Virtualize.dk

Know your way around in the vCenter GUI. There are some questions in the VCP4-test regarding what options you have different places in the GUI. Go through all menus and options, and know what they are there for.

An example could be: What is the default setting for “Default cluster settings” under VM monitoring in the HA-configuration?

1: Low

2: Medium

3: High

Check the answer out here

Check out this blog post from Jeroen van de Kamp. Alot of thing to consider when virtualizing TS/citrix workloads. Also handy in a VDI-environment.

Check out this forum post. Alot of usefull things and considerations.

First of all, know your maximums! Its not that big a part of the test but its is easy point if you can memorize them. Memorize this whitepaper and take the the practice exams that on Simon Long’s blog until you get them 100% right. That helped me alot.

I passed my VCP4 today Pretty difficult test.

I would like to introduce feedreader. Its a regular rss-reader, nothing fancy there. I use it every day to get news about different things and i would like to share the virtualization-rss-feeds i use and read.

http://www.amikkelsen.com/?feed=rss2

http://feeds.brianmadden.com/brianmadden/rss

http://professionalvmware.com/feed/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchservervirtualizationServerVirtualizationNewsAndOpinions

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization/feed/

http://www.virtualtroll.com/?feed=rss2

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Virtualization_info?format=xml

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/vSphere-land

http://feeds.scottlowe.org/slowe/content/feed/

Power issues

I am gonna upgrade out ESX4-hosts to u1 and i came across this problem. One of the VMs would not vmotion to another host. I am getting this error

“Migrate virtual machine ubuntu02.domain.tld The operation is not allowed in the current state.”

The thing that was wierd was, that it was only that VM that had the problem. The CPU and memory-usage counter showed 0. So i tried reinstalling vmware tools and reboot. Nothing helped.

I found the solution here

service mgmt-vmware restart

and

service vmware-vpxa restart

solved the problem

I had to add another harddrive to a test VM and wondered how to take advantage of thin provisioning in linux. On Windows VM’s you have to do a “Quick Format” to use thin provisioning. Here is what you do on a linux (ubuntu) VM.

1. Shutdown the VM (if you dont have Hotadd-feature licensed)
2. Add a new harddrive with thin provisioning
3. Start the VM
4. Log in
5. Check the dmesg to find the devicename of the new harddrive ( in my case /dev/sdb )
6. sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb (use another mkfs-command to use the filesystem of your choise)
7. /dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
   Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
8. Wait for it to finish
9. Mount the harddrive (sudo mount /dev/sdb /home/newharddrive)

This is the way it worked for me

1. Upgrade all apps (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade)
2. Reboot
3. Upgrade the kernel (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade)
4. Reboot
5. Install new kernel headers ( sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` )
6. Choose “Install/update vmware tools” in the VI-client
7. Mount the CD (sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom && sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom )
8. Copy the tar to your homefolder ( cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-x.x.x-yyyyyy.tar.gz /home/username)
9. Untar (cd /home/username && tar zxvf VMwareTools-x.x.x-yyyyyy.tar.gz)
10. Install the upgrade (sudo /home/username/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl)
11. Follow the instructions on the screen
12. Reboot

Done