I notice that the memory utilization for vCenter 4 is very high even I run it on Windows 2003 Server. The highest memory utilization of the vCenter is not SQL or anything, but is Tomcat. Can you believe that the Tomcat will take up to 1.3GB of physical memory show in the task manager? This had given myself a signal that I may need to increase the memory I had on the production virtual center server I have before I may consider a final upgrade to vCenter 4 for production purpose.

The guys talked about Live Migration on HyperV on the next release. As a customer, I am always believed that the software provider should only commit and tell the customers when their products are ready, and not always tell the customer WE ARE READY IN THE NEXT RELEASE. This only explain as your product is not ready, what about your next release is in 2 years time? That meant the products is not as promise as you publish to the customers. Please take note that VMware had supported Storage VMotion for current version, which is another step beyond of Live Migration.

Cluster File system from Microsoft today will be far behind if we compare with the fault tolerance in vSphere. This is only able to match with what VMware had been done in the pass and not creating new technology into their product. They should take more innovative to come out something that VMware doesn’t.

HyperV is not scalable as VMware does? This could be right depend how you want this to be compared. In virtual infrastructure, HA and DRS are both important pieces in the production environment which promise the load balancing and High availability. ESX 3.5 support up to 32 ESX host per clusters, which I think HyperV is not comparable at all. I think HyperV is far behind in term of the technology which customers are demanding. They may able to target the crowd which plan for development, test and training environment to be virtualized on HypverV, but not mission critical production systems. You can easily run 1000 of web server in the front end without HA or clustering to serve your web site today, with additional load balancer in the market which auto redirect the traffic to the servers, therefore when 100 / 1000 servers are down, and your web should still reachable. There is nothing should be proud to tell the customer how many Virtual Machine from Hyper V is currently running the Microsoft website. To run a web server in virtual machine today, is very common and not big deal at all.

About reliability, if we compare the system uptime for Linux and windows, which machine will we rebooted most and patch it most? I think you and myself should have the right answer in the mind. Even if VMware is utilizing the similar amount of resource to power up the ESX, but do remember, VMware perform smartly in term of resources management. It will smartly manage the resources to give the maximum utilization of the hardware you invested, plus higher ratio of consolidation. Of course, it does provide flexibilities to reserve the right amount of resources if require.

HyperV has the advantage to run on any hardware you like. This is something that VMware does not provide, as we are required to follow the HCL from VMware for each version of ESX we deploy. In most case, will we actually run our production virtual infrastructure to serve business need on a custom made server? or a mixture parts from multiple vendor which didn’t fully tested of compatible purpose?  Most customers today will buy the servers from DELL, HP, IBM and etc, which provide the best compatible from technology from motherboards, memory, CPU, storage and etc, which had been certified and tested before they sell to the customers. This had significant improved the server life spend and productivity.  Therefore, I will conclude this advantages from HyperV does not really concern myself to select them as the hypervisor in our data center.

Management wise, I think they are trying to over sell their system center, which is a big step to lock customers down to their so call SCCM for everything in your environment. Why will you need to have pure microsoft to run in your organization while there are plenty of products available to be more reliable, cheaper and efficient. In our environment, we are trying to avoid to run Microsoft as much as possible due to the costly licensing term they apply to the customers. We run 85% of our system in Linux environment today, and I should said SCCM is not the right tools to manage my physical or virtual environment. If you want me to choose between Altiris and SCCM, Altiris might be a better choice to myself. SCCM may meant more to the pure Microsoft platform environment usage.

There are certainly more comments I can put here regarding the video I watched, but I think is just too tired to write up everything here. I think you guys who read this should have your personal opinion. My thought here is meant for share and more towards my environment. You may think differently from myself as the environment that you run may be different. Enjoy the video.

VMware highly recommend to perform upgrade to vCenter 2.5 update 4 to support the ESX 3.5 update 4. ESX 3.5 update 4 will require vmtools to be upgraded too.

For more information, please visit to the official release note from VMware.

I tried to search around the knowledge base and VMware communities forum to look for the solution and I found the some useful information here.

VMware Communities
KB from VMware

Both contain valuable information to resolve the problem. I followed the guide from the post and re-run the SQL job and I able to generate the jobs under the SQL server agent. Now I am able to view the data from Feb 2009 to present. I am still working on to recover the rest of the history performance for my vm farm. I did manually open the table in vCenter databases and found the previous records from October 2008 were there, and I engaged with the VMware support now to resolve the problem.

I will update more to this post once I got it fix from the VMware support.

Updated: Maximum Configuration Supported in ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5

This information is always important and helpful for you to plan your environment.

Beside OS dependancy it also require a database which currently so sad only work with Oracle or MSSQL. During TA3201 session under “Linux Initiatives“ mentioned vCenter will have a Linux appliance version as well as a Cross Platform Client. As follow are some highlight what’s is in the vCenter Linux appliance. The interesting part is there is no mention whether it will support OpenSource databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

I am really interested to know & looking forward for the release.

During the upgrade, there is the SQL script at the backend which trying to upgrade your DB table for your virtual center database and update manager. It does show some error during the upgrade and the screen will dissapear. Once it complete, you will find that your virtual center are still functioning as usual. 2 days later, you will start realize the Virtual center services is not able to be started anymore. Now is the big problem come. If you have backup your DB before the upgrade, you should be good. Or else, you will lose whatever data previously you have. Always backup the DB before any upgrade. A good example, missing template posted by superman previously.

From this issue, I spent a full day to investigate 1 by 1 to troubleshoot and find out the root cause. I had even removed the entire VC and reinstall the previous version, unfortunately, problem is not as easy as I had thought. This doesn’t solve my problem. The last move, I reinitiate the DB for both virtual center and update manager both during the fresh installation, now the environment is back to normal.

I had conclusion the root casue is absolutely cause by the failure upgrade on the SQL during the upgrade installation. I am not very confident to the VMware QA team regarding their upgrade release. They should had tested this all upgrade properly before it release for the public. It could be very risky to the users always.

Some additional tips before you reinstall, you should browse to the folder location which previously store all the patches you had download for your update manager, in case you do not required to re-download again once you reinstall. The patches could be easily more than 4GB, which will take a long time for you to download from the internet again.

Today, I found some solution from VMware sites.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007196

This had clearly explained the bugs they have for this upgrade. But again, is too late for my case which is already screw up my virtual center. Earlier bird is always risky and excited but again, VMware need to improve their QA and QC for the product release.

Basically setting up a brand new Windows 2003 machine is pretty simple but setup a new Virtual Machine took me 2 days. The most important is my VM template is go missing. The quick solution is search for VM template and register (add to inventory) again.

SSH into my ESX server using putty and search for VM template file with extension “.vmtx”.

[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# find /vmfs -name *.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeddb-89b75750-a52d-011aa0289d15/W2K3STD/W2K3STD.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeda7-2a63d436-724b-011aa0289d15/RHEL5/RHEL5.vmtx

How to register a VM template using CLI:
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register

In my case, I will register my VM template as example below:
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/465eeddb-89b75750-a52d-011aa0289d15/W2K3STD/W2K3STD.vmtx
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/465eeda7-2a63d436-724b-011aa0289d15/RHEL5/RHEL5.vmtx

Probably you can check previous article “How to re-register a VM once it had been removed from ESX” posted by Craig for register a VM template using Virtual Center and browse through the data store.

The lesson tell me I MUST backup SQL database and VM template keep in the database.

Open the management studio in SQL 2005 and connect to the SQL server engine that manage the virtual center and update manager DB. right click and select stop the database engine. Follow by that, open you my computer and browse to the folder which contain the DB and DB log for your databse.

The path of the DB folder could look similiar as D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\Data

Look for the DB file which end with .mdf and .ldf.

These is the files you need to backup to restore your DB in the future. Copy those files to a safe location. Once you had done that, you can easily continue your virtual center upgrade as require.

You can copy to a network share drive, backup tape or any storage you need. Backup DB is so simple.

After that, I try to check most of the setting and log file from putty and virtual center. Here is my finding. Due to some unknown reason, the .vmx file setting and the configuration on the virtual center show really different. I had to force restart the virtual center service, and reconfigure some of the resources setting in virtual center to ensure it had not reserve or limit any resources on CPU and memory, and I power up the VM again. This round, the VM able to power up and functioning. Originally, It shouldn’t reserve any resource as I had not configured that. For some unknown reason, the resources limit had been configured by the ESX itself. This had happened in the pass but it had not cause any issue.

The root cause here is clear again that the virtual center information is not tally with the information from the command. I will say this is not something new and is well known and really causing so much issue sometimes. A lesson really had been learnt today.