Best Practices for ESX Host Partitions
Setting up a new ESX 3 server, here’s a good place to start with the type and size of your partitions.
Installing ESX is fast and simple. By default you could click through the installer GUI changing only your local time zone and end up with a stable, dependable host. However, there are some recommended partitioning best practices that should be followed in order to make sure you minimize possible future headaches and create a repeatable and scalable environment.
VM /ETC » Blog Archive » Best Practices for ESX Host Partitions
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April 5, 2008 No Comments
Potential Problem with ESX 3.0.x and VirtualCenter 2.5
We are still running ESX 3.0.x and VC 2.0.x. I thought about upgrading vcenter first and then just upgrading the servers has time permits. But if there’s going to be odd issues like this, even if its only when you install some patches. I think I’ll try to put together a much shorter timeline to move to 3.5
Heads up—I’ve been alerted to a potential problem when using ESX Server 3.0.x with VirtualCenter 2.5. Quoting from this VMware KB article:
ESX Server 3.0.x hosts managed by VirtualCenter 2.5 must have their Host Agent (hostd) specially configured to work with VirtualCenter 2.5. This configuration is done automatically during the initial installation of the VirtualCenter Agent (vpxa). If an ESX Server patch is subsequently applied that includes the esx-hostd RPM package, like ESX Server patch 1002435, the patch replaces the existing Host Agent (hostd) configuration file (/etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml) and undoes vpxa’s changes. This reverting of the Host Agent configuration file breaks connectivity with VirtualCenter 2.5.
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April 5, 2008 No Comments
Virtualized Automaton: Ultimate VMware link guide
wow, this list in incredible if you are looking for links about vmware, checkout this site.
Virtualized Automaton: Ultimate VMware link guide
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March 9, 2008 1 Comment
16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server - VMware VROOM!
Even with all that horse power, they didn’t talk about network traffic running all exchange 2007 roles on the same box. I wonder how long one of these boxes takes to vmotion. Also I’d like to know the details on how they setup the luns and if they used vmdk files
We recently finished a large Exchange 2007 capacity test on VMware ESX Server 3.5. How large? Well, larger than anything ever done before on a single server. And we did it from start to finish in about two weeks.
We did this test because we have felt for a while that advances in processor and server technology were about to leave another widely-used and important application unable to fully utilize the hardware that vendors were offering. Microsoft has guidelines on what environment works well with Exchange, and a system with more than eight CPUs and/or 32GB of RAM is beyond the recommended maximums.
16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server - VMware VROOM!
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March 5, 2008 1 Comment
VMware ESX 3.5 upgrade path: Where to start
Once I’m ready to make the jump, I’m always looking for good information from people that have already done it. Here’s some good steps to follow when you start your upgrade.
VMware’s flagship products ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 have been available for a little over a month now. When the upgrades were made available, there was much excitement on the newly touted features. So, many IT professionals quickly hurried off and downloaded their product updates and then came to a collective stopping point. How do we upgrade ESX while in use? Sure we upgraded from ESX 3.01 to 3.02 with very little impact. But the change from 3.0x to 3.5 may seem worthy of more preparation because the scope of the change is larger with some of the new features, like Storage VMotion. With the release, here is a simple upgrade strategy that many are adapting:
- Allocate two ESX 3.0x systems as 3.5 candidates (not everyone will be able to do this, I realize).
- Carve these two systems into their own cluster or data center.
- Make sure all existing VMware DRS rules would be okay with two systems removed.
- Upgrade or fresh install one of the systems to ESX 3.5.
- Test migration from ESX 3.0x to the new ESX 3.5 system.
- Test VMware tools versioning and test any upgrade virtual machine tasks.
This strategy will replicate what you will likely face in a real upgrade situation, as you may not be able to. Because you may only be able to have a limited number of systems available for maintenance at any given time, it is good to be able to replicate that in a test datacenter or cluster. In smaller implementations, this could be repeated with one host where the migration test would be from a live ESX host. Evaluation software may also be a consideration to make available the correct number of hosts to simulate the co-existence of ESX 3.0x and 3.5.
Keep it moving
Should your configuration allow seamless migration between your ESX 3.0x and 3.5 hosts - that should not be a crutch for undefined periods of mixed versions. A good practice would be to have all hosts on the same version of ESX within a cluster. Larger environments may have difficulty moving all systems to the new version, but strategize within your Virtual Center configuration to determine the best configuration for temporary mixed versioning. The goal should be to get all systems on the same version enterprise wide - but only after you are completely comfortable with 3.5 in your infrastructure.
The horse’s mouth
VMware provides many quality resources online, I’ve saved some work for you and collected some of the highlighted pieces here for review in relation to ESX 3.5 upgrades:
What’s new for storage in ESX 3.5
VMware Consolidated Backup improvements in ESX 3.5
These resources are a good strategy in being well informed for the what your plan for ESX 3.5 will entail. Simply installing without preparation is surely a recipe for mis-configuration or incorrectly applying your configurations as intendend. And the test upgrade procedure to become familiar with a mixed environment will allow you to clear the way for an end-state configuration of a single version of ESX.
VMware ESX 3.5 upgrade path: Where to start
Rick Vanover
Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:48:44 GMT
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January 18, 2008 No Comments
ESX3: Storage Health Check
You can easily check the health of your storage by looking under the /proc filesystem in the service console.
The directory /proc/vmware/scsi/vmhbaX/ where X refers to your HBA number contains virtual files which correspond to LUNs on that HBA. Using "cat" you can view the contents of these and check for cmdsAbrt (command aborts) and busRst (bus resets), these should both be zero indicating healthy storage connectivity. If either of these numbers are higher, especially bus resets, it is advisable to investigate for storage sub-system issues.
For example, to check LUN 0 on VMHBA0, which is LUN 0 on local storage, you would use:
cat /proc/vmware/scsi/vmhba0/0:0
You can obtain a summary of attached storage volumes from /proc/scsi/scsi again using "cat".
From Xtravirt
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November 25, 2007 No Comments
Errors after upgrading vcenter?
If you upgrade your vcenter then get errors when you esx servers are trying to update the virtualcenter agent.
Follow the directions in this post
http://communities.vmware.com/message/497546
To save you some time here is the directions that fixed the issue for me:
You could manually try to install the agent as follows:
- Copy the vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-32042 from the upgrade folder in the VC folder to /tmp on the ESX server
- run the command sh vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-32042
(By default the script is located in C:\program files\vmware\vmware virtualcenter\upgrade )
Next restart management services:
service mgmt-vmware restart
After completing the above steps, try to reconnect to the esx
Enjoy
jb
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November 18, 2007 No Comments
Twitter Updates for 2007-10-28
- wow, the lions are up 10 -0 #
- hansen just bounced a 50+ yard field goal off the post and through, 13-0 #
- Waiting for Grace and Melissa to get back from MP #
- BenwayNet: Geeky weekend: Melissa went to her fathers this weekend and took Grace with her, s.. http://tinyurl.com/2uh59a #
- BenwayNet: ESX: esxtop reporting (xtravirt): Xtravirt posted this nice little command to pipe.. http://tinyurl.com/27hhdh #
- Grace is home, I missed my little girl SO much
# - Guess I’ll have to give the lions some love, they are 5-2 #
- BenwayNet: Wordpress theme layout issue: Maybe its IE6, but I don’t know why my two sid.. http://tinyurl.com/2l43oj #
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October 28, 2007 No Comments
Twitter Updates for 2007-08-22
- Chatting with our China IT support, going over the open issues list #
- upgraded a server to ESX 3 and I lost my service console. looking for the information to recreate from the command line #
- got it, esxcfg-vswif -a #
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August 22, 2007 No Comments
Twitter Updates for 2007-06-21
- Question for tomorrow, how many VM’s have you packed onto an ESX server? #
- video conf with China tonight over the internet. I’ll be so happy when our mpls is installed. #
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June 21, 2007 2 Comments
