To improve the I/O performance for ESX Virtual Infrastructure, VMware had come out with the round robin option for both ESX and VM guests. Although is an experimental option in the ESX setting today, but I will encourage you all to try this option which provide fail over and load balancing on the storage path to connect to you SAN storage. For VM guests, you will allow allow to use this when you have RDM – Raw Device Mapping option to direct read write to the physical LUN from your SAN storage without using VMFS.
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Someone posted a question about Antivirus for VMware ESX host in VMware forum recently which make me recall what I plan todo before.
Few month back, I was thinking of install Antivirus (probably ClamAV) for my VMware ESX box but I give out at the end of the day. Why? I think this is too much(for the time being). So far, I used to monitor or administrative more than 200 of SuSE and Red Hat Linux box and I have never install any anti virus software for Linux’s box. So why I need one for VMware ESX. Basically VMware ESX 3.x and Redhat Linux is almost the same.
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Looking at VMware Comminities page and found Asia Pacific area VMware User Group as below:
How about other country such as Malaysia? Indonesia? Thailand? or China?
I would presume VMware is not famous in these country? Why?
As a Malaysian, I would like to take this opportunities to promote Malaysia VMware Communities and Malaysia VMware user group to the world. Malaysia Boleh!
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After couple of months we had performed the patch activities for our ESX hosts and VM guests by using the Update Manager, here is my review of the Update Manager from VMware.
Update Manager had simplified the life of the system engineers who manage the VM farm with the huge number of VM guests and ESX hosts which may require a frequent patch update. Before the Update Manager released, most of the time we had patched the server by using satellite servers, Altiris, SMS and others patching tools. That will require additional cost required to be implemented on the VM guests or ESX host due to the licensing agreement from the vendor.
Update Manager is fully compatible with VMware ESX patches update for ESX 3.0, 3.5 and ESX 3i. From the Host level, you will able to get all the patches downloaded by the update manager schedule task once the VMware had officially release their patch on their official system. Update Manager had also integrated well with Microsoft patches as well as others famous software patches like Red Hat, Adobe and etc. It even allow us to patch the template image which we store for deployment purpose, without manual interaction to convert the template back to virtual machine. If you try to patch a windows 2003 template image, the entire process is fully automated. This is really impressive. I had also patch my DR servers which is 30 miles away from my major Data Center, and we had 30 Mb MPLS across the WAN, it worked perfectly without any issue at all, and of course, the patching timing will be slightly longer due to the location of the DR servers.
To get the update manager deployed in your environment, here are couple of steps you may need to configure before it could fully function.
A dedicated DB for update manager in the SQL or Oracle – Depend on the choice of database servers you are using. This Database will store all the information and patches to be used for patching purpose. If you have proxy server in your environment, you need to configure the proxy address and port number in the virtual center configuration for Update Manager. Schedule task to refresh and check the latest patches release from the official site, recommend to run the schedule task at least once in a week. I do schedule it to be run on weekly basis, to ensure you getting the latest patches when you try to patch you VM guest or ESX host.
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When I try to log in to my virtual center to verify my VM farm today, the virtual center show my ESX host had been disconnected from the virtual center by itself. The ESX host itself should be running in critical mode as production and had HA and DRS enable on the cluster. The 1st thing I try to verify is to ensure all my VM and the ESX host is still in production mode, and yes, all the VM is not been down and it still run as normal while it disconnected.
Here is what I did to reconfigure my ESX host and re-join it back to the HA and DRS cluster in my production farm.
Disable the HA and DRS features from the cluster, and totally remove the ESX host from the inventory on Virtual Center server. Follow by that, I SSH in to the ESX host with su -, then I path to the /etc/init.d and look for the services mgmt-VMware status command
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