Virtualization

Sorry for the lack of updates

Frode Sandholtbråten — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:30:23 +0000

I’m currently in the process of moving, my lab is dismantled and I have no spare time available for playing around with virtualization. So, sorry, no updates for a while… Hopefully, things will change when I am settled in the new place and have figured out what my new job is all about :)

Breaking VMware Update Manager

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:12:28 +0000

You should believe that the VMware Update Manager was capable of handling missing files. But no, it does not. I removed a couple of files from the repository by simply pressing delete on them. These files were part of a host upgrade baseline and were no longer needed. After the delete operation, I can no longer [...]

Performance monitoring problem

Frode Sandholtbråten — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:16:12 +0000

My new R710 running ESXi 4.0 has one problem: When the CPU load comes close to maximum, all performance monitoring for the host failes. Only a few, random monitoring requests comes through, making the resource graphs in vCenter look pretty ugly. As you can see from the attached image, a lot of data is missing. [...]

Automatic installation of ESX 4.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:22:27 +0000

Mike La Spina has written a nice post about automatic installation of ESX 4.0 hosts utilizing PXE, kickstart and a lot of scripts. Mike has done a nice job creating configuration scripts, making it easy to copy his ideas for use in your own environment. Auto installation becomes necessary if you need to deploy a large [...]

RIP Virtual Iron

Frode Sandholtbråten — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:09:55 +0000

According to The Register, Oracle is going to kill Virtual Iron fron the end of June 2009. Now, I’m not that surprised, there are a lot of Xen based virtualization products on the market. The only difference between them is the management software. Now, I tested Virtual Iron in my project and found it to be [...]

Clever solutions: Microsoft Azure and its fabric controller

Frode Sandholtbråten — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:07:34 +0000

I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft Hyper-V which I assume is the hypervisor used in their Azure solution. As illustrated earlier, Hyper-V has its problems, especially with live migration and iSCSI support. But, the Azure have some clever solution on its own. I found a video from a presentation held at Professional Developers Conference (PDC) [...]

Cloud computing: Addressing on a global scale

Frode Sandholtbråten — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:21:56 +0000

My interest for virtualization solution includes cloud computing. Now, cloud computing is the new buzzword. Users, system administrators and investors hope that cloud computing will solve all redundancy and administration problems that currently exists. I am currently not that optimistic, especially when I think about all the new problems that cloud computing introduces. Today’s topic is [...]

Feature requests, take two

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:29:32 +0000

It’s been nearly 11 months since I wrote the feature request post where I asked for some features currently missing in VMware. Now, it’s time to see how it went: Live Cloning or backup: Live cloning to either a template or a new VM was added in ESXi 3.5 U2. Storage VMotion GUI integration: New feature in [...]

Changing host name and IP address of a vCenter server

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:35:16 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of trying to change the host name and IP address of the vCenter server. The old host has two networking interfaces. NIC1 was connected to the Internet while NIC2 was connected to an internal network with IP address 192.168.30.0/24. The vCenter and the plugins were configured to use the internal [...]

Dell PowerEdge R200 and ESXi 4.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:58:10 +0000

I promised some more details on the R200 and ESXi 4.0. Full hardware spec: Server: Dell PowerEdge R200 Processors: 1x Intel Xeon X3320 2.5GHz Quad Core Memory: 6GiB, DDR2 667MHz ECC Disk space: 1×640GB SATA + 1×80GB SATA Storage controller: Intel ICH9 NIC: 2x Broadcom BCM5721, 1x Intel PRO/1000PT PCI-E Dual Port OS: VMware ESXi 4.0 Note: 1U Rack ESXi 4.0 is installed to [...]