When you start the autorun of vSphere vCenter 4.0 update, you will notice a new button called Agent Pre-upgrade Check. In this post you, I will show you the wizard.

Choose the right credentials to connect the vCenter database:

Choose your scan type:

And wait. My hosts are ready to upgrade:

Finally the vSphere Client is supported on Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2:

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support — This release adds support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 as well as 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 as guest operating system platforms. In addition, the vSphere Client is now supported and can be installed on a Windows 7 platform.

You can find the downloads and release notes here:

ESX 4.0 Update 1: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/esx40u1/ZHcqYmQlcGpiZGVqdA==

Release note: http://downloads.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html

ESXi 4.0 Update 1: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/esxi40u1/ZHcqYmQlcGhiZGVqdA==

Release Notes: http://downloads.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi40_u1_rel_notes.html

vCenter 4.0 Update 1: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/vc40u1/ZHcqYmQlcCpiZGVqdA==

Release notes: http://downloads.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vc40_u1_rel_notes.html

vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update 1: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/sdkwin40u1/ZHcqYmQlcHRiZGVqdA

Release notes: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/windowstoolkit40U1-200911-releasenotes.html

When I tried to Storage vMotion a VM to another LUN I got an “operation timed out error”:

After analyzing the vpxd.log, I found the following lines:

The best part I found out, is that the VM was rolled back to it’s old location without losing data or getting corrupt.

This problem is documented in KB1010045. The following solution will resolve the timeout problem:

Increase the Storage VMotion fsr.maxSwitchoverSeconds setting in the virtual machine configuration file to a larger value.

The default is 100 seconds.

To modify fsr.maxSwitchoverSeconds:

1. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
2. Click the Options > Advanced > General.
3. Click Configuration Parameters.
4. From the Configuration Parameters window, click Add Row.
5. For the Name field,  fsr.maxSwitchoverSeconds and for the Value field enter the new timeout value.
6. Click OK twice to save.
7. Restart the virtual machine for the changes to take effect.

You don’t want to change this by hand, so I created a PowerCLI script which will set the fsr.maxSwitchoverSeconds to 300 seconds for all your VM’s:

$vms = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | where {-not $_.config.template}

    $vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec

    $extra = New-Object VMware.Vim.optionvalue
    $extra.Key="fsr.maxSwitchoverSeconds"
    $extra.Value="300"

    $vmConfigSpec.extraconfig += $extra

foreach($vm in $vms){
    $vm.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)
}

After changing the value to 300 seconds, I was able to Storage vMotion the VM.

With the one-liner below, you’re able to create an overview of your VM’s, Clusters, ESX Hosts and Datastores.

Get-VM | Select Name, @{N="Cluster";E={Get-Cluster -VM $_}}, `
@{N="ESX Host";E={Get-VMHost -VM $_}}, `
@{N="Datastore";E={Get-Datastore -VM $_}} 

The following output will be generated:

If you add an extra line with the export-csv cmdlet, you can export the output to a CSV file.

Get-VM | Select Name, @{N="Cluster";E={Get-Cluster -VM $_}}, `
@{N="ESX Host";E={Get-VMHost -VM $_}}, `
@{N="Datastore";E={Get-Datastore -VM $_}} | `
Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation C:\Scripts\VM_CLuster_Host_Datastore.csv 

If you want, you can import the CSV file into Excel. Excel has some basic filtering options, so you’re able to filter on ESX Host, Cluster etc.

Carter Shanklin just announced the release of Project Onyx. She his post here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2009/11/project-onyx-is-here.html

Download the zip file from here: http://tinyurl.com/ygayony extract the zip file and start Onyx.exe. If you’re starting Onyx from your c: drive and you are running Windows Vista / , you’ve to run it with Administrator rights:

Accept the License Agreement to continue. The main screen opens. Click on connect and fill in the IP Address of you vCenter server:

When you’re connected to your vCenter server, Remember the second IP Address on top of the Onyx Screen:

Now open the vSphere Client and connect to the second IP Address with http:// on front of it:

You will see a warning message about the connection to server xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is not secure. Click yes to continue.

The vSphere client opens and it will look and feel like we’re used to it. But here comes the great part. Click on the play button in Onyx:

Do the thing you wanted to do within the vCenter client and you will see that Onyx is generating some nice ready to use PowerCLI code:

To save the script, press the Save output to file button.

11 December aanstaande is het weer tijd voor het jaarlijkse VMUG event.  De voorlopige agenda staat al een tijdje online en wordt per week beter en beter.  Wat het leuke aan dit event is dat er  presentaties worden gegeven door mensen uit de communitie zelf. Eric Sloof, Viktor van den Berg, Joep Piscaer, Bouke Groenescheij, Gabrie van Zanten en Luc Dekens. Deze sessie zullen technisch van aard zijn.

Nieuw dit jaar is de workshop.  Deze workshop gaat over het product vCenter Heartbeat. Wil je kennis maken met dit product, dan is de je kans. Tijdens deze workshop krijg je kort wat theorie en daarna kun je zelf met het product aan de slag.

Mocht je nog niet zijn ingeschreven, doe dit dan snel want ik heb gehoord dat er al bijna 400 inschrijvingen binnen zijn en er is plaats voor 600 deelnemers. Dus wacht niet langer en schrijf je snel in: http://www.vmug.nl/modules.php?name=Inschrijven

On a new Windows Server 2003 server without the VMware Tools installed, there are no TimeOut settings configured.

You can find this setting in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\

The picture below, you’ll see the default settings from Microsoft:

After the installation of the VMware Tools, a new dword value called TimeoutValue is added with the hexadecimal value of 3c. This value represents a timeout of 60 seconds.

On a Linux VM the default timeout is 60 seconds (on a CentOS setup). You can find the timeout settings in:

/sys/block/<disk>/device/timeout

After the installation of the VMware Tools, the timeout value is changed to 180 seconds.

More info about this subject can be found here:

• KB1014

Last week I had to install a vCenter 4.0 server with a database on a SQL 2008 x64 server. Before you can connect to the SQL 2008 x64 you have to install the new SQL server 2008 Native client. You can find it here:

• X86 Package
• X64 Package

Download and install the package:

In my earlier post about how to create an ODBC connection to use with vCenter 4 on a x64 version of Windows 2008. You already read about the “special” way of starting the ODBC data Source Administrator. Start it via: Start –Run - %systemdrive%\Windows\SysWoW64\Odbcad32.exe. The next step is to select the new Native Client version 10.0

 
The rest of the stuff is still the same

Since the upgrade to vCenter 4.0 and ESX 4.0 we got a lot of false alarms on VM memory usage. If you take a look in the advanced performance tab, at VM level. You’ll see that the VM is using all the assigned memory. When you take a look on the host OS, you’ll see that there is less memory usage then vCenter reports to you. I asked on Twitter if anyone else had seen this behavior before. @DuncanYB responded with a post, which he did earlier this year.  

So with the information from @DuncanYB I started a search at http://kb.vmware.com/ and found the following KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014019. This article describes one of the symptoms that apply on our environment:

Summaries and Symptoms

Issues fixed in this patch (and their relevant symptoms, if applicable) include:

• Fixes an issue where a guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on Intel systems that support EPT technology or AMD systems that support RVI technology. This issue might cause the memory alarms in vCenter to go off spuriously even if the guest is not actively accessing a lot of memory.
• Fixes an issue where DVFilter API’s fail for particular message types during message reordering.
• Fixes an issue where DVfilter socket reads might fail if zero bytes are returned due to a connection close.
• Fixes an issue with a DVFilter API where ESX might fail if a guest operating system is moved from one vswitch port to another. This fix allows dropping frames which are accidentally or maliciously posted to a different portset.
• Fixes an issue where incorrect SysAlert() messages might be displayed on certain systems if the number of cache colors is not calculated correctly.
• Fixes an issue with monitor or vmkernel crashing when running certain guest operating systems with a 32-bit monitor running in binary translation mode.

Deployment Considerations

BEFORE INSTALLING THIS PATCH: If you have set Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 0 to workaround the high memory usage issue detailed in the Summaries and Symptoms section, undo the workaround by setting Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 1.

I installed the patch on a Cluster whit this problem. After the installation of the patch mentioned in the KB article above, vCenter keeps sending false alarms. After a short search on the vmtn communities I found the following post of Paul1

I go to the Top-Level in Vcenter, klick "Alarms" and than "Definitions". Edit one of the definitions (don’t change anything) and then save it. After this the old alarms was gone in my environment

After “changing” the VM Memory Alarm definition, vCenter stops sending out false alarms.

In my previous post about this subject I created a script to view the information on the PowerCLI console. With the v2 script you are able to export the data to a CSV file.

$myCol = @()
$vms = get-view -ViewType VirtualMachine  | Where-Object `
{-not $_.config.template}
foreach($vm in $vms){
    foreach($dev in $vm.config.hardware.Device){
    $MYInfo = "" | Select-Object VMName, DeviceLabel, `
    FileName, DiskMode, ThinProvisioned

       $MYInfo.VMName = $vm.Name

           if($dev.GetType().Name -eq "VirtualDisk"){
                   $MYInfo.DeviceLabel = $dev.DeviceInfo.Label
                $MYInfo.FileName = $dev.Backing.FileName
                $MYInfo.DiskMode = $dev.Backing.DiskMode
                if($dev.Backing.ThinProvisioned){
                $MYInfo.ThinProvisioned = "True"}
                else{$MYInfo.ThinProvisioned = "False"}

                $myCol += $MYInfo
               }
       }
}
$myCol | Export-CSV -NoTypeInformation "D:\scripts\vmdkinfo.csv"

When the script is finished, you can import the CSV file into Excel.  After the import, we can analyze the data with just a simple filter. With a few clicks,  you’re able to view al the VM’s without Thin Provisioned disks.

Now we have a list with all the VM’s with Thin Provisioned disks:

So with a small PowerCLI script and the help of Microsoft Excel, you’re able to generate a report with just the information you need. The best part is that it will only cost you couple of minutes of your time .