Everything Virtual

It’s #LonVMUG Time Again

It’s only a couple of days before the first #LonVMUG of 2012 and I thought I would post up the agenda for it.

The #LonVMUG is being held on Thursday 26th of January from 10:00 – 17:15 at The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London, EC4R 1AP

If you haven’t managed to attend any VMUG’s I would definitely recommend that you do because it’s a great way to network with like minded peers and attend some very well delivered presentations.

If you’re coming to the #LonVMUG on Thursday pop over and say hello

Top 50 VMware Virtualization Blogs Voting Has Begun

Every year Eric Siebert from vSphere-Land.com runs a vote for the top 25 VMware and Virtualisation blogs. As there now are over 180 blogs listed on the nominations list the vote has been increased to the top 50 blogs for the year.

The voting is simple, should take no more than a couple of minutes of your time and allows you to choose your top 10 favourite listed blogs. The scoring is such that a #1 vote gives you 10 points, #2 vote gives you 9 points all the way down to a single point for a 10th place vote.

The following criteria should be taken into consideration when voting.

How often do they post
How well are the posts written
How long are the posts
How long have they been blogging

If you like the content that I provide here and would like to cast a vote for my blog I would really appreciate it, the blogging is done because I want to do it but I hope you the reader also get something out of it.

Thanks for reading the blog and come back soon.

VMware ESXi 5.0 – Upgrading VMware Tools on Windows XP Pro SP3 VM vNIC Issues

Last year I built up a Windows XP VM to allow me to do some performance testing in my vSphere 4.1 lab, the VM used the Flexible type Network card (as that’s the default card type) and worked without issue over a number of ESXi demo installations.

Since passing my VCP on vSphere 4 I have been slowly migrating my lab environment across to ESXi 5.0 and yesterday it was the turn on my XP machine, I still keep an XP machine around for various testing purposes (used for my Iometer testing last year). Upgrading the Virtual Machine Hardware version went smoothly when I imported the VM into my ESXi environment, starting the VM I managed to get an IP address and started the Windows Update process (it’s been a couple of months since this box was online). After the updates were installed and the machine rebooted I started the upgrade process for VMware Tools, it’s at this point that I started having problems.

When the VM rebooted I tried to hit Windows Update again (you know how it goes, update after update, but when I tried to access that or any other site I wasn’t getting any kind of response.

Pulling up a command prompt I was getting the initial DHCP allocated IP address but when trying to ping anything it wouldn’t find anything. Doing an ipconfig /renew timed out as well.

I then carried out the following to see if there was anything not working in my environment.

From another VM on my server I checked to make sure I could still browse the network
I removed the vNIC from the VM
I enabled hidden devices for device manager (set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1) and then ran devmgmt.msc to remove any hidden vNIC devices from Device Manager

Whilst Device Manager has an option to show hidden devices it doesn’t show disconnected devices, that’s where the set command above comes into play. As you can see in the screen shots above we see the original Device Manager and then the Device Manager with the Show NonPresent Devices setting enabled.

Added a vNIC back to the VM (at this time I was still using the Flexible type vNIC).
Rebooting the VM still didn’t give me any network connectivity, I just had an APIPA address allocated.
At this stage I changed the NIC to the VMXNet 3 and rebooted, still no luck.
Finally I re-installed VMware Tools to ensure that the VMXNet 3 drivers were installed correctly.

After going through the above steps I was able to start browsing the network and Windows Updates started working again.

I can tell you that I haven’t been able to replicate this behaviour in my lab (I have tried a couple of XP builds and they all upgraded VMware Tools successfully using the Flexible vNIC) but in case you experience the same type of issue you have some things to try.

VMware VCP 4 Passed – Lessons Learnt

As I have stated in the past I have been studying for my VCP for a while, I managed to take the ICM course last year and probably spent a good four months afterwards studying to make sure I passed with ease. Disaster struck when work suddenly went crazy and my study opportunities disappeared. It was only in December that I remembered that I had received a discount voucher from VMware for a 70% discount on the cost of the exam (which for anyone who has sat the exam knows, it’s not cheap at £145).

The reason for this post is that whilst I was lucky and received this email through the post the other day

It was actually very close to being a “Sorry You Failed, please try harder next time” message, why you ask?

I booked the exam on the 21st of December, I was scheduled to sit it on the 23rd of December, I hadn’t studied for the exam in over two months and I hadn’t been playing with my lab at home because of time constraints (I spend 14+ hours of the day out of the house either at work or travelling to work, I have a wife and son who also want to see me and spend time with me so really, there wasn’t a lot of time to spare) but I knew that if I wanted to get my VCP instead of procrastinating about it I would have to give myself a reason to actually do it and that’s why I booked it when I did for when I did, I stood to lose the cost of the exam (in this case £52.20 which is what I paid for the exam after the 70% discount Smile ). I then spent 2.5 days travelling to and from work (6 hours a day) as well as my lunch hour, studying for the VCP exam. Now luckily for me I have an Apple iPad 2 with the Kindle App installed, I also have a large number of VMware based books purchased from the Amazon store as well as the PDF’s mentioned in my previous post (VMware VCP 4 – Additional Study Material) so I knew I could go over the material I wasn’t sure about.

This is where I learnt my lesson, 2.5 days is not enough time to cram for an exam, not after a hiatus of 2 months from study. My advice is definitely take more time to study but also make sure you give yourself a deadline to have the exam booked by.

FreeNAS 8.0.2 Release is now ready for use

Back in May of last year I wrote a post about how I thought that FreeNAS 8.0.0 Release wasn’t actually ready or reliable, it had failed on me a couple of times and performance as far as NFS was concerned was dire. Testing of the NAS couldn’t continue because of the difficulties I was experiencing with FreeNAS, so much so that I didn’t finish testing.

Move forward two releases (with a 3rd just around the corner) and I can say that FreeNAS is now at a point where it does what it’s says on the tin. Let me give you an example.

I recently built up a new NAS device instead of purchasing the ever so slightly over priced Iomega PX6, the idea being that I thought (correctly in this instance) that I could build up a server offering the same kind of functionality that’s on offer from the impressive PX6. My final solution was actually based on FreeNAS 8.0.2 after testing various products and I had been running my home lab from it for a couple of weeks.

Because I had been experiencing some issues with my servers (three Lenovo TS200’s) I decided to run some memory tests on those boxes for a couple of days (as it stands the ram in all the servers ran fine for 48 hours so it mush have been issues with the installation of Windows 2008 R2 that I had been testing due to work). Once I had finished with my Hyper-V environment I decided to upgrade to vSphere 5 and start studying for my VCP 5 exam. This is where my change of heart for FreeNAS really came through.

Having stacked my storage devices into Ghetto Rack I decided to install the latest release of FreeNAS onto my HP Microserver, I plugged in my SanDisk Cruzer and proceeded to “upgrade” FreeNAS onto it, I say “upgrade” because I had thought that the drive I was using had been used for something else but at the time I didn’t really think about it. With the Microserver now having FreeNAS on it I decided to boot up my GhettoPX but was alarmed when I discovered that it didn’t actually boot into FreeNAS but instead into OpenDSS (which is what I had thought was on the drive in the Microserver), it was then that I realised that I had used the wrong USB key, the concern now was that the GhettoPX had all my VM’s on it (around 20 different machines used for different projects).

Disconnecting the 6 internal SATA drives I proceeded to install FreeNAS and tried to configure it to see if I could restore the environment back to how it was (no, at this stage I didn’t have a copy of the latest config which is silly because I always did so when I was using OpenFiler).

I managed to import the disk set, which to be honest was a start but when I did that I couldn’t see anything on the disks, so going through the same configuration steps used when I originally created the iSCSI extents and targets I re-created them.

Lo and Behold, by ensuring I created the targets and extents with the same names and sizes I was able to recover my iSCSI volumes, now all I needed to do was discover them in my last ESXi 4 server so that I could migrate them from the datastore to allow me to upgrade my entire lab (servers as well as datastores) to the vSphere 5 infrastructure. Using the vCenter console I was able to mount the datastore and migrate the data across to my NFS datastore on my IX4.

What could have been a total disaster for me as far as lab build goes actually went very well, FreeNAS didn’t baulk at my lack of config files, didn’t stop at me recovering my existing iSCSI volumes and actually worked on the browser I wanted to use (actually I have tested it on both Firefox and IE9 successfully, something that the original 8.0.0 release wouldn’t have done).

FreeNAS team, I know I was hard on you back in May of last year but the progress you are making on FreeNAS 8 is definitely moving in the right direction, it’s also nice to see that unlike OpenFiler you are keeping the releases flowing at a decent rate. I would like to see an improvement in NFS performance but as the current usage for the NAS is for my new ESXi 5 environment I will be playing with VMFS for the moment so NFS isn’t such a great issue… for now.