I went to install the VMware SDK for vSphere 4.0 on to my desktop running Windows 7 64-bit, Visual Studio 2008, and .Net 3.5 SP1 and discovered the SDK setup is not friendly with these versions. According to VMware you need Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0 if you want to run the SDK.
So like most of you reading this I turned to my trusted adviser…google to find the answer I was looking for. Much to my disappointment after 5 minutes of searching around I didn’t find any instant gratification for my problem so I decided to just go ahead and figure it out on my own.
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Categories: Other, Scriptng, VMware Tags: ESX 3.5, ESX4, ESXi, Installation, Script, scripting, SDK, vCenter, VI4, Virtual Center, VMware, VMware Workstation, vsphere
I’m sure many of you have run into an issue with setting up Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC). As i was setting up a new “Desktop Group” I ran into a problem when trying to configure the vCenter SDK address. The configuration wizard show you an example that looks say ‘For example, https://VirtualCetner.example.com/sdk” which is what you would expect to use and you would also expect it to work. Think again. When you try to setup your vCenter SDK address you will be presented with and error “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address.” Citrix takes security serious so unless you plan on replacing the default SSL certificate on your vCenter server you will need to hack out a work around. Now I would agree that in production you should replace the default SSL but if your just trying to spin up a demo or test environment it can be a hassle.
So I searched the web over and over and found a number of threads with many of ways to resolve the issue only none of them seemed to work for me. However a combination of a number of things that I found did. So I’m here to save you the trouble of finding all of various pages with partial solutions. Below you will find exactly what you need to do to make this work.
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Categories: Desktop Virtualization, ESX 4, VMware, vSphere Tags: Citrix, DDC, Desktop Virtualization, ESX 3.5, ESX4, Installation, Provisioning Server, PVS, vCenter, VI4, Xen Desktop
Last week my boss came to me and asked if I could write a script for a customer to register VM’s after being replicated from once VI environment to another. I agreed to take on the project and go for it.
Like everything I do these days I decided to use powershell to write the script. I have taken a liking to it and the fact that I can run the scripts on both ESX and ESXi hosts saves me from having to re-create scripts all the time. So I plugged away to 3am wrote the script, tested it inside out and sideways in my lab. I was confident in the scripts ability to register all vm’s form all datastores I went ahead and sent it off to the customer.
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Categories: Other, Powershell, Scriptng, VI_Toolkit, VMware Tags: Automated Deployment, Disaster Recovery, ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX4, PowerShell, Script, scripting, VI Toolkit, VMware
Just like they did with the Advanced Technical Design Guide for VI2, Scott, Mike and Ron are releasing the VI3 ATDG today. I read it when it was first released and it is a great reference.
Go get some -> http://www.vmguru.com/
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Have you ever needed an easy to reference way to see what the configuration maximums are for different versions of VMware ESX. I know I seem to need this all the time. I find it a huge pain to keep referring to each of the individual VMware documents to get the answers. Sometimes I also want to see what the changes are between versions and I can’t seem to memorize this information in my tiny little brain. So I went ahead and created a “Configuration Maximums Comparison Matrix” based on the VMware Configuration Maximums for each version.
You’ll notice some settings don’t have values for each version. This is because they were not published in the VMware documents. As I go through some additional documents and extract these values I will update the document to reflect. For no the document does include everything from the VMware Configuration maximums published for each of these Versions:
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Categories: ESX 4, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX4, ESXi, vCenter, VI4, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
Over the years there have been some controversy over this topic. Should Virtual Center (vCenter) be physical or virtual? There is the argument that it should be physical to ensure consistent management of the virtual environment. Of course there is also the fact that Virtual Center requires a good amount of resources to handle the logging and performance information.
I’m a big proponent for virtualizing Virtual Center. With the hardware available today there is no reason not to. Even in large environments that really tax the Virtual Center server you can just throw more resources at it.
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Categories: VMware Tags: Capacity, ESX, ESX 3.5, ESXi, Failover, HA, service console, vCenter, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware
In the previous years Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery have been big buzz words. All companies small and large vowed to launch initiatives to implement either or both in their current IT strategies. My question is what happened? Why is it that I rarely see organizations that have implemented or even have a plan to implement Disaster Recovery?
Is it a lack of understanding? Is it that most companies believe it is to expensive or complicated to implement? Well it doesn’t have to be either. Most companies that are undergoing virtualization initiatives already have half if not more of what they need to implement Disaster Recovery. The simple fact is if you already have at least two data centers and are virtualizing you are a prime candidate. Here are some common question and my answers regarding this subject:
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A few days ago I wrote a blog about ESX local partitions. A good question was raised after I wrote the article concerning ESX hosts that boot from SAN. In my last article I asked the question “Should the partition scheme be standardized, even across different drive sizes? My question today is should that standard also be used when booting from SAN? I’ve heard the argument that when booting from SAN you should make the partitions smaller to conserve space. Anyone have an opinion on this? I feel it should conform to the standard. We determine the partition sizes for a reason based on need, and that same need still exists regardless of what medium you are booting from.
My recommendation would be to develop a standard partition scheme and utilze it across all drive sizes and mediums. You can find my recommended partition scheme in my previous post mentioned above.
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How would you like to kick off your ESX installation, then go have some coffee, go for a jog, or just hang out by the water cooler until it is finished without worrying if you’re wasting time while it’s waiting done and waiting for you. Well you can with this ESX email script. Incorporating this script as part of your ESX automated deployment script allows you to configure your server to email you once the post installation configuration is finished.
So what do you need to do? It simple you can get the mail_notify script that I found on yellow-bricks.com from our downloads page. Once you have the script you will need to get it on to your server along with the MIME Lite.pm file that you can download here. Once you download and extract the package you can find the Lite.pm file under /lib/MIME/ folder.
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Categories: Kickstart, Other, Scriptng, VMware Tags: Automated Deployment, email notification, ESX, ESX 3.5, kickstart, Script, scripting, VMware
I have been asked this question a few times so I thought it would be wise to post an article on it. When deploying an automated build script with the kickstart and/or installation files located on http, ftp, or nfs there are network configuration dependencies that you need to be aware of.
The ESX installer is a modified version of anaconda which is the same installer used for RedHat and a few or Linux variants. Anaconda is what allows for the kickstart portion of the automated build script. Anaconda itself has some limitations as far as what it supports.
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