Monday, September 21, 2009

Supported image formats for Converter 4 Standalone

VMware Converter 4 Standalone supports the following image formats (see screen dump below). Hyper-V is supported but conversion will have to be done as a physical server (see link)



Friday, September 11, 2009

Problems showing performance stats in VC after DB upgrade

We had an incident the other day about a VirtualCenter v2.5 U4 not showing performance statistics for the VM's. It was possible to see live stats for e.g. CPU and memory usage. But changing the chart options to 'weekly' or 'monthly' resulted in a 'Performance data is currently not available for this entity'.

Recently the backend SQL Express server for this VC had been upgraded to a SQL 2005 Standard edition and this was the reason for the error.

In the SQL server, there are three stat-roolup-jobs (which are the ones creating the perf stats in VC) which were not automatically created during the upgrade. These had to be added manually following this KB article from VMware. These are:
  • Past Day stats rollup
  • Past Week stats rollup
  • Past Month stats rollup
After adding the jobs and waiting a couple of hours for all of the jobs to have run, everything worked just fine (The VC DB is called VCDB - UMDB is for Update Manager).

Below is a screendump from the SQL Management Studio after the jobs had been added:

Howto: Removing a disk from a VM - howto identy the right disk?

From time to time, we need to remove disks from a VM. If there's only two or three disks attached to the VM, it's typically not a problem figuring out which one to remove e.g. if the disks have different sizes. But if you have seven or eight disks and they are the same size, then it's a bit more tricky - let's say if you're asked to remove the 'E-drive'. Under 'Edit Settings' for the VM, the disks only have a number which does not necessarily correspond with anything within the VM.

So how to identify exactly which disk that corresponds with a given volume within Windows?


The match can be made by looking at the SCSI target ID for the disk - this can be identified both in WIndows and under 'Edit settings' for the VM (A VM can have four SCSI controllers with up to 15 disks on each controller, so a maximum of 60 disks per VM).

To identify SCSI target ID within the VM:
Go to Computer Management -> Disk Management
Right click a disk and choose Properties


On the General tab you will see the Bus number (SCSI controller) and the Target ID (SCSI target ID), note the number - in this case below the ID is 4.


To identify SCSI target ID from the VI client:
Now go to 'Edit Settings' for the VM under and locate the disk with the corresponding target ID (see Virtual Device Node for the disk). Make sure the that the controller number and SCSI ID is the same. In this case it is Hard Disk 5 that have SCSI ID 4.

Shut down the VM to remove the disk.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

SVMotion GUI plugin for VI Client in VI3

Lost Creations has made this very popular GUI plugin for doing SVMotion from the VI Client. It has been out there for quite some time, so this post is merely for my own reference (I actually thought I had posted about this before...)

It's absolutely a 'must have' tool for daily operations of the virtual infrastructure.

(Update 2011.01.05: Use this link for download in stead)

Go here for installation guide.


SVMotion with .vmdk's on different LUN's

Yesterday, I had to extend a number of disks on a VM. There were about seven .vmdk's spread over three different LUN's which were all out of space. In VI3 there's really no good way to increase a LUN (unless you use extend, but don't), so to increase the disk sizes of the .vmdk's, a larger LUN had to be created onto which the .vmdk's could be moved before extending them.

The storage guys create a 1 TB LUN for the VM. So, I wanted to use SVMotion to move the .vmdk's one by one to the new LUN. If you start out with a disk that is not the primary, or OS, disk you will get an error (I'm using the GUI plugin from Lost Creations), so you can only move the primary disk. However, when you move that primary disk, all of the .vmdk's attached to that VM will be moved with the VM at the same time and will be placed on the target LUN.

So when SVMotioning, all .vmdk's attached to that VM are moved at the same time. Therefore, make sure to have enough space on the target LUN.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

I passed the VCP 4 beta exam!

Hurrah! This Monday I received an email notification from VMware stating that I have passed the VCP4 beta exam on vSphere 4 that I took on July, 16th. For that I got a fancy little VCP button to wear at VMworld ;-) The email notification only mentioned that I passed and then a formal score report will be sent next week...