ESXi 4.1 TSM (TechSupport Mode) start/stop VM

Hi all,
I'm studying for the VCAP-DCA exam, and I have a LAB.

My lab is a HP DC7800P with 6 GB of RAM and ESX4.1 for the core. Inside I run some Vm like 2ESXi and vCenter.
Today I want to start the VM from the cmd line.... but where is vmware-cmd???

In ESXi you need to enable TSM, then login through a SSH client like putty or term in Mac OSX then with thsi command you have the list of the vm

# vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

is the equal of vmware-cmd -l
and than with the VMID you can run this command

vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on VMID

my 2 cent

aLex

NFS and VMware ESX

ehy..

Who use a Linux machine as a repository for vmware?
I try it for a LAB environment. I create a LVM logical volume and than I share it through NFS. I connect it to the ESX and than I try to create a VM. On NFS datastore you cannot create a thin disk, but just thick disk!
I use RedHat Ent 5.5 with local disk formatted in ext3 filesystem.

I create a machine with 4GB HDU and all goes fine. Than I want to create a 40GB vm: Error.!
Oh.....
What's that?

After a little brain storming with me and I.... I find the problem: I create the ext3 filesystem with the default block size : mke2fs -j /dev/...
With this command the filesistem use the default block size 1024 and a max file size 16GB. A VM with a 16GB hdu is too little.

For resolution I reformat the filesystem with the command mke2fs -b 4096 -j /dev/... and now I can create a file of 2TB!!!

Remember the option when you want a repository for a VM.

aLex

SQL and Exchange on vmware

A very good link collection of SQL and Exchange on vSphere environment.

aLex

FileSystem ReadOnly on Linux Virtual MAchine

Hi all,

I find this article that explain the problem of the fesystem that became read only on a SAN issue.

Great.

aLex

vCli 4.1 new command

Yeterday I tryed some cmmand on the vMA appliance for my study to the VCAP certification.

I Added the test vCenter with vifp addserver and than I want to list the client inside the Virtual Center. The response is here vicfg-hostops -o info --viserver vservertest and it returns the list of the ESX! Great!

On this document I find another great think of vMA for the migration from ESX to ESXi! The ability to kill an hung vm from the cmdline: now with the esxcli vms vm kill you can kill a vm that don't respond from the gui! Very Nice!

aLex

NFS export on Virtual DataMover on EMC Celerra

Just a little link for me, and Powerlink is not always easy to use...

First I create the desired folder structure using the Window file share.
Next I ran this command to create the NFS export on the vdm –
“server_export server_2 -Protocol nfs /root_vdm_1/production-FS/unix/nfs1 -option root=172.24.102.240,rw=172.24.102.0/255”

aLex

vRanger 4.5.3 backup issue after upgrade to vSphere 4.1

Hi All,

last week I upgrade our production farm to vSphere 4.1 ESX, not ESXi.
After the upgrade I reenable the root login over ssh and reenter the credential on the vRanger console for the ESX.

All the backup on 3 of the 5 esx in the cluster fails with this errorFailed to acquire vm lock /vmfs/volumes/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxxxxxxx242/.vzmutex due to an SSH connection issue.

After some tricks and reserch I found this article that helps me to resolve the issue.

On the 3 esx with the error I remove the direcotry .vzbin under /tmp and than the backup goes fine.

aLex