Posts Tagged ‘vmware’

Large Storage VMotion and a Little Patience

Whilst doing a little storage vMotion using VMware this week, I got a little lesson in patience from VMware and thought that I would share my experiences to help a few others who are looking at doing storage migrations of larger VM’s. My experiences are with VMware ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5. Not the most recent, I know, but we haven’t had time yet to upgrade to vSphere 4.

The point of my migration was to get a particular vmdk off a slower set of disks and only a faster set of disks. Due to the fact that ESX 3.5 doesn’t directly support moving only one vmdk at a time, I had to do a little dance to get the one vmdk that I wanted to move, moved. I had to move the virtual machine itself and ended up moving a couple of extra disks in order to to get it to move.

Near as I could figure, Storage vMotion (with ESX 3.5) has the following stipulations:

  1. The virtual machine files must move.
  2. The virtual machine files must move to a datastore that is large enough to hold the largest vmdk.
  3. Apparently, the host needs enough memory free as the size of memory allocated to the already-running virtual machine (during the move, memory usage spiked which caused all kinds of problems for me since this was a large virtual machine, but not really the point). I haven’t verified this requirement yet, but that’s what my initial thoughts are after seeing the behavior.

Seeing the migration options for vSphere 4, I wanted to cry on how difficult my life was made by these requirements, but that’s another story. We’ll be scheduling that upgrade shortly. :)
Anyway, I ran the Storage vMotion. At which point, I managed to bring the virtual machines on my host to a screeching halt, not knowing number 3 right off hand. After killing a few virtual machines and moving a few others away from this host, we were back under way.

Near the end of the Storage vMotion (at 90% to be specific), the interface stayed at the same percent for several minutes and I was greeted with this friendly error:

A general system error occurred: failed to reparent/commit disk(s) (vim.fault.Timedout)

Uh-oh. A quick Google serch found this VMware knowledgebase article.

Unfortunately, I missed the “Incorrectly” throws a timeout error message and panicked a bit. I started digging around in the destination and original datastores and found tons of “DMotion” files everywhere. While desperately looking for solutions around the web, my Virtual Center screen refreshed with the new datastores being associated with the disks and moved over. Yup, while I was freaking out, the whole thing just took care of itself.

Apparently, when working with Virtual Center, one must always have a bit of patience and remember to double-check timeouts inside Virtual Center with the ESX hosts directly. I suppose I should have known better as I’ve seen this kind of behavior while working with snapshots in the past. If you come across this post while searching for this error, take a few minutes to relax and let VMware do its thing in the background while Virtual Center shows stupid error.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jan 11th, 2010

Don’t Neuter Your Software If You Can’t At Least Be Professional About It..

Since I was snowed in on Christmas, I got a bit of time to play around with my little server here at home. I got it this fall and installed VMware ESXi on it to do a bit of experimenting on. Today, I was getting a bit of cabin fever, so I started playing around with some of the features that I saw existed in vSphere 4, but never got a chance to try out. I noticed an option to hot-add and hot-remove virtual CPUs to guests which sounded like a good deal of fun on this wintry day. Nope, apparently the option exists for me, but I can’t actually save it without a proper license. They could have at least “grayed” the option out so I couldn’t click on it.. Or, at the very least, VMware could have at least proof-read the error message at least once:

Nice work, VMware. Some classic software developer English, right there.. Perhaps Ralph from the Simpsons wrote this dialog?

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Dec 25th, 2009

Machine Restarting After vMotion in ESX 3.5 Update 3

I ran into a nasty bug in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 during an implementation at work and thoght I’d share the solution. The bug is a known issue with VMware and I found the documentation with the workaround. The problem goes something like this: after vMotion’ing or starting up a virtual machine guest on an ESX 3.5 Update 3 host with HA turned on with virtual machine monitoring enabled., the machine may reboot. The issue is caused by a delay in the heartbeats from the VMware tools on the guest and VMware HA does it job and kills the existing instance and boots up a new one. The workaround is to add the following line in the vmsvc section of the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml file and restarting the HA management services:

<heartbeatDelayInSecs>0</heartbeatDelayInSecs>

You can also turn Virtual Machine Monitoring off, but by adding the line you can leave VM monitoring on. You can find the actual VMware Knowledgebase article here.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Feb 5th, 2009

openSUSE 11.1 On VMware

Yesterday I decided to install the new 11.1 release of openSUSE. Since I didn’t have any spare machines laying around, I threw it on my desktop using VMware Server. The installer was much smoother and a lot more slick than past releases, but probably what impressed me the most was that once the installation was done and I was booted up into KDE, the mouse left the VMware console screen. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. I was going in and out playing with the new OS while getting a little work done. Eventually I got the system fully patched and was ready to install the VMware tools. Then all of a sudden, I realized that the tools had already been installed and my mouse had been going in and out of the console window the whole time. The openSUSE installer had detected that it was running on top of VMware and installed the tools for me. Not too shabby.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 20th, 2008

VMware: A Traditional Licensing Model in a SaaS World

With our economy closing in around us, companies are investigating ways to save money and improve efficiencies. Startups that are looking for VC are struggling to find cash to front projects that involve IT projects. One way to conserve costs is to virtualize infrastructure to get the most of hardware purchases. VMware has been considered by many to be king of virtualization. However, VMware’s cost of entry is extremely high. A startup can get into the VMware ESX line with a starter pack which allows for 6 CPU’s, virtual center, and 3 years of support for $20,000. That’s actually an incredible deal when you go try to buy that software retail with machines from an OEM. Unfortunately for VMware, an organization can get into virtualization using Amazon’s EC2 service or other cloud computing provider for a much lower cost per machine. Perhaps a subscription-based model could allow for a lower point of entry for organizations into the VMware architecture? The technology is great but so far their licensing hasn’t adjusted to the way the market is moving. Even Steve Ballmer harped on VMware for its pricing model. Of course, they do offer the ESXi version of their software for free, but it doesn’t allow you to hook into a SAN or migrate guests between VMware hosts.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 17th, 2008

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