmkernelgateway $kernelGW
}
}