vExpert 2012
After reoganizing my life I was very happy to receive a mail from the vExpert Progam that I am one of the aprox 400 vExperts that are nominated for 2012.
Congrats to all that are (re)nominated.
Within these aprox 400 there are 3 kind of categories:
Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can now also apply via the Evangelist path.
Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.
VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.
With this nomination I am again encouraged to go forward with my believe in VMware & Virtualization. This will be seen in coming blogs on this site.
Greetings
Gert
Resizing a system or data disk in a virtual machine
I get a lot of questions of students and customers about resizing a virtual disk. This is the reason for this blog.
The following procedure will guide you step by step through the process of resizing (increasing) a disk of a virtual machine.
Before you make virtual hardware changes be sure you have taken a full backup of the virtual machine.
NOTE: If you do not want any troubles only increase the disk size. Decreasing can cause loss of data.
Flow
Increase Disk using diskpart
Step 1: Edit the virtual machine settings and increase the size of the disk (VMDK).
Step 2: Open the console of this virtual machine and start a command prompt.
Step 3: Start diskpart and execute following steps.
list volume
à this gives you a list of the available partitions
select volume x
à select the partition number you want to increase
extend
à this will add the empty disk space into the partition.
Now the partition has increased in size.
NOTE: On Windows 2008 this can be done via the Device Manager / Storage, but I have seen some weird things like showing incorrect partition sizes.
Increase Disk using Third Party tool
Since I have some great experiences with the Acronis Disk Director tool I will explain the steps to increase a disk using this tool. Another tool that can be used is e.g. GParted.
Step 1: Be sure you have a boot image (ISO) of the Acronis Disk Director Tool that supports your guest OS.
Step 2: Boot your virtual machine using the boot image ISO. Use the ESC button during booting your virtual machine to activate the “one time boo menu”
Step 3: Select the partition you want to increase and right mouse click on it. Then select “Resize Volume”
Step 4: Increase the disk space of the selected partitions by decreasing the unallocated space to 0
Step 5: After increasing the partition you have to commit the changes.
Step 6: Now you need to reboot your virtual machine after disconnecting the boot image.
VMware Cloud Infrastructure & Management
Today 12th of July VMware announced a new suite of products. Look here for news release.
I the near future I will blog about this new release in a sort of “How to” format to introduce the new feature.
The suite consists out of following products.
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0
VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0
vShield App 5.0 with Data Security
A new product most of the time means, a new set of licenses. VMware moved from 6 different licenses to 5, they removed the Advanced license. Lucky for the owners of this license (with a active subscription, they will be migrated to Enterprise. Look here for the license paper
Here a list of vSphere 5 introduction links
VMware Cloud Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/cloud-infrastructure/
The Console Blog: VMware Unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite
NTPRO: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/
Kendrickcolemand: vCenter 5 – To Appliance or Not?, Using VMware AutoDeploy for ESXi
YellowBricks.com Live BLogging, vSphere 5.0 Clustering technical deepdive
UP2V: http://up2v.nl/
VmwareTips: VMware 2011 Mega Launch
Virtual Geek: Raising the Bar V = vSphere 5!
CRN VMware Adds Virtual Machine-Based Licensing In vSphere 5
vTexan: really cool things in vSphere5
VMware vCenter Error Call “PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents” for object “propertyCollector” on vCenter Server failed
A customer of mine called me with a weird problem with a Template which was converted back to a Virtual Machine. See here the problem which occurs when the customer wanted to edit the settings of this VM.
The cause of this problem is that an ISO was mounted from a datastore which does not exist anymore.
To solve this problem, just connect to the ESX host where the VM is registered on. Edit the setting here and put the CDROM on “Client Device”.
Then check on which datastore the VM is located. Then unregister and register the VM again in the ESX host. Now you are able again to edit jthe setting of this VM via vCenter
Unable to remove VMware ESXi host in VMware vCenter
During a migration process from ESX to ESXi at a customer site we had a problem removing a server from the vCenter inventory.
We checked the permissions on this server and we saw that the user who wanted to remove the server was admin on datacenter level. Here the screen we got.
Knowing there is a PowerCLI command to remove a ESXi host from the vCenter, we walked that way with success.
I used this
PowerCLI script to remove this server from the inventory after moving the
server out of the cluster to the datacenter level.
Connect-VIServer vCenterServer
Remove-VMHost “HostThatCannotBeRemovedViaGui” –confirm:$false
Disconnect-VIServer –confirm:$false
VMware vSphere Client for Ipad now avaible
Since VMworld San Francisco 2010 we are waiting for this nice app for the Ipad. VMware today released this app via the iTunes store for FREE (Direct Link), just as the VMware View Client for IPAD (Direct Link).
What are the features available in this app?
- Search for vSphere hosts and virtual machines in your vSphere environment
- Monitor the performance of vSphere hosts and virtual machines
- Manage virtual machines with the ability to start, stop and suspend
- View and restore your virtual machines’ snapshots
- Reboot vSphere hosts or put them into maintenance mode
- Diagnose vSphere hosts and virtual machines using built-in ping and traceroute tools
What is required for this app to be able to manage your vCenter?
-
vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) virtual appliance available from the VMware Labs: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcma (Now supports SSL)
NOTE: This app is available as is, with community support.
- Network connection to the vCMA virtual appliance; can use built-in VPN client
-
VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server
Look at my blog entry to see how to setup the vCMA : limited-vsphere-management-using-a-mobile-device
An overview of the architecture
Some interesting links
(Limited) vSphere management using a mobile device
On the VMware Labs website you can find a free appliance that can give you limited access to the management tools available in vSphere vCenter. The appliance is called vCMA or vCenter Mobile Access.
How to install?
- Go to the vmware.com/labs website and download vCMA as a OVF. Jump to site
- Extract the zip file that contains the OVF.
- In vCenter, go File – Deploy from OVF and point to the extracted OVF file.
- Once deployed, you can start the VM.
-
After the VM is started, there are 3 options to change settings
-
Using the menus on the console (to set network, timezone, login in to the command console)
-
Using the web interface https://vcma-host-or-ip:5480
-
Or using the command console. (use login in first screen)
- By default the root account has as password vmware (remember the console is by default in qwerty)
-
Special configuration settings to thing about!
- Set the IP to a fixed address
- Enter the DNS servers
- Change the default hostname and domainname. (http://communities.vmware.com/message/1335001)
- Change the root default password using the passwd, in the command console
How to use?
- It is very easy to start using this app.
- Open a browser (on you PC or mobile device)
- Point to http:// vcma-host-or-ip/vim (the folder /vim is needed and I hope VMware will change this in a next release)
- Enter the vCenter server name and the userID and password you normally use in the vcenter.
-
Now you can do some functions like
- vMotion
- Edit settings of a VM
- Change Powerstates of a VM
- Etc, install and discover.
Alternative apps you need to buy!
vManage : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmanage/id318737136?mt=8
iDatacenter http://nym.se/idatacenter/ (iPAD)
iVMControl : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ivmcontrol-control-vmware/id404263941?mt=8 (iPAD, iPhone)
vCenter service (VPXD) configuration and commandline options
In my previous post about fixing a administrator issue on the vCenter Server, Eric Sloof mentioned in his post and options that needs to be set in the vpxd.cfg. To give you a complete overview here a nice blog from Boche.net
Overview of vcxd.cfg options and commandline parameters
Thanks Eric and Boche for sharing.
How to fix lost administrator rights in vCenter
During Vmware vSphere ICM classess it has happened that during the “Access Control” labs students are locked out of their vCenter.
Thanks to a blog of Eric Sloof we can fix this problem? Follow me
Dependent Hardware iSCSI Adapters
During the VMware vSphere ICM courses I sometimes get some questions on NIC’s that appear as a iSCSI card. What are they and how can they be used.
A definition from VMware (from the SAN Introduction page)
Dependent Hardware iSCSI Adapter: Depends on VMware networking, and iSCSI configuration and management interfaces provided by VMware. This type of adapter can be a card that presents a standard network adapter and iSCSI offload functionality for the same port. The iSCSI offload functionality depends on the host’s network configuration to obtain the IP, MAC, and other parameters used for iSCSI sessions. An example of a dependent adapter is the iSCSI licensed Broadcom 5709 NIC.
An overview
The different iSCSI initiators and their driver in the VMware Hypervisor
How to configure?
Have a look at following pages