Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends… we’re so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside.
It’s time again for the next VCDX Brown Bag. This one will focus around the storage requirement of the VMware Enterprise Admin exam. To prep, please pull down and review the Enterprise Admin Blueprint from here.
The critical details:
Date: 03/16/2010
Time: 2PM CST
Registration: Here
If you have any comments, or specific areas you would like to see covered, drop a line in the comments.
We had an all-star cast on the call yesterday, including TWO VCDXs #34 himself, Jason Boche and #29 Frank Denneman. There was even a bit of Twitter interaction from Duncan, pointing out that when it comes to HA, there can be only one. Unfortunately, due to the seat of the pants nature this call took, I neglected to add a sound card to the VM hosting the call, and could not record it. That said, there were an excellent number links and knowledge that were passed around:
Again, thanks for coming, and see y’all at the next one.
The reason this is a beta is we are testing a new platform for hosting these. I figure so long as we’re testing, might as well make it a live one, no? If you’re up for it, here are the critical details:
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM CST
Registration: Here!
This session will be recorded (I hope) and put up under the new “Brown Bag” section. Note: The VCDX Link does not work at present.
In trying to get used to ESXi and it’s console-less nature I’ve been forcing myself to use the vCLI or PowerCLI to do things. Along the way I’ve learned that the vCLI is generally really well though out, if different. Here is an example of this: Setting up a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) using PowerCLI and the vCLI:
PowerCLI
Steps:
- Connect to the ESXi or vCenter server:
Get-Credential | Connect-VIServer –Server 1.2.3.4
- Create the new vSwitch:
Get-VMHost –Name “ESX Host” | New-VirtualSwitch –Name “NewSwitch”
A very basic example that, no uplinks and the like, but it does show that the action is very straight forward in PowerCLI.
vCLI
This one is actually much much more complicated than the above (not really, but well…)
vicfg-vswitch.pl –add vSwitch1 –server 1.2.3.4 –username root –password yourP4ssword
Conclusion
There you go. Two one liners to add a vSwitch to your ESXi (or ESX) host. Both are simpler than I’d thought. Questions? Comments? Drop a line in the comments or hit me up on Twitter (@cody_bunch)
Today I was reviewing my post on ESX Crash Dumps and found that well, for vSphere, it is quite broken. How? Well…
No /usr/sbin/vmkdump in ESX 4
As referenced in this KB article, vmkdump has been replaced with some additional flags on esxcfg-dumppart:
In ESX 4.X, esxcfg-dumppart is now used to extract the logs files.
The syntax is:
esxcfg-dumppart –log <ESX dump file>
esxcfg-dumppart -L <ESX dump file>
Here it is in action:
The file:
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 6790236 Feb 18 10:11 vmkernel-zdump-021810.10.11.1
# esxcfg-dumppart –log vmkernel-zdump-021810.10.11.1
Created file vmkernel-log.1
Log wrapped
# ls -l | grep log-rw-r–r– 1 root root 262144 Feb 25 06:49 vmkernel-log.1
There it is. Woot! Questions? Comments? Drop us a line.
It is time to empty my RSS reader and Firefox tabs yet again. Basically this week has been much like drinking from a firehose, so I’ve not had as much time to read. That said, here are some of the posts from this week that I found particularly interesting:
vscsiStats Into Excel – Gabes Virtual World
VMware Technical Resource Center – TechHead
The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox – Yellow Bricks
VIJava Browser – Double Cloud
Resource Pools and Slot Sizing – Frank Denneman
VMTN Podcast 83 Links – Yellow Bricks
HA Deepdive Overhaul – Yellow Bricks
Each of these posts is well worth the time to read. If you’ve any others you would recommend, drop them in the comments.
Normally I save press release posts of this sort for virtualization.info. However, I have a special place in my heart for HyTrust. Perhaps it comes from a past life where I flirted with InfoSec or so. HyTrust since the first has been putting off the right vibes, their technology, methodology, engineers, and product seem to be doing “The Right Thing”. As such I’d like to note a few big events that have recently taken place for HyTrust:
New VP of Sales:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – (Business Wire) HyTrust (www.hytrust.com) today announced the appointment of Jim Gannon as vice president of Sales. Gannon is a seasoned executive with over 19 years of tenure at category-leading organizations such as VMware, EMC and General Electric (GE). He will leverage his experience in building high-performance sales teams to accelerate HyTrust’s penetration into the high-growth production virtualization market and extend the company’s leadership position.
10.5 Million in Funding
HyTrust, Inc., the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, announced today that it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. New investors Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems participated in the round of financing, as did existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Len Rand, partner at Granite Ventures, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Directors. HyTrust will use the capital to drive development, sales and marketing, and fuel the company’s next stage of growth.
While both of these individually are pretty cool and are awesome news for HyTrust, it will be interesting to see what happens now with both strategic sales led by Gannon & investment by Cisco (Strong UCS ties perhaps?).
Note: If I sound a bit fan boyish in this post it is because well… I am. Normal techie posts will continue shortly.
Today’s post is brought to us by Chris, a member of the VMware community who wields some powerful Louisianan VooDoo magic (and PowerCLI). Chris uses this to show us how to take a csv file in, and use it to attach a VM to a dVS switch as well as adding the VMXNET3 nic to the VM. Getting right on with it:
Story:
Had to bulk create a bunch of VMs. The new server standard has each production server on 2 networks, the normal production network, and an auxiliary network (for backups, updates, management, etc). The issue I ran into was that our switches were created in vSphere as virtual distributed switches (using the Cisco Nexus 1000v). The standard new-vm script wouldn’t allow you to connect the network adapter to that switch, unfortunately. Also, we preferred to use VMXNET3 NICs as opposed to the default e1000, another thing that new-vm doesn’t allow. So I wrote the following script in PowerCLI that does the following:
- Reads in a CSV file (fields: Name,Description,OS,Disk,Memory)
- Connects to the vSphere server (you specify the server and cluster to add VMs to).
- Creates a VM in the specified folder on the ESX host with the least memory utilization and the datastore with the most free space and having at least 30gb free space
- Removes the default e1000 NIC
- Adds 2 VMXNET3 NICs on temporary networks (cannot add directly to vDS)
- Connects the 2 VMXNET3 NICs to the vDS
- Powers on VM
Tried to generalize code as much as possible, works here, but this was a new rollout so there may be differences in how other people have it.
Script:
Ending
If you are reading this in an RSS reader, I strongly encourage you to click through to give them some love.
When starting Professional VMware, I never imagined that we’d have/need a sponsor. However, something we are doing must be right, as Train Signal has signed on to help us out with our ongoing “Brown Bag” series. Which, is actually in-line with their new vSphere Pro series training. If you wanted/needed more than the “Brown Bags” offered, the Train Signal vSphere Pro Series is where it’s at.
Moving along with our series of esxcfg & VCDX related series of posts, we come to esxcfg-vswitch. The example we’ll work with here has us setting up a new virtual switch, adding an uplink NIC, adding a port group with VLAN 393, and changing the MTU. Ready? Here we go:
- Add the vSwitch:
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch –add NewSwitch
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch -l
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 5 64 1500 vmnic0
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
VM Network 0 0 vmnic0
Service Console 0 1 vmnic0
VMkernel 0 1 vmnic0
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
NewSwitch 64 1 64 1500
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
- Add the uplink:
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch –link vmnic1 NewSwitch
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch -l
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 5 64 1500 vmnic0
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
VM Network 0 0 vmnic0
Service Console 0 1 vmnic0
VMkernel 0 1 vmnic0
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
NewSwitch 64 3 64 1500 vmnic1
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
- Now to add the port group & VLAN 393
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch –add-pg=NewPg NewSwitch
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch –vlan=393 -p NewPg NewSwitch
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch -l
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 5 64 1500 vmnic0
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
VM Network 0 0 vmnic0
Service Console 0 1 vmnic0
VMkernel 0 1 vmnic0
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
NewSwitch 64 3 64 1500 vmnic1
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
NewPg 393 0 vmnic1
- Now the MTU:
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch -m 123 NewSwitch
[root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-vswitch -l
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 5 64 1500 vmnic0
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
VM Network 0 0 vmnic0
Service Console 0 1 vmnic0
VMkernel 0 1 vmnic0
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
NewSwitch 64 3 64 123 vmnic1
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
NewPg 393 0 vmnic1
In summary, the commands we used:
- esxcfg-vswitch –l
- esxcfg-vswitch –add
- esxcfg-vswitch –link
- esxcfg-vswitch –add-pg
- esxcfg-vswitch –vlan
- esxcfg-vswitch –m
Questions? Comments? Drop a line in the comments.
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