What Is Ailing Your VI – Call For Topics

This blog, thus far has been all about VI. How and what to automate, how to get yourself out of some sticky spots, and perhaps some turtles thrown in for good measure. However, it’s missing something. What is that? YOU! What is going on in your VI? Having trouble? Stuck on something? Some DBA on your nerves and you need to explain vSMP to him without talking down at him? Let’s discuss.

Simply throw your thoughts, questions, comments, confusions, and ‘other’ into the comments on this thread. From there, we’ll (Pancil and I) will pick some and write them up for you. Really, it’s that simple.

bunchc on June 1, 2009 | Filed Under community

  • jodell
    i have a VI toolkit problem that I have been unable to solve. My challenge is to mount a new SAN based snapshot to a Windows Guest each night so I can backup all of my SAN based data.

    The server admin has challenged me to complete this without shutting down the server when removing a RDM (the old snapshot) and mapping the new snapshot. I have written a powershell based VI toolkit script to automate everything except one critical step - I haven't been able to see the changed data when I replace the old snapshot with the new one.

    I haven't been able to find a way to remove the RDM while the guest is powerd up. I tried simply replacing the snapshot using the same LU number so the RDM doesnt' change. WIndows 2003 keeps presenting a cached version of the filesystem data. Unmounting and remounting doesn't refresh the data.

    Do you have any ideas?
  • I do have some questions, and some ideas:

    "I tried simply replacing the snapshot using the same LU number so the RDM
    doesnt' change. WIndows 2003 keeps presenting a cached version of the
    filesystem data. Unmounting and remounting doesn't refresh the data." -
    Does a 'rescan' do anything? In disk manager, right click, rescan? Or a
    restart of the "Logical Disk Management Service"?

    You could further do those things through the VITK using Invoke-VMscript. Do
    a "get-help Invoke-VMscript" to find out more about that.

    If this doesn't help we can explore some other options as well.

    -C
  • jodell
    I have tried rescanning at the ESX level and within the VM. This makes no difference. I haven't tried restarting Logical Disk Management service. I will give this a try.

    I am using Invoke-VMscript for my interim solution - I am running the main script from a 3rd server so I can reboot the backup server. Invoke-VMscript handles mounting and unmounting of the presented LUNs.
  • Cool. Let me know the result. Further I've found this VMware Communities
    post: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/171757 that seems to suggest
    using diskpart to do similar.

    -Cody!
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