Today I was reviewing my post on ESX Crash Dumps and found that well, for vSphere, it is quite broken. How? Well… No /usr/sbin/vmkdump in ESX 4 As referenced in this KB article, vmkdump has been replaced with some additional flags on esxcfg-dumppart: In ESX 4.X, esxcfg-dumppart is now used to extract the logs files.
-> Continue reading vSphere 4 and Core Dumps (vmkdump)
As a plethora of my last posts suggest, I am spinning up study towards my VCDX. My first stop on that journey will be with the Enterprise Admin exam. Along the way I hope to share bits that I learn, review, and otherwise enjoy about the process. Today that is figuring out all manner of
-> Continue reading What NICs Do I Have? – esxcfg-nics – VCDX Prep
This came up recently on the VMware Virtualization group on LinkedIn. The question was essentially: “In the event of a host hardware issue, can I VMotion my VMs off the host and send a notification?” The answer is: “Most Certainly!” This can be done by setting up a vSphere vCenter Alarm and corresponding action. Let’s
-> Continue reading vSphere Host Died Abandon Ship! – vSphere vCenter Alarms & Actions
When was the last time you found yourself configuring VMware tools on Linux? Did having to incessantly press enter accepting the defaults drive you nuts too? I think I might be the last one to the game on this, but today I was stumbling through configuring VMware tools on a few Linux VMs. Stumbling, over
-> Continue reading VMware Tools –default!
"Sokath, his eyes opened" or roughly “Understanding”. So what does the Tamarian language have to do with PSODs or Machine Check Exceptions (MCEs)? Well, neither one of them make much sense, and need some understanding in order to translate them appropriately. What is an MCE (Machine Check Exception) A machine check exception, or MCE is
-> Continue reading Using AMD’s mcat.exe to Debug your PSOD MCE (Machine Check Exception)
The last time we touched upon LUN resigning, it was during an odd hour of the night. Looking back now, some interesting VMware KB articles have cropped up around this very topic. First there is KB 9453805, which covers this process for VI3, seemingly from top to bottom, it also greatly expands on my post,
-> Continue reading Revisiting Lun Resigning (Bad things at 2AM)
While I’d love to be able to claim I was clever enough to think of this on my own, that would straight up be lying (I really am not all that clever :). Well, it would be more than lying, I’d not be giving proper credit to his awesomeness Rich Brambley at VM/Etc for coming
-> Continue reading vCenter Client on Linux – Single App RDP and You!
I recently got a comment on a post I had done a while back on VMware tools and Time Sync. While the one-liners there may be useful, they don’t particularly explain how they got to the end results. With that in mind, today I hope to explain some of the logic used when you need
-> Continue reading A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
This one came at me from left field recently. The task at hand was to cold migrate one of a Virtual Machine’s disks from it’s old LUN, to a new one with some more breathing room. Simple enough, no? We’ve all done it a million times. What happened however, was that I received a “Error:
-> Continue reading Migrate Storage – “Failed to Connect to Host”
Time is critical. In VMs this criticality is even more pronounced. Time slips… CPU instructions go askew, and things get weird. That said, there are situations when you may wish to disable the built in VMware Tools Time sync service… completely. What do I mean by completely? Well, even with the tools time sync set
-> Continue reading Time Is Marching On… Disabling TimeSync, Completely.
This post actually puts together two of my past posts to solve a ‘common’ problem. Common that is, if you often leave snapshots running, and do not have a method for otherwise checking on them. The situation is this: It is 3:45PM on Friday (what good issue doesn’t happen on a Friday?), you are closing
-> Continue reading Help! I Snapshotted My Datastore Into Oblivion
Remember this? No? Well, go back and read it. I can wait. … Done? Good. The gist of the last post, was that if you cloned, or copied a Ubuntu VM from one host to another, the UUID changes. That UUID is the basis for part of the generated MAC address, which then changes, causing
-> Continue reading More MAC Address Mayhem – SLES Edition
I thought I had covered failed sVmotion in a past post, or at least some of the symptoms. Alas, I can not find the post (either I fail at Google, or they fail at indexing my content… likely the first). During a recent sVmotion fail I came across a wonderful cleanup KB from vmware.com. From
-> Continue reading Holy sVmotion Fail Batman!
Clones and Snapshots, two of the many modern day miracles to come from virtualization. No? So they’re not as cool as VMware’s vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling, High Availability, Fault Tolerance are they, but the are the foundation on which that magic is built. What happens to the machine in your corporate domain when you need
-> Continue reading Active Directory Machine Accounts and VMware Clones and Snapshots
Today was like Christmas morning. All the waiting was over, and I downloaded the eval of vSphere 4. I can still recall the smell of the warm plastic DVD that came out of the writer, and the joy I felt holding it in my hands. I popped the disk into an unsuspecting box, and began
-> Continue reading vSphere 4 Web UI Fail – Auto Starting The vSphere 4 Web Service
We’ll I’m not entirely sure that it “Hates” me. Perhaps that is too strong a word. Trolling around my VI today, I found a host that had it something spinning out of control: [root@hyp1 root]# top 10:50:35 up 12 days, 1:08, 1 user, load average: 2.00, 1.98, 1.92 306 processes: 297 sleeping, 9 running, 0
-> Continue reading ftPerl Hates Me
What is a “Step Ticker” You know, it’s one of those little pedometer things you strap onto your hip and tracks how far you’ve walked. Ok, so it’s not that. At least not within the context of servers & virtualization. So what IS it? It’s a horribly named NTP (network time protocol) concept. Yup. That’s
-> Continue reading WTF Is A Step Ticker? – Step Tickers. and Why They Matter
I have to honest. I haven’t given the Tripwire tools the time of day prior. Wether it was because I didn’t have any time, or I felt my own skill at scripting was good enough, I don’t know. After a run in with a v-motion issue while at Citrix Synergy/Virtualization Congress 2009, and having Mr
-> Continue reading Oh My God! Tripwire Ops Check.
Late Tuesday evening I was troubleshooting an issue with a Mr. Smith from #vmware on Freenode. Yes, really, his name was smith. The issue we were troubleshooting was related to sharing VMDK files, between two VMs running on separate hosts. After pointing Mr. Smith to my “Share and Share Alike” and feverently insisting that it
-> Continue reading Sharing and Snapshots – Another Look at Sharing VMDK Files
After spending an evening last week or so getting VMware Workstation running on OpenSuse 11.1, I found myself in a situation due to hardware failure, that I had to re-install… again. This time I needed the process for getting Workstation running again looked more like: 1. Ensure haldaemon is running 2. Install kernel-default, kernel-source, gcc,
-> Continue reading Updates On Suse 11.1 and VMware Workstation