Posted on May 28th, 2010 in Tips | 1 Comment »
For the past few weeks, my customers keep received an alarm “Host connection failure” email alerts via VMware vCenter but end up it’s a false alarm.
The email alert example as below:
Target: kulsrvprd01.malaysiavm.com
Stateless event alarm
Alarm Definition:
([Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - incorrect Ccagent] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - network error] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - time-out] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - time-out] OR [Event alarm expression: Host connection lost])
Event details:
Host kulsrvprd01.malaysiavm.com in DC1 is not responding
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Today, 10 G Ethernet consider as common technology at least to the enterprise customer. Many of us are looking into 10G Ethernet from server to switch via L2 or L3 networking perspective. The main reason behind this are due to the Virtualization and Cloud Computing technology driven. Few years ago when we came out the design with multiple gigabits NICs on the ESX host to support NIC teaming, load balancing and etc, which may end up deliver around 14 Gbps of network bandwidth and 8Gbps of FC bandwidth per host. Each ESX host are consolidate 20 to 30 virtual machines. At that time, this may be the best option we could had done due to technology limitation. Is this design GOOD enough? I will say yes for previously, and NO for today technology availability.
Photo shot of the real environment which have 14 gigabits NIC Ports and 4 x 2 Gbps FC.
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Posted on November 26th, 2009 in Tips | No Comments »
Just found the note from VMware today about the possibility of upgrade fail if you are trying to update you ESX 4 to update 1 with update manager.
When attempting to upgrade ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1, you may experience the following symptoms:
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VMware ESX 4.0 Update 1(Build 208167) was released on 19 Nov 2009 and I did a patch update on 3 of my vSphere Dev Servers included of 1 ESX (build 164009) server and 2 ESXi (build 164009 & 171294) servers on Dell PE2950 today.
The Redhat Linux and Windows 2003 & 2008 Virtual Machines VMware tools upgraded successful and everything look goods after the Update 1 patched.
I would suggest you refer to VMware Communities – vSphere Upgrade and Install forum & “vSphere 4u1 – any issues” thread before apply any VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi Update 1 patches on production environment.
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Recently there are some request from my client who suggested to have their production and DR site to be automated protected and fail over in the event of disaster. VMware SRM seems to be right choice for most of the time, but these clients are decided to bring it to another level of fail over procedure during the DR happen. I am doing some research today and found this interesting topic from Netapp which the Metro cluster suppose to synchronize from production to DR through dark fiber to prevent controller failure, DR or disk corruption.
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