VMWare users check this out

1

Posted by jayb | Posted on 05-07-2009

Category : technology, vmware

Tags: , ,

Fireworks 03

Image by sunsurfr via Flickr

I was reading through my rss feeds this weekend and came across a post entitled ‘The best thing I’ve found all year….’ by one of the top vm bloggers. So I had to check it out. He was posting about a Dell tool that allows you to extend the file system of a running vm similar to diskpart, but…….YOU CAN DO IT TO THE SYSTEM DRIVE!!

Download it from http://ftp.us.dell.com/app/ExtPart.exe

Eric Sloof even created a little demo to show you how easy it is!! http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1022-Pump-Up-the-Volume.html

Enjoy and let me know how well this works for you. I know I’ll be testing it this week. From the comments on Mike Laverick’s site it works on windows 2003. I’ll have to test it on windows 2000 (yes, I still have a few of those around)

later,jb

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Free utility: MC-WOL

Posted by jayb | Posted on 17-12-2007

Category : Misc

Tags: , , , ,

Very nice, this tool will be a great addition for our Altiris admin. Now we just have to make sure WOL is enabled in the bios of our Dell machines.

This small command line utility makes possible to switch on a computer from a second one by sending a "Magic Packet". Both of computers can be located on the same LAN or on the different LAN segments.

http://www.matcode.com/wol.htm

Download MC-WOL.EXE

Free utility: MC-WOL
rodtrent
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:08:20 GMT

Calculating VMware HA Failover Capacity

7

Posted by jayb | Posted on 05-12-2007

Category : Post from around the Net, technology, vmware

Tags: ,

Our new ESX cluster has 3 Dell 2950 Servers with 12,16, and 32 GB of ram. From this article I need to look into making them all 32GB.

Most readers probably know that VMware High Availability (or VMware HA) is the feature of VMware Infrastructure 3 that allows for virtual machines (VMs) to be rebooted on another available host in the event of an unexpected host failure.  In these types of scenarios, a physical host goes down unexpectedly, typically due to hardware failure, and with it go a bunch of VMs.  With VMware HA, these downed VMs will reboot on a different physical server in the HA cluster, thus minimizing downtime.

I had always considered that the “failover capacity,” i.e., how the number of VMs that could be supported in an HA cluster with a failed host, was calculated by VMware HA in an intelligent fashion similar to that used by VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (VMware DRS).  In other words, VMware HA would look at the needs of the downed VM, consider what is available across the various hosts, and then place virtual workloads accordingly.  Sadly, that is not the case.

This article, titled HA Failover Capacity, by a VMware technical support engineer—“VMwarewolf”—provides more detailed information on how failover capacity is actually calculated.  What actually happens is that VMware HA calculates a number of “slots” based on the least amount of RAM installed in a server in the cluster divided by the most amount of RAM configured for any VM in the cluster.  In the article, the example is given of a server that has 16GB with at least one VM that is configured for 2GB of memory.  That would create 8 slots (16GB / 2GB = 8) for VMware HA.

That in and of itself is bad enough, since not all VMs will require 2GB, but here’s where it gets worse.  After calculating the number of “slots” available on the smallest server in the cluster, it then extrapolates the total number of slots in the cluster using the number from that smallest server.  So if one server in the HA cluster has 16GB but the remaining three have 64GB, all four servers will be treated as having only 16GB for the purposes of calculating HA “slots”.  So, instead of the three bigger servers coming up with 32 slots, they’ll show up as having 8 slots.  Ouch!

Be sure to keep this in mind when creating VMware HA clusters and planning for fault tolerance.

Also, if you aren’t reading VMwarewolf’s stuff, you may want to start.  He (or perhaps she?) is posting some good stuff.

ESX, Virtualization, VMware

—
Related Articles at blog.scottlowe.org:

  • ESX Server and the Native VLAN
  • My First Articles!
  • Using scponly on ESX Server
  • When an OS is not an OS
  • Full VM Recovery with NetApp Snapshots
  • VM File-Level Recovery with NetApp Snapshots

    • Calculating VMware HA Failover Capacity
    slowe
    Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:02:22 GMT

    WUBI help

    3

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 11-11-2007

    Category : linux, technology

    Tags: , , , , ,

    I installed WUBI on my Dell Latitude D820. But I can’t get the wireless card to work. It looks like the card is installed, but I’m using WPA for wireless at home and WPA is not a option.

    I just downloaded WUBI so its the latest version.

    That’s for the help in advance

    jb

    Dell purchases Equalogic

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 07-11-2007

    Category : technology

    Tags: , , ,

    Wow, I’m really surprised about this. Concerning the Dell/EMC partnership, equalogic competes with EMC in the small and midsize markets.

    Here’s links to more details about the deal:

    http://esgblogs.typepad.com/steves_it_rants/2007/11/dell-just-bough.html

    http://esgblogs.typepad.com/stor_wars/2007/11/dells-logic—t.html

    http://storagemojo.com/2007/11/05/dell-wins-equallogic-emc-loses/

    First Snow

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 01-12-2006

    Category : News

    Tags: , , , , , , ,

    Today we got the first snow of the year. I didn’t even think about all the schools that where closed today when I took my daughter to daycare, but they where closed because of the weather. So I got to stay home with her today and work from home as much as she let me :-)
    Melissa went to work and said the roads where awful, you would think for a winter storm that was all over the news the night before that the plow trucks would be out in the morning. But nope, and from the radio is sounds like there where lots of accidents.
    This weekend we are moving our SQL server from so REALLY old HP servers to virtual machines. Atleast until we have the money next year to move to new dell servers.

    Enjoy the snow
    jb

    The Best Time To Buy Everything

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 17-09-2006

    Category : Post from around the Net

    Tags: , , ,

     Here’s my tip, buy a car at the end of a quarter not just the end of a month. This allows loads true for Dell computers. Buy at the end of the quarter.

    Here are two different viewpoints on ‘The best time to buy everything’, one from SmartMoney and the other from CNN Money. Some excerpts are below, see the articles for more.

    Airline tickets
    SmartMoney and CNN agree: Buy on a Wednesday, about 21 days (or just a couple of days earlier) before your flight. This is when airlines release their available seats for the upcoming weekend and the weekend after.

    Televisions
    SmartMoney: Six to 12 months after a particular model is launched.
    CNN: While the blowout sales on electronics tend to cluster around the holidays, even cheaper deals on TVs can be found in the spring beginning in April, after the end of the fiscal year in Japan.

    (…)
    Read the rest of The Best Time To Buy Everything (67 words)

    Source: The Best Time To Buy Everything
    Originally published on Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:10:01 GMT

    Stupid back plane

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 10-06-2006

    Category : Rants

    Tags: , , , ,

    I’m finally leaving work today. I got called at 7:30 because users couldn’t connect to our ERP system. I remoted in and the server looked fine. So I called the database guy. He made a change and the users could connect.
    At about 1PM I get a call from the database guy that he was in looking at the server and saw I bunch of “failure to write” errors. (I didn’t see anyting when I looked in the morning) At this time I’m shopping about 30 minutes away. I ask if production is still running. Not sure, I get called back at 2:30 (still shopping) production is running and database is down.

    So at 3 I come in and take a look, amber lights on the mirrored set that is the c: drive….not good. I reboot the server and the lights turn green, hooray. I still call dell and ask them to ship the parts.

    Well the parts finally arived and where installed. All the hardware seems to be up, I emailed the dba and I’m going home.

    later,jb

    Busy week, not many posts

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 14-12-2005

    Category : News

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Let’s see Monday started by having the drive our exchange logs on fill up. Yeah….who would have thought we could have 3GB of changes to the database over a weekend…..exeutil is your friend…
    The rest of the week, we’ve had an onsite vmware workshop. We installed 3 Dell blades with ESX onto our SAN and we now have VCenter and Vmotion. This stuff ROCKS!!! VCenter is SO MUCH better than the MUI you get when you only have ESX. The workshop runs one more day. Only a few more things to clear up and then it’s time to move about 15 machines to the new virtual server farm.
    This Saturday we have family coming for a Christmas party and if the weather is good enough we are heading to Detroit Sunday for the Lions game. You can’t beat free tickets!!!!

    free bingo

    later,jb

    What a week.

    Posted by jayb | Posted on 12-11-2005

    Category : News

    Tags: , , , , , , , ,

    Wednesday morning 5am, I get a call that nothing it working at work. On my drive in I call our desktop support person to see what he can access….Nothing. The server room is dark. Not good.
    We had storms Tuesday night, but we have a huge UPS and a generator…..yah…

    I get into work, into the server room…The UPS is off!!! it has power its just off…..Once I turn it on.. all the servers and network equipment power up. I spend the rest of the morning cleaning up errors from the equipment going down hard.

    Now I need to findout why the UPS was off. We call the vendor in and all they can do is gather logs and get back to me.
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