Vsphere on sigtar.com

vmware - powercli enable remote scripts

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +1300

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

Jumbo Frames on your vSphere ESXi box

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Continuing on from this /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 following to allow jumbo frames onto your vswtich (insert your vSwich in following)

esxcfg-vswtich -m 9000 vSwitch0

Then create your kernel port groups that you want to use for iscsi, my commands looked like this… (repeat for each iscsi kernel port you have) – note : DO NOT ADD ANY VMKERNEL(s) from the GUI, instead use the steps below

vSphere and Multipathing iSCSI

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +1300

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.

vSphere - ctrl-alt-del greyed out

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1300

This bug has hit me. Looks like users with roles like vm user / power user cannot send “ctrl-alt-del” via the console even though they have the correct permissions. Our users cannot use ctrl-alt-ins as they are connected via RDP to a machine that has the console installed.

Found this : http://communities.vmware.com/thread/220683;jsessionid=480C8A2C9B9EACA9FF2BB4E1BECA2D53?start=15&tstart=0

Looks like its a known bug and will be fixed in the upcoming VC4.0 update 1 sometime Q3 2009 :(

ESX - network utilization

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1200

One of the best articles i have found on this subject is here : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/07/16/understanding-nic-utilization-in-vmware-esx/

There is some additional information here on setting up an etherchannel on the cisco side : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2006/12/04/esx-server-nic-teaming-and-vlan-trunking/

This can be handy if you need a single VM to use both physical nics in a load-balanced manner - both outbound and inbound. Of course its not really that simple though. This will really only add a benefit if the VM is communicating to multiple destinations (using ip hash - a single destination from a single VM with one IP will always be limited to the same physical nic).

ESX 4 (vSphere) - installation issues

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I’ve had a couple of installation issues with ESX4

One was particularly strange, the install process would freeze every now and again until i pressed a key on the keyboard. This was related to AMD’s power saving C1 mode - disable this in the bios to fix this problem.

Secondly it was a problem with my nic. Essentially i didn’t have card that was supported (realtek). After inserting a intel card all was well. This fires up a ambiguous error and cans the whole install. (lvmdriver error)

Citrix XenServer 5.5 - First impressions

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I had decided to try out Citrix Xen Server at home since i work a lot with vmware during my working week and felt like a change. It all seemed well… That is until i had to deal with snapshots. I suppose i have taken for granted almost all other virtual host software that provides a simple “revert to snapshot” option. From what i can tell this is totally absent from Citrix XenServer 5.5.