Malaysia VMware Communities » Tips

Purple screen for ESX host during vSphere 5 Upgrade

craig — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:26:09 +0000

Just read through 1 of the KB here which referring to the potential risk to create a purple screen scenerio during the vSphere 5 upgrade while you ESX host update 2 could potential conflict with the vCenter 5.

You may encounter an issue where:

You have recently upgraded your vCenter Server to version 5.0
You have hosts of minimum version ESXi 4.0 Update 2 (build 261974) and maximum version ESXi 4.0 Patch 9 (build 360236) in your vCenter Server inventory
After the vpxa agents are upgraded, the ESXi 4.0 Update 2 hosts experience a purple screen that includes this error:NOT_IMPLEMENTED bora/vmkernel/filesystems/visorfs/visorfsObj.c:3391

Solution

This issue has been resolved in ESXi 4.0 Update 3. To avoid this issue, upgrade all affected hosts to at least ESXi 4.0 Update 3 (build 398348) before upgrading vCenter Server to 5.0.

please refer to the full post here for more details.

VCP 5 Exam Experience

craig — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:21:33 +0000

I just did my VCP 5 Exam las 2 days ago. I would like to share some of my experience to you, who may plan to go for the exam. Currently, VMware will allow all VCP 4 to proceed to direct exam upgrade path for VCP 5. You need to get your VCP 5 before end of Feb 2012. If you are failed to obtained the VCP 5 after end of Feb 2012, you will require to attend the official training before you can sit for the exam.

Well, I would like to share some of my thought and experience for the VCP 5 exam. I had passed it but it took me more than 1.5 hours as I recheck all the 80 questions after I answered the 1st round. I used to be the 1st VCP 5 in Malaysia, but I am not sure whether I am going to be 1st VCP 5 again in Malaysia. The exam is never easy as most of the questions are deep dive into specified technology area, and you will require a lot of hands on deployment, support administration or lab environment to visualize or provide the correct answer. Simon Long’s blog may had helped little bit, but to my surprise, most questions are relevant to the administration experience on VMware stuffs.

If you plan to buy DUMP to pass this exam, I will suggest you save the money and time to perform more testing in your own environment. Most questions are relevant to our day to day job rather than theory.Please ensure you master the functionality on vsphere 5 with all new capabilities and console. The exam cover Hypervisor, Storage, Cloud, Networking, HA deep dive and scenario base troubleshooting. P

I am glad that VMware had set the standard for the certification high, and I hope they will continue maintain the quality of the certification.

I am officially VCP 5 now…. time to enjoy my weekend and good luck to whoever plan to go for VCP 5.

Database requirement in Citrix Xendesktop

craig — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:53:25 +0000

I had gone through few days of hands on training for Citrix Xendesktop. The experience of the training is good and it went through technical deep dive. 1 of the key thing we discussed during the training was about the databases requirements to support the Xendesktop and Xenapp infrastructure. Microsoft SQL will be 1 of the key component, and you will require to plan for the high availability architecture to support the production environment.

The best approach may just consider to build an independent Active/Passive or Active/Active SQL cluster to support the infrastructure. A backup for the SQL is always recommended to create recovery point in the event of data corruption. Most data on the SQL databases is the configuration changes, log and etc. Similar to VMWare vCenter Database.

XenDesktop License Server Flexibility

XenDesktop License Server Flexibility

craig — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:31:32 +0000

While I am attending the training for XenDesktop today, we had covered the topic of License Server for Xendesktop.
I had raised the question to the trainer.

what if the license server go down, will all the existing connections or sessions been terminated automatically?

He had explained as the configuration in the license server and license files are design to prevent the point of failure in the scenario of license server unavailable due to any failures. You will be given 28 days period of time with unlimited seats in the event of license servers unavailable during the outage.

In normal scenario, assume your license server is functioning with 1000 seats, you will also allow to provision 10% extra within 28 days before you increase the purchased licenses. This will allow you to turn on extra capacity temporally in the short period.

New license offer from VMware vSphere 5 on 3rd party VDI solution

Is Public cloud ready for enterprise application such as Office Applications?

craig — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:37:21 +0000

Microsoft had pushed very hard for the office 365 to all their existing client doesn’t matter they are SMB or Enterprise. Personal opinion, I had tried out the office 365, the experience is useable but it doesn’t meet the requirement of my expectation for office use. Anway, this is just 1 of the down side. When you look at the infrastructure readiness and dependancy, I think enterprise may putting too much risk as now to adopt to office 365.

If the office 365 are able to be dedicated connectivity and resources with robust infrastructure behind, it could make a lot of different for many users to be considered.

Recently there are many outage happen on the cloud provider, which alert many of the users start to re-think to the strategy of cloud to minimize the business impact in the event of unexpected outage. A right strategy for Cloud can bring benefits to the company, but a wrong strategy of cloud could end up create disaster to the environment too. Those major outage top news had forced the service provider to further enhance the infrastructure uptime.

This report explain the uptime been claimed by Google and Microsoft both.

Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

Microsoft 2008 Cluster Bugs

craig — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:33:38 +0000

Went through a marathon troubleshooting with my client for the past 1 week to figure out the reason why a cluster failed in place and it could not easily rebuild back after 1 of the node evicted. We had gone through the process to re image both nodes and rebuild from scratch. Follow exactly the best practices and run through the cluster validation without any error. While we try to form the cluster, the system keep provide an unknown error which do not share much information from log. It just keep telling you that the node is not reachable or unauthorized due to security setting.

After few nights of troubleshooting, I was running out of clue. Came to the sudden, I accidentally search the computer name in AD under the category of Users object group, and I found an user account been created in AD with the same name as we define on the cluster name. I was wondering whether this could caused the confuse to the system. Therefore, I was suggesting to remove the user name temporally as it was not use at the moment and tried to reform the cluster. Guess what, the cluster form up as it needed to be in less than 1 minutes. We were so happy to end the marathon troubleshooting every night well and we were also very pissed off with the bugs we face here.

I am not very sure what is the real reason behind can really cause this, but this is the real case which take us few days to figure out. I think Microsoft should seriously look into this problem as it sound stupid to have this bugs in place today. User name and computer object name are always not the same thing in AD, how can the system confuse with it?If this is unavoidable, they should put in to the documentation or check list to remind the users on this. My personal comment on Windows 2008 Cluster technology, it does not make the administrator life simple, and it added too much dependency for the Microsoft AD. Please take note that this problem happen to both windows 2008 and windows 2008 R2.

Rumours from Blogger about new changes on vSphere 5 license change

craig — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:59:03 +0000

Since the Official launch of VMware vSphere 5, the hottest topic been discuss in virtualization is all about the new license been implemented by VMware more than what’s new in vSphere 5. After few weeks of complain, discussion and feedback from the users or partner, there are rumours saying that vmware is now ready to revise the license with better capacity limit per CPU sockets.

Here are some of the details to share, which been discuss on the internet frequently and yet to be announced and verified with VMware.

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlement
VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlement
Max vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAM
VMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB
VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GB
VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GB

Well, looks like VMware do listen to the feedback, if the above is correct, I think it at least make more sense compare to the previous information been released. One thing i had found from the discussion forum, high consolidation ration no longer unacceptable in fact it had been well adopted by world wide users. Those feedback on the forum had shown that most production host today are beyond 96GB memory with 2 x 6 cores in place tody.

Let’s wait for the announcement from VMware to verify the statement above.

VMware vSphere 5 License Comparison Chart

jlchannel — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:25:18 +0000

As of 12 July 2011, VMware officially launched the 5.0 release of vSphere. VMware vSphere 5 introduced an impressive number of new features and new licensing format.

The following is complete VMware vSphere 5 license comparison chart.

click to enlarge.

Anyway, you can see “Compare vSphere 5.0 Official Editions” here and here.

Confused Explaination from VMware about New License Scheme on vSphere 5

craig — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:57:15 +0000

After the surprise revise new License Scheme in vSphere 5, VMware had started to worry the decision of the so call FLEXIBLE offering to their client, which had received large numbers of users’ negative reaction for it. If you perform the calculation carefully, you will realize they require 30% more than what you use to pay previously, in some cases it could even double the software cost and maintenance cost you need to pay to VMWare for upgrading to vSphere 5.

While I read around a lot of the comment, I found this post from official VMware Website which try to SPIN the reader around.

Understanding the vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Model

If you are experience virtualization users, you will realize whatever in post is purely to defend the decision been made and continue to spin the story around. He is right that they did not cap you the physical memory/CPU limit per server, but on VRAM. If you have a 2 CPU sockets server today with 10 Cores each and you want to run with 256GB memory per host or even higher number of memory, you will end up require 4 sockets Enterprise plus license to entitle for only 192 VRAM allocation to the virtual machines pool you have, and the rest of it is stay there for HA or so on. If you want to use more than that, please buy more license from VMWare. Old days with memory over commit and over provision are gone. as long as you do not have enough software licenses. Well, beside saying this, you may still able to use the memory over provision or over commit while there is HA kick in due to any physical host failure.

Honestly speaking, if VMWare are confident that customer will continue the journey with them, what is the point of telling public that the so call FLEXIBLE, NO LIMIT or any spinning story that could mislead the reader. There is an open market for every product in virtualization today, there will be users choose to go VMWare still and some may think to switch to others too.

I do not see any problem for the software company to create restriction on their software, but I do mind the mislead information could confuse the users and readers. Is still a choice of for user to decide whether it is worth to buy the product.

VMware vSphere 5 may not be the ideal platform for Matured vSphere 4.1 Users

craig — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:19:21 +0000

With the surprise of new license structure change from VMware, it had impacted large number of the existing customers which may end up required to double or triple their existing CPU license if they require to upgrade to vSphere 5. This was mainly cost by the cap happen per CPU sockets which is only 48GB each even for Enterprise plus. There are many users start to evaluate alternative solution such as HyperV, Citrix Xen and KVM now due to the large impact on software cost may be added to the existing environment.

Imagine you have a 2 way server with 192GB memory now, you will require to purchase 4 sockets license to entitle the VRAM for 192GB. Honestly speaking, the new license structure doesn’t sound to be green and really make the existing users getting harder to defend the decision to stick with VMware. VMware are not promoting high consolidation anymore while force you to buy more license or consider a smaller server to be deployed in your infrastructure. No matter how they spin about the flexible licensing scheme, I think many smart users feel upset with the new model they released. Providing a choice, there will be many users choose to remain at version 4.1 without upgrade and start looking into option as HyperV, XEN or KVM. VMware are opening bigger door to their competitor to challenge their market share.

VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1 on SQL 2008 R2