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I had a another problem with Storage VMotion yesterday and found out a couple of interesting things.

Firstly, there is a now a Knowledge Base article explaining how to recreate vmdk header files if they are missing.  This was news to me, so here’s the link:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004232

Secondly, was discovering a sightly different approach to recovering a failed Storage VMotion (DMotion).  My previous experiences had involved something along these lines:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/999890#999890

Which basically breaks down to creating another snapshot, so that you will then be able to force a vmware-cmd …/vmname.vmx removesnapshots

However this approach was messy, didn’t always commit properly and required editing the vmx file.

So yesterday, when facing a similar problem, I saw it resolved in slightly different way.  We started by checking the linking of parentCID to CID in the vmdk header files, as we had an issue with all the different DMotion snapshot files.  Then to commit the snapshots, we used vmkfstools -i <last_snapshot.vmdk> <destination.vmdk> to clone the disk to another file.  By sending the clone command to the last snapshot header file, it knew to roll all the chained snapshots, along with the original disk, into this new copy.

Obviously this method requires extra space for the second copy and can take longer, but you have the advantage that the original are untouched.

Update:

VMware has just released a new KB article covering the whole process: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007849

Jose Maria Gonzalez from http://josemariagonzalez.es/ has translated my VI3 reference card into Spanish.  Thank you to Jose for taking the time to do this.  I’m sure this will make a lot of Spanish speaking ESX users very happy.

Why not head over to Jose’s great website and grab a copy here.

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine pointed me at this site (thanks Raphael):

http://www.bluebearllc.net

They are a start-up software company who are building a “hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform” virtualization management application.

I just received my beta key and have been having a quick look.  Its built on Adobe AIR and has a very fluid map model to move around the virtualization components.

You can see some screenshots here:

http://www.bluebearllc.net/kodiak/screenshots

It certainly looks very promising, as it is a free, open-source and can manage multiple ESX hosts without the need for VirtualCenter.  The maps are beautiful.  Combine this with a free ESXi license or two and you have a great solution for companies with no virtualization budget.

However I have one small bit of feedback for this new company.  They are branding everything around the bear nomenclature.  It is selling a small form factor server under the brand Koala.  As a “naturalised” Australian, I have to point out to my American software friends that Koalas are not part of the bear family as any fair dinkum true blue Aussie would know.

Long time no blog…

My apologies to anyone who has emailed me lately.  I promise to catchup with them soon.  Things have been a bit buzy.

I unfortunately haven’t made it to VMworld this year, but have been following the news as much as I can.  One great piece of news that I just read on Duncan Epping’s great blog:

…VMware just announced the fact that vCenter Server will be released as a linux virtual appliance in the future and the vCenter client will be cross platform available.

I assume that the vCenter client will be the VI4 equivalent of the VIC.

I have said many time before that the VC server should be a linux based VM.  Looks like its actually going to happen.  Yippee.

Long time no blog. Sorry, been kinda busy lately, but I want to link to a post with some nice Linux related reference cards.

10 must-have Linux (and not only) cheat-sheets

And here is a site where the author has created several nice bash, perl and vim sheets, which all you Service Console gurus might like:

http://www.catonmat.net/projects/cheat-sheets

There are lots of these cheat sheets out there, especially for developers. Here are a couple of sites which list a lot of them:

http://www.cheat-sheets.org

http://techcheatsheets.com

Let me know if there any ones which you find particularly useful as an ESX user, and I’ll create my own “10 ten”.

Tags: Linux