Professional VMware

Finding CPU Ready Values on ESXi

Lacking a service console, ESXi needs to be approached differently when performing common troubleshooting tasks. One of these, like the title states, is to find the CPU Ready values for a particular VM. There are more than a few ways to skin this particular cat, but in this case I’ll show you two: The vSphere Client, and the vMA:

The vSphere Client:

Select the VM you’d like to dig into, then select the performance tab, CPU, then “Chart Options…”:

In the resulting dialogue, remove one of the two counters and add “CPU Ready”:

Select “OK” and enjoy the resulting chart:

Not horrid, but not excellent either. While milliseconds are good, and will help us determine a performance issue, there are times when we need to see the overall %RDY on the entire host, rather than a specific VM. For that we turn to the next method…

%RDY in the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA)

I’ll assume you’ve already downloaded and deployed vMA into your environment (falls outside the scope of the post) Once you’re logged in, fire up resxtop as follows:

In this case %RDY is the last column. For more information on finding, and interpreting these values, check Duncan’s ESXtop section.

VCP Brown Bag #4 – Virtual Machines

In this edition of the VCP Brown Bag we’ll cover the requirements for objective 5 of the VCP4 Exam Blueprint (Here). This will include the installation and configuration of virtual machines and vApps.

The critical details for this Brown Bag:
Date: March 23, 2010
Time: 2PM CST
Registration: Here!

Hope to see you there!

VCDX Brown Bag #2 Follow-Up

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s call, and subsequent "lab fail” we’ve got today’s follow-up post. The topic we covered was storage, however that didn’t stop us from rambling into other areas.

First, the links:

• Virtualization Team Study Guide
• iSCSI Management from the CLI (JFVI)
• VMware Communities Study Guide
• Software iSCSI (that isn’t Openfiler)
• VMware DSA Course
• VMware Tips – Enterprise Admin Exam

Another follow-up post can be found here and here (RTFM-ed.co.uk).

Last but not least the video from the session. This is actually pending a re-encode from the “janky” format that Goto Meeting uses.

Speaking of next time. Drop a line in the comments with anything you’d like to see or talk about.

VCDX Brown Bag Lab Architecture!

For those of you following along with or VCDX Brown Bag series, we figured you might be interested in the “Lab” architecture used during our discussions. This is in the hopes that y’all will benefit from it, suggest improvements, etc.

The Hardware:

Surprisingly there isn’t much to it in this case. The lab is running on a Dell D630, with 4GB ram, and a second hard disk caddy for VMFS storage. This box is running vSphere ESXi 4 with the free license.

Because we’re using ESXi as the base platform, it means the rest of the setup is contained within virtual machines. Quite a few virtual machines actually.

The VMs:

There are quite a few of these to be spun up or down as needed for different brown bags. As our focus right now is on the Enterprise Admin Exam, there wont be much in the way of traditional guest work loads. Here is a breakdown starting with the storage and working up from there:

Storage:

We have two in this case:
- EMC Celera VSA
- Openfiler

Why two? Well, the EMC Celera is a bit heavier than Openfiler in terms of ram use, but provides a more realistic environment to configure our storage.

Hypervisor(s):

In this case as the current release of the Enterprise Admin exam is focused on VI3 and ESX 3.5, we have (depending on the focus of the Brown Bag) one or two ESX 3.5 VMs configured as follows:

1x vCPU
2 GB Ram
15 GB Disk

This is on top of the physical vSphere setup mentioned above.

Virtual Center:

This is another VM that will be spun up and down as the lab and focus of the Brown Bags dictates. It is here to facilitate the things only vCenter can, and is configured as follows:

OS: Windows Server 2003 Std x86
1x vCPU
1 GB Ram
20 GB Disk

Summary:

This is just the start of the VCDX Brown Bag lab. As the lab moves, changes, expands, this post (or a follow-up) will be updated. Have any suggestions? Drop a line in the comments!

VCDX Brown Bag #2 – Storage!

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.

VCP Brown Bag #3 Follow-Up

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:

• How to become a VCP
• VCP4 Exam Blueprint!
• HA Slot Size Calculation (VMWare KB)
• HA Slog Size Correction from Duncan (Yellow-Bricks)
• Understanding Update Manager – vCenter Update Manager Admin Guide (pdf)
• ESX4 Patch Management Guide (pdf)
• VCP4 Mock Exam (VMware)
• VCP4 Practice Exam (Simon Long)
• vSphere Version Comparison (VMware KB)
• vSphere Version Comparison (Pricing PDF)
• vSphere Version Comparison (VMware)

Again, thanks for coming, and see y’all at the next one.

VCP Brown Bag – Beta

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.

Add a vSwitch, PowerCLI vs. vCLI

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:
1. Connect to the ESXi or vCenter server:
   Get-Credential | Connect-VIServer –Server 1.2.3.4
2. 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)

vSphere 4 and Core Dumps (vmkdump)

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.

Awesome Posts of the Week – Weekend Reading

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.