We see the growth in the market to be more aggressive for consolidation in the data center for both physical and virtual server from time to time. There are plenty of solutions in place allow blade to support virtualization today such as virtual connect from HP, pass through module, infiniband integration Xsigo, Cisco UCS and etc. This had significant resolved the I/O interfaces require per blade to host the virtualization host server. CPU and memory per blade and significant increase with the latest release from all the major server vendors, the CPU, memory and disk I/O are no longer the concerns for virutalization.
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I am currently doing some test to simulate the real update requirement for my production VMware Farm to be upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4. To minimize the impact to our production system, we may want to do this with as minimal impact as possible. Due to the virtual hardware version and tools upgrade require, is pretty tough for us to perform the entire upgrade at 1 time. Therefore, our plan is get the host upgraded and follow by each individual virtual machine to be upgraded follow the suitable timing for different business unit. HA and DRS will need to be disable temp during the ESX upgrade.
I am able to get the ESX 3.5 to be manage by the latest vcenter. A vmotion from ESX 3.5 to vsphere 4 had been successes too, but the latest version of virtual machine which built from vSphere 4 might not compatible to vmotion back to the ESX 3.5 hosts. At the same time, if you have different processors chipset in the environment and require EVC to be turned on, it may be a little challenge to do so. You may want to ensure the EVC to be done with no down time. You may need to refer to my previous post about how to enable EVC with no down time.
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I just read an interesting article and wat the demo video for the products of Stor Magic SvSAN which is capable to provide the flexibility for us to utilize the local Hard drive in our machine to act as a share storage. As we know, the 1TB SAS HDD is available in the market today, and most of the ESX servers we have today, are not running with local storages due to the requirement of HA, DRS and VMotion within ESX servers. In the video, it show the flexibility and opportunities to fully utilize the ESX servers we have. I am interesting into this particular products and idea and downloading for a try now.
More review will be publish after my test on this. If the success of this products is true, we should able to save some money for some of the cases which may not require big SAN box to their environment to entitle the HA, DRS and Vmotion features. Stay tune.
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Posted on September 24th, 2008 in Tips | 1 Comment »
Previously Craig posted about Monitoring features from ESX 3.5 update 2 and I would like to share How to Enable Virtual Machine Monitoring here.
- Login to Virtual Center
- Right click on your Cluster
- Click Edit Settings
- Click VMware HA
- Click ‘Enable virtual machine monitoring‘
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What? Running SuSE Linux Cluster on VMware ESX? Basically if you have VMware HA and DRS enable, your virtual machine is running on cluster mode. Then, why running Linux cluster on VMware? Who care? It’s just for fun and for personal testing purpose only.
1st, create two SuSE Linux(I’m running SLES 10 SP2) on VMware running on same network said cluster1(192.168.1.1) and cluster2(192.168.1.2).
2nd, add new hard disk on VMware infrastructure client. Please remember to choose ‘Use an existing virtual disk‘.
Click here for bigger image.
3rd, install and configure Linux cluster heartbeat.
Make sure you have heartbeat RPM install
cluster1:~ # rpm -qa|grep heartbeat
sles-heartbeat_en-10.1-0.20
heartbeat-pils-2.1.3-0.9
heartbeat-stonith-2.1.3-0.9
yast2-heartbeat-2.13.13-0.3
heartbeat-2.1.3-0.9
cluster2:~ # rpm -qa|grep heartbeat
sles-heartbeat_en-10.1-0.20
heartbeat-pils-2.1.3-0.9
heartbeat-stonith-2.1.3-0.9
yast2-heartbeat-2.13.13-0.3
heartbeat-2.1.3-0.9
Install Linux cluster heartbeat RPM package if you haven’t install
cluster1:~ # rpm -ivh heartbeat-xxxxxx
cluster1:~ # rpm -ivh heartbeat-stonith-xxxxxx
and etc
Edit Authentication file (same for cluster1 and cluster2)
cluster1:~ #vi /etc/ha.d/authkeys
auth 2
2 sha1 MVM_CLUS2!
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