Daz’s bits and bobs

I’ve run into some issues lately with XP guests that are running off a IDE controller. If you want any kind of performance you must build your machine with the LSI drivers (parallel).

Here is a flp image with the required LSI drivers (Press F6 etc on xp boot)

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1499140#1499140

V2V cold clone process for SBS / exchange / sql / DC’s etc…..    (works in vSphere)

Steps to convert from hyper-v guest to vmware guest

• Remove hyper-v integrated services while hyper-v guest is running. (if possible)
• Note down NIC networking details first
• Clean shutdown hyper-v guest
• Use StarWind Converter (free) to convert VHD to “dynamically growing VMware” image and use “IDE” as type. Note “SCSI” does NOT work if you have not got the LSI / BUS drivers in the source image, just use the default options – dynamic vmware and IDE.
• Create VMware guest shell (virtual machine equivalent to hyper-v specs but without the disks) – remove all hard drives, iscsi controller should also disappear.
• Upload the VMDK to same data store as virtual machine and attach to the virtual guest in the right order. They should be detected as “IDE”
• Start new vmware guest
• If you could not remove integrated services (i.e. hot clone), then you MUST disable hyper-v services immediately.
• Install vmware tools – reboot
• Remove hidden NIC and other orphaned devices, and reconfigure network card as per original.
• Windows may need to be re-activated – do this.

Note : converting a machine to use an IDE controller will limit its performance!

Continuing on from this http://sigtar.com/2010/02/04/vsphere-and-multipathing-iscsi/

you may want to implement jumbo frames to your iSCSI backend…

Enable jumbo frames on your iSCSI target and switches then complete the following on the ESXi hosts (iSCSI initiators)…

This to list your current switch details and port group names…

esxcfg-vswitch -l

The follownig to allow jumbo frames onto your vswtich (insert your vSwich in following)

esxcfg-vswtich -m 9000 vSwitch0

Then delete and recreate your kernel port groups that you setup for iscsi, my commands looked like this… (repeat for each iscsi kernel port you have)

esxcfg-vmknic -d iSCSI-1

esxcfg-vmknic -i 10.0.0.101 -n 255.255.0.0 -m 9000 iSCSI-1

to confirm you have set the MTU (frame size) correctely, run the following….

esxcfg-vmknic -l

you should see your iSCSI kernel ports with a MTU of 9000 all going well.

This is just a quick reference to create a multiplathing iSCSI setup…

Create two virtual kernel switches, one called “iSCSI-1″ and the other called “iSCSI-2″ (and so on if you have more nics)

Then per kernel portgroup ensure that only one of the nics is active. For the “iSCSI-1″ portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 0 to active and nic 1 to unused. For the “iSCSI-2″ portgroup configure it to override the virtual switch settings and move nic 1 to active and nic 0 to unused.

Now you have to run some esxcli commands to gel things together…. alt-f1 on the esxi console and type “unsupported” followed by your root password. The following is the command i have to run to get both my portgroups to work together on the iscsi hba….  (you can check your vmk number from the networking config screen)

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba33

For each target then change the path selection method to “round-robin”.

Go back to storage adapters and click “rescan”

If you want all future iSCSI targets to automatically use round-robin you must also run the following from commandline…   (this is for our HP Lefthand, your “storage array type” may be different. Its listed under your target details). Basically sets round robin as a default for this type of array. In general you should do this first before presenting any LUNs etc, else you may have to bounce your box.

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA –psp VMW_PSP_RR

Here is a good presentation about vmwares DVS technology. Essentially a new way to create a vSwitch over a cluster and just add the required hosts into it.

http://download3.vmware.com/vdcos/demos/DVS_Demo_800×600.html