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.

1st is the placement for the 2 node cluster virtual machine, which you should consider split the 2 virtual machine in different host and disable the DRS or vMotion for the cluster node. Now is about the quorum disk and data disk you would like to put in the cluster. You may consider using RDM for either physical or virtual mode, and provide separate SCSI controller for the share disk. You will further require configure the SCSI controller as physical mode allow the RDM to be access by the 2nd node later.

You may not able to add the RDM to the 2nd node as you usually did in this case. You will need to browse through the existing virtual disk, to point it to the vmdk configuration files which own the RDM path from the virtual machine folders.  Once you have done this, you can configure your Microsoft cluster as usual. Not complicated, it just few important steps you need to take note here.

In order to launch the 32 bits DSN client wizard from the ODBC, you will require to manually browser to the folder under C:\windows\syswow64\odbcad32.exe and right click select run as administrator. Right after it, the ODBC configuration on 32 bits will be prompted. Before you can install the correct SQL Native Client, you will require the correct 32 bits client in place which meant for 64 bits operating system. This source file will usually found on the SQL installation CD under the 32 bits folder which meant for the 64 bits operating system use. Right after all in place, the rest of the configuration on the vCenter setup will carry as usual.

This method are worked for both Microsoft SQL 2005 and SQL 2008. Have fun……..

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007669

I found the KB above which describe in details about the root cause and solution to over come this.

This issue may occur if the VirtualCenter Server service starts before one of the services it depends on. The VirtualCenter Server service is dependent on the following services:

• SQL Services
• ADAM Services (when using linked mode in vCenter Server 4.0)

This is a good news for most of the ERP users especially when you have SAP running in your production environment.

(see SAP Note 1173954 for details):
1. Since Jan 13, 2009, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Read the full details from the official announcement.

Workaround:

It’s pretty simple but it took me few hours(damn!). Please make sure your VCenter server have minimum one network cable connect to switches.

To improve the performance of your vCenter, you may need to consider to increase the physical memory on it, or you may also consider to disable the virtual center web management services from services.msc prompt in Microsoft windows. I had my vCenter running on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, and I do experience the similar performance issues. As my scenario, I can manage my environment without web management, therefore I had decided to disable the services and save the physical memory from the server for other purpose.

It also support the P2V conversion process for Windows Server 2008. VM converter version 4 do support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft.

VMware Converter 4 Beta

Click here if you do not have a VMware account

But if we compare the technology today, I believe most of us will see that from virtual cpu perspective, VMware had been quite slow respond on that. If you do spoke to most of the VMware representative or consultant, they always told you not to allocate more than 1 Vcpu if not required.

In real world, I believe that non of us will be satisfied with the single core performance for our server environment. Dual core is been in the market for more than 2 years, and quad core had been also popularize to most of us. Single core will just be SLOW in most of the event. I am here to urge VMware to push harder for more virtual CPU per VM. The thing that should consider is to compare with the competitor products like Xen and Xensource.

In Xen, you will allow to configure 8 vcpu per VM if your host have 8 cores. That meant you should able to configure 16 cores per VM if your host do have 4 x quad cores today. I am yet to test with 16 cores per VM as my machine is come with 2 x quad cores.

I even try to run a VM with Windows 2008 which contains 8GB memory and 8 virtual cpu assign. The VM is run on local storage on the SATA disk. The performance on the VM is just fast compare to 4 vcpu VM I had in ESX. Again, not to say VMware is not good, and I strongly believe VMware is still the best today, but they are little behind with the delay of more vcpu per VM.