I really don’t have the patience to smoke out an entire “night before _______” blog post, but I did want an excuse to practice typing on the iPad without a keyboard prior to VMworld. I have to say. I think I still type faster on my Blackberry Curve, but my iPad Fu is getting way better. I think my biggest issue with leaving the laptop at home this year will be more with website compatibility than with iPad skilz.

Heading to my 5th VMworld tomorrow, and 2nd Vmunderground party. I am stoked, because I have a good feeling about the announcements and the ideas we’ll be exposed to this year. I have all Sunday afternoon open in San Fran, so give me shout on Twitter if you’d like to meet up. So it looks like my Monday and Tuesday nights late are pretty wide open. Give me holler if there’s s party I should consider.

I can be found on Twitter at @vSeanClark. Have a happy VMworld!!!

This is test one to my seanclark.us orphan blog. Next up will be adding a second blog (likely http://vmunderground.com. Here goes nothing.

So before getting started with some cloud app dev in ruby and/or puppet and chef, I needed to check out what is new in the ruby and RoR (ruby on rails) world.  I’ve probably missed quite a lot in the last 3 years since I was actively hacking out RoR apps.  Here are the tools and resources I’ve (re)discovered and will be starting with:

Launchpad Resources

• Ruby on Rails resource to resources –  http://rubyonrails.org/
• Ruby Language main page – http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Infrastructure Automation (Cloud)

• Chef  - http://www.opscode.com/chef
• Puppet – http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/introduction.html

Editors

• VIM baby! I’m old school.  Vi-like editors are not for everyone, though.  But you can get VIM for linux, Windows and Mac.  I’m starting out with VIM on Ubuntu linux.  -  http://www.vim.org/index.php
• And there’s now a Ruby on Rails features for VIM –  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1567
• Textmate is a Mac-only client. Probably most popular Ruby editor for Mac.  When I’m home (2 Macs), I might take Textmate for another testdrive, but not to excited about forked out cash for this endeavor….yet – http://macromates.com/
• More IDEs and editors at the bottom of this page might get my time: http://rubyonrails.org/download.  But for now I’m going old school.  If I can be more productive some other way, I’ll definitely give it a shot.

Deploying Rails Apps

Last time I was active in RoR dev, the preferred deployment method was changing every 9 months.  I was not disappointed to learn that there have been some big improvements in simplicity and speed for deploying Rails apps.  Here’s the latest:

• Phusion Passenger –  http://www.modrails.com/ – I’ll be starting here and will see if it truly is as simple as it states.  I’m hoping so.  As cool and easy as Ruby and Rails make development life, deployment and hosting has always been somewhat of a PITA.
  • If Passenger falls on its face, I’ll just fall back to what I know: Mongrel -> http://github.com/fauna/mongrel
• Don’t forget you can also use jRuby to run your RoR app on any Java Virtual Machine, and Warbler can be used to package any Rails app as a .war file for deployment to java app servers like VMware SpringSources lightweight tcServer .  This seems like a great way to “infect” your Java org with the goodness of Ruby on Rails AND VMware at the same time.
• Database layer I’ll probably default to MySQL since I have the most experience in this space.  But I’m very interested in exploring more scalable options and will also be looking to “NoSQL” options to address use cases that need web-scalability.

Well, that’s my starting point for this week.  Hopefully will have time for more posts on my journey back to ruby as time allows and I get some reps under my belt with some of the above mentioned items.  In the meantime, if you have questions about starting off with Ruby and Rails and cloud hosting and management of these types of apps.  I’ll be glad to share my experience since it will be very fresh in my mind.  Feel free to tweet me at @vSeanClark and I’ll be glad to point you in the right direction.

My good friend, fellow Pella resident, and VMware/Citrix shaman, Tait Smock and I have jointly submitted a session titled 100% virtualization leads to 100% protection which you can find under the Private Cloud – Business Continuity section.  It should be a good ride for folks wanting to learn about real world 100% virtualization efforts within healthcare to help drive better disaster recovery.  Folks with Meditech Client/Server will also want to pick Tait’s brain for tips and tricks on virtualizing that beast of an app.  Below is the summary of the submitted session:

100% virtualization leads to 100% protection -

Pella Regional Health Center realized the power of VMware to dramatically improve their disaster recovery capability with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). They achieved 100% virtualization of their core application, Meditech Client/Server, in January 2010. This enabled them to realize the full benefits of VMware SRM, transforming their disaster recovery time from days to hours.

More Suggested Sessions

While you are on that page, I also suggest you vote for a few other great speakers.   I can highly recommend voting for the first 3 on the page.  The speakers are all good guys and know their stuff, even if one of them isn’t Dutch.  :)

APPRO Systems: Warm Site Recovery Using vSphere, NetApp, SMVI, PowerCLI, & PoshOnTap –  Speaker: Jase McCarty

Planning and Designing an HA Cluster That Maximizes VM Uptime – Speaker: Duncan Epping

Disaster Recovery the Dutch way: Cheap –  Speaker: Gabrie van Zanten

It is a gorgeous morning in Pella, Iowa and the tulips are in full splendor.  Birds are chirping and we have yet another perfect spring day to be thankful for.  The Drake Relays are in full swing and I’m looking forward to a weekend of elite track and field action in my own backyard.  In short, life is good and it feels like the perfect beginning to a new chapter in my professional life.

On Tuesday, I will be diving out of the airplane and entering the world of VMware virtualization consulting.  In the past I have typically worked for software development shops, VARs, a hospital, and I even farmed for a character-building 6 month stint with my in-laws back in Manning, Iowa.  Yes, that’s right.  The bacon you were eating back in late 2002, early 2003 might have come from a pig I helped care for (or cussed at).  I actually got my Oracle certified DBA cert while farming those 6 months.  I guarantee, that nothing motivates you to pass an IT certification more than power-washing manure out of an empty hog barn.  Nothing!  But I digress…..

I’m off to a new way to put bacon on the table for my family.  I will be working as a VMware Architect [not for VMware PSO] working on capacity planning and how to best provide hybrid cloud computing resources for the many servers at a Fortune 500 company.  From everything I’ve heard, it’s a top notch company to work with and a great community to live in.  I’m excited, and fully expect to throw myself into the vSphere VCDX preparation starting next week and will likely turn the bulk of my research into cloud computing tech rather than the VDI focus of the last year and a half.  It’s definitely going to be fun ride and a great challenge to rise to to.

But this change isn’t all rainbows and unicorns (weaponized ponies).  It has definitely been a bittersweet decision for me, as I have to leave a great team of of people and a great company with awesome customers.  Alliance Technologies has been my work “home” for almost 5 years of my 10 year IT career, launching my IT career in 2000 when I was a programmer/DBA.  In 2007, they were gracious enough to have me back and help build up their VMware practice and apply my trade.  But for the last year and half, I have focused a large part of my work and research on Quest vWorkspace and “VDI”.  It has been fun to watch the Alliance Technologies vWorkspace practice grow and thrive.  Alliance Technologies has a great group of engineers and sales professionals that “get VDI” from their years of experience with Citrix, VMware and now Quest vWorkspace.  It will be fun to watch their continued growth and success in the coming years.    Thank you, Alliance Technologies and good luck!

So with that, the cat is out of the bag.  I’m excited for this new chapter and this new challenge.  It’s definitely going to be a interesting and rewarding few years.  Look out VMware and Cloud architect gurus, you’ll probably be seeing and hearing more from me as I pick your brain and bounce ideas off you.  I hope that I can help return the favor at least once or twice as well.  If not, I can at least pay up in a beer at the next VMworld.

Can your storage system auto-tier storage at the block level? That answer is likely no.  Most storage vendors allow you to move whole LUNs between different tiers of storage but they lack the intelligence or technology to move individual blocks.  Why is this cool and desired?  Well, the vast majority of VMware Virtual Machines are stored on SAN volumes formatted with VMFS, VMware’s virtual machine file system.  On this single SAN volume, there can be many virtual machines.  For a server deployments, 10-20 VM/VMFS is common and for VDI deployments it could be up to 64 VMs/VMFS.  So the on-going problem for all VMware administrators has been how do you ensure each of these VMs has the performance it needs when some VMs are very active and others are not?  That’s a valid question for less capable storage systems for most vendors.  But a better question is, “How can I provide tier 1 storage storage performance to only the blocks that need it?”  Only Compellent can provide a simple answer to that question with their automated tiered storage.

If you take a typical windows VM you have plenty of unused system files and stale data that is not ever accessed.  In the case of an Microsoft Exchange mail server, think of all the mail that is older than a 1 day old.  It is rarely accessed, so until it can be permanently archived to cheaper tiers of storage, it makes great sense to let the Compellent Storage Center automatically move the data that is rarely accessed to lower tier of primary storage, saving money on tier 1 storage and helping maximize the performance.  Since Compellent has a unique Dynamic Block Architecture, it can “see” inside the vmdk and identify blocks that are rarely used and move them to lower, cheaper tiers of storage without administrator intervention, scripting or creation of snapshots on VMs to facilitate storage vmotion.

One blog post can’t really do Compellent technology justice.  I’d invite you to view the announcement of the new features of their fifth version of Compellent Storage Center here.   Many others within the storage blogosphere are linked to at the bottom of that post as well.

And as always, please feel free to comment on this post by hitting me on Twitter, with @vSeanClark.   I’ve been working with Compellent in VMware deployments for over 2 years now and have plenty of Compellent/VMware goodness to share with you.

Okay, this presentation is for a Dell co-sponsored event with Alliance Technologies.  So we’ll likely be discussing Dell Equallogic in depth, but I’ve been a HUGE fan of Equallogic even before going to work for a Dell partner, so don’t think for a second I’m selling out.    Anyway, my  main topic is “Simplify Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Solutions”.  What are my 3 main keys to achieve simple?  Well that’s simple in my mind:

1. Virtualize your servers!
2. Virtualize your desktops!
3. Virtualize your data w/ virtualized iSCSI SAN from Dell Equallogic!

Yes, it’s dangerously simple to spout out those 3 bullet points but the devil is in the details.  I will flog and beat the devil to death in the next three posts and let you know how I arrive at simple, successful data protection and disaster recovery solutions that are repeatable, predictable and simple.

Guidance from Citrix.  Yes, it’s not vWorkspace, but the fundamentals should be similar:  http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114522 – The Cliff Notes of this document are:

• Exclude Spool directory, page file, and ../program files/Citrix  (Not sure if later is required with Quest vWorkspace)
• Scan write events only
• Scan local drives only

Hmm, that’s nice.  Still no vWorkspace.com access. On to the next piece.

After installing Trend Micro ServerProtect presentation becomes unresponsive: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114137 .  That sounds like us.  Better give Trend Micro a holler on the telephone.

Still no vWorkspace.com, so checking on a good topic on BrianMadden.com that seems to fit the bill perfectly.  Best anti-virus for Terminal Services -  The dude posting the question references Patrick’s recommendation here: http://www.sessioncomputing.com/anti-virus.htm but that is down too!   Is there some kind of DDoS on vWorkspace sites today?  Actually, looks like that might just be an old site.

I guess, I’ll look this up the old-fashioned way.  Email to our SE at Quest.  Will update post with findings and best practice for A/V in vWorkspace Terminal Server environment soon. 

UPDATE: Customer is turning off auto-protect.  Kind of feel like if we’re going to do that, why don’t we just focus AV protection on the gateway and just continue to rebuild fully patched clean Terminal Servers with visionapp Server Management on a more regular basis.  With no server-based AV mucking up performance.  Thoughts?

Jeff Barr – Amazon

I got in a bit late, so I missed Jeff’s first half.  When I sat down he mentioned cloud use cases for AWS.  Intuit uses it for load testing their apps to ensure they have bugs caught before tax filing crunch time on April 14th.  Seasonal or as needed use of cloud is classic use case.  Then a slide about other Amazon cloud services came up, storage, VMs, web platform,,, but my favorite was on the far right:  mechanical turk!!  I had no idea mechanical turks existed.  I think I’ve found my new buzz word.  Any, Amazon’s mechanical turk is way to get human powered work done via the cloud or find work to do via the cloud.  I just did a quick search of this and highest pay rate was something like $2.07 an hour.   So I won’t be getting rich being a Turk, but might be able to find some cheap labor to knock out turk-like duties.

Overviewed other AWS advantages like: Offload heavy lifting when building out infrastructure for your app, lower costs (capital only, operating will still bite you butt, but it is all a trade off), and reduce time to market of your app (spin up resources when you need them).  Focus here was squarely on that of developers choosing a platform for their apps.  This is where I put together a tweet on battle for platform dominance, “Academia is the battleground for influencing cloud platform bias of next generation of app developers”

Jeff wrapped up by mentioning that cloud services like their SSS, start at home/individual level, then introduced to co-workers, then to departments and ultimately company wide.

Dennis Quan – IBM

Dennis was up next with the IBM perspective of cloud and what services they are offering.  Dennis started with the obligatory definition of what cloud services are:

1. Self Service
2. Delivered over the network
3. Elastic scalability (grow as big as you need, pay as you go..)

Probably one of the most concise, general ways to define cloud services.  Next slide was a good reminder for the x86 virtualization zealots in the house (not pointing any fingers), but he showed the layers of cloud services form apps, to platforms (apache, .NET, MySQL..), os (windows, linux, Unix..) to hardware (x86, mainframe)…….  WHAT?!? Mainframe??  Yes, Sean and other x86 pizza box server loving zealots, you can do cloud with good ole mainframes as well.  You won’t hear that from VMware, but mainframes are perfectly valid hardware platform to build an app on top of that can be: 1. self-service 2. network delivered and 3. Elastic scale.  This will feed another thought on cloud that I will drive home with some future posts is that the platform is where the battle for cloud will be fought.  You have to attract developers to write apps that people want for your platform otherwise you will lose market share.

IBM has run a private cloud infrastructure to service their 400K employee base since 2006.  It’s called the Innovation Portal and speeds products to market and allows greater efficiency in new product development and testing.

Dennis mentioned a joint effort with IBM, Google, and the NSF to provide academia access to a massive compute cloud based on Google’s MapReduce computing techniques for large data compute processes.  This runs on Apache Hadoop and users can leverage Java or scripting language of choice to accomplish their large processing task.

Dennis mentioned that everyone loves cloud benefits and efficiencies but can’t/won’t release their arms around their datacenter.  VMware used to call these folks server-huggers, I’m going to coin new term (i hope): cloud huggers.  The private cloud is here to stay, although hybrid cloud use will continue to grow and augment private cloud setups.

Q + A:

Dev-ministrator: A developer that has to learn to administrator cloud services as part of daily job in order to more properly design and debug app to work and scale for the cloud.

I think we should all be dev-ministrators or enginevelopers or architadmins….  Well roundedness in IT is huge skill and increasingly needed as we swing back hard and fast to centralized computing of the cloud.  If we aren’t all the renaissance IT man, then we MUST be able to communicate properly across disciplines, departments and organizations.

How do I back up and protect my data in the cloud?

Great question.  The $25K question.  How do I secure my information assets in the cloud?  See Christopher Hoff to follow the ongoing quest for this holy grail.  But the gentleman who asked this question pared down the scope a bit.  He stores his pics and core data on Amazon’s S3 storage service.  But how should he best protect this data?  Buy a European S3 account? Backup to local hard drives?  Get service from another cloud provider?  What about use of Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly and services like them?  What happens if they go belly up?  How do you get the data back.

There is no pat answer to that.  The most powerful take-away here is the questions themselves.  Individuals and businesses need to consider these questions when choosing to rely on cloud services.  Dennis Quan brought up good analogy.  When households first bought lightbulbs and signed up for electricity service from the utility, they still chose to keep some candles and matches around the house.  With cloud, common sense and basic risk management will determine how you protect cloud assets or if you go to the cloud at all.  If you are the next twitter, you’ll probably play fast and loose with the cloud.  If you are global financial firm worth $100 billion dollars, you’ll probably consume clouds of clouds AND a local private cloud backup.

That’s my quick brain dump from a cafe in Ames, Iowa.  Looks like I’m not getting any magical invites via email or twitter to attend the private cloud sessions this afternoon, so I’ll head back to work.  Give me a holler if you have any questions.  Comments welcome as are tweets to vSeanClark.  :)

Error connecting: Error connecting to /vmfs/volumes/47a23275-63d1cb52-6968-0019b9e5c637/vCenter/vCenter.vmx because the VMX is not started.

Other VMs opened perfectly fine on this same ESX server, just this one VM was hosed. Couldn’t ping it’s IP either.  Tried restarting mgmt-vmware from the service console, and that removed the VMname from the ESX servers inventory the next time we logged in.  Just some weird placeholder VM instead, which I ended up removing from inventory.  Next tried to re-add the vCenter VM to inventory by browsing to the datastore.  No luck, this process hung.  So restarted mgmt-vmware again.  And this time decided to look at esxtop to see if this VM was still running or something.  And it was..or at least something was running with its name.  So now I set out to restart it with vmware-cmd.

Ran vmware-cmd from the service console and vCenter did not show up as a running VM.  Weird! It’s in esxtop but not vmware-cmd -l.  So now I need to try to find the process for this hung, posessed VM and kill it. So I tried the following

ps -ef | grep vCenter that I found on Google here:  http://www.esxguide.com/esx/content/view/11/14/ .  Cool, but this kept returning a ever-increasing and chanign PID.  Not cool.

Then I discovered this gem from the VMware Communities . First up attack, new PS argument from page 8 of the pdf.

ps axu | grep vCenter -> Still a fail.  PID kept incrementing every time I ran the command.  Is something relaunching, or what?  Must find root process but how?

Next up, /proc-FU.  On Page 9, michaelstan of the communities, suggests the following, which I follow verbatim and looked for my vm named “vCenter”:

(at the cmd prompt enter) cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

This lists the running VM’s on the host server you are logged on to.

vmid=1069 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server1/server1.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server1″

vmid=1107 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server2/server2.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server2″

vmid=1149 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server3/server3.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server3″

vmid=1156 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server4/server4.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server4″

vmid=1170 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server5/server5.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1178 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server6/server6.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1188 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server7/server7.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server7″

vmid=1198 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server8/server8.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server8″

[-If you are running ESX 2.5 then you can kill the vmx PID-]

If you are running ESX 3.0.x then you find group ID that controls the PID of the VM.

(at the cmd prompt enter) less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1149/cpu/status

vcpu vm type name uptime status costatus usedsec syssec wait waitsec idlesec (more…)

1149 1149 V vmm0:server3 350042.494 WAIT STOP 15968.954 518.916 COW 325800.734 322397.266 (more…)

Scroll right with the right arrow key to locate the “group” pid. In this case the group pid was 1148 (not shown in this

example)

Now with the group PID you can kill the VM safely without corrupting the VM as posted earlier.

(at the cmd prompt enter) /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 1148

Warning: Apr 20 16:22:22.710: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1148.

THIS MEANS SUCCESS… if you receive another line then the process might not have been successful.

Hope this helps!

Michael Stan

In short, I did the following from the bold:

1. cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names
2. “less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1149/cpu/status” where 1149 was the VMID of the VM in question (found with step 1) and then hit right arrow until I found the “group” pid.
3. “/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 1148″ where 1148 was my group pid found in #2.
4. received the following “success” message: “Warning: Apr 20 16:22:22.710: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1148.” and ran esxtop to verify the VM was done running, which it was done.
5. Re-added VM to inventory and all is well.

Haven’t had a hung VM since the ESX 2.5 days, so it was a fun little challenge to finish out my Friday afternoon.  But thought I would quickly share for the benefit of all.

Ping me on Twitter if you have questions.  vSeanClark

UPDATE: Jason Boche suggested I could have arrived at the PID w/ ps -auxwww | grep VM-Name.   Well that would have been quite a bit simpler but wouldn’t have given me an opportunity to say /proc-FU again.  

(at the cmd prompt enter) cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

This lists the running VM’s on the host server you are logged on to.

vmid=1069 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server1/server1.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server1″

vmid=1107 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server2/server2.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server2″

vmid=1149 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server3/server3.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server3″

vmid=1156 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server4/server4.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server4″

vmid=1170 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server5/server5.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1178 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server6/server6.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1188 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server7/server7.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server7″

vmid=1198 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server8/server8.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server8″

[-If you are running ESX 2.5 then you can kill the vmx PID-]

If you are running ESX 3.0.x then you find group ID that controls the PID of the VM.

(at the cmd prompt enter) less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1149/cpu/status

vcpu vm type name uptime status costatus usedsec syssec wait waitsec idlesec (more…)

1149 1149 V vmm0:server3 350042.494 WAIT STOP 15968.954 518.916 COW 325800.734 322397.266 (more…)

Scroll right with the right arrow key to locate the “group” pid. In this case the group pid was 1148 (not shown in this

example)

Now with the group PID you can kill the VM safely without corrupting the VM as posted earlier.

(at the cmd prompt enter) /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 1148

Warning: Apr 20 16:22:22.710: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1148.

THIS MEANS SUCCESS… if you receive another line then the process might not have been successful.

Hope this helps!

Michael (at the cmd prompt enter) cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

This lists the running VM’s on the host server you are logged on to.

vmid=1069 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server1/server1.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server1″

vmid=1107 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server2/server2.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server2″

vmid=1149 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server3/server3.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server3″

vmid=1156 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server4/server4.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server4″

vmid=1170 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server5/server5.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1178 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server6/server6.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server6″

vmid=1188 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server7/server7.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server7″

vmid=1198 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/45…/server8/server8.vmx” uuid=”50…” displayName=”server8″

[-If you are running ESX 2.5 then you can kill the vmx PID-]

If you are running ESX 3.0.x then you find group ID that controls the PID of the VM.

(at the cmd prompt enter) less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1149/cpu/status

vcpu vm type name uptime status costatus usedsec syssec wait waitsec idlesec (more…)

1149 1149 V vmm0:server3 350042.494 WAIT STOP 15968.954 518.916 COW 325800.734 322397.266 (more…)

Scroll right with the right arrow key to locate the “group” pid. In this case the group pid was 1148 (not shown in this

example)

Now with the group PID you can kill the VM safely without corrupting the VM as posted earlier.

(at the cmd prompt enter) /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 1148

Warning: Apr 20 16:22:22.710: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1148.

THIS MEANS SUCCESS… if you receive another line then the process might not have been successful.

Hope this helps!

Michael Stan