Back in April I wrote a blog aimed and the differences between ESX and ESXi. The original post was written for ESX 3.5 and with the introduction of vSphere I think it’s about time i have revisited this topic and looked at the pros and cons of ESX4 and ESX4i. Now before we dig into the technical details there is one big thing you should all be aware of. The FAQ page published by VMware states “VMware ESXi is the recommended platform for both new and existing customers. Future hypervisor releases will solely be based on this architecture.”
For most that should be enough said. After reading that I would seriously start rolling out ESXi in a lab and start figuring out how I could maintain my needs without the service console most of us have become to know and love. I would also start brushing up on the RCLI as well as the PowerCLI if you are currently dependent on scripts that run in the service console. The good news is almost everything you do today in the service console can be achieved one way or another with ESXi as well. OK with that said lets talk about some of the other limitations.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, Other, VMware, networking, storage Tags: Cloud Computing, Desktop Virtualization, ESX4, ESXi, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
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
For over a year now, I have started off telling customers in Plan and Design engagements that they would be using ESXi unless we uncovered a compelling reason to NOT use it. The “which do I use” argument is still going strong. Our blog post “ESX vs. ESXi which is better?“ was posted in April and is still the most popular. It seems to be a struggle for many people to let go of the service console. VMware is trying to go in the direction of the thinner ESXi hypervisor. They are working to provide alternatives to using the service console.
VMware has provided a comparison of ESX vs. ESXi for version 3.5 for a while. Well, VMware posted a comparison for ESX vs. ESXi for version 4 last night. It’s a great reference.
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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
A whitpaper was posted in the VMTN communities Thursday outlining the differences between the ESX 3.x and ESX 4.x service console. It further offers resources for transitioning COS based apps and scripts to ESXi via the vSphere Management Assistant and the vSphere CLI. Also mentioned briefly was the vSphere PowerCLI. If you are a developer or write scripts for VMware environments, also check out the Communities Developer section.
I hear it time and time again…The full ESX console is going away. ESXi is the way to go. I know there are valid arguments for keeping ESX around, but they are few. Failing USB keys may be a valid argument, but I have not heard of this happening. If that is the case, use boot from SAN. You need SAN anyway. As for hung VM processes, there are a few ways to address this in ESXi.
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Everyone at this point should be aware that the Service Console is now located in a vmdk on a VMFS partition. The Service Console vmdk must be stored on a vmfs datastore and the datastore must either be local stoage or SAN storage that is only presented to the one host. So I guess no shared vmfs datastores to house all the Service Consoles……. The next question I had about the new service console was the /boot partition. Where is it and how is the server bootstrapping? Well I can’t say I have totally gotten to the bottom of this yet but I have discovered a few things. When digging into scripting installations of vSphere I first looked at the disk partitioning which sheds a little light on the boot process. Here is what the disk partitioning portion of the script looks like:
part /boot –fstype=ext3 –size= –onfirstdisk
part storage1 –fstype=vmfs3 –size=30000 –grow –onfirstdisk
part None –fstype=vmkcore –size=100 –onfirstdisk
# Create the vmdk on the cos vmfs partition.
virtualdisk cos –size=8000 –onvmfs=storage1
# Partition the virtual disk.
part / –fstype=ext3 –size=0 –grow –onvirtualdisk=cos
part swap –fstype=swap –size=1600 –onvirtualdisk=cos
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Categories: ESX 4, Kickstart, Other, Scriptng, VMware, vSphere Tags: Automated Deployment, datastore, datastores, ESX4, kickstart, service console, VMware, vsphere
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
So, I use NewsGator to aggregate a BAZILLION feeds from several sources, blogs, like this one, actual news feeds and a bunch of VMware feeds. The VMware feeds are from the VI:OPS and VMTN forums. The VMTN forums allow you to create a custom feed by selecting the RSS link at the bottom right of each page or you can get a feed from a specific section of the forum by clicking the link on the bottom left of a list. On of the custom feed options is to get a feed of the new KB articles.
VMware has released quite a lot of new KB articles surrounding vSphere. They just released nice best practice guidelines for installing or upgrading to ESX 4 and vCenter 4. They are short and to the point. There is also a nice article covering best practices for upgrading an ESX 3.x virtual machine to ESX 4.0. One thing I noticed, but never thought about is this : Read more…
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Categories: ESX 4, Other, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX4, Installation, vCenter, vCenter_Upgrade, VI4, VMware, vsphere
Here is some information about vSphere that I thought would be good to share with the world. As with everything else this is just a drop in the bucket. I’m currently working on putting together some upgrade videos and screenshots so take a look back and hopefully I will have them done by the end of the week.
Here is some interesting information about vSpehere and what it supports keep in mind these are just some notes I jotted down:
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Categories: ESX 4, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, ESX4, green technology, installtion, vCenter, vCenter_Upgrade, VI4, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
