…playing around with virtualization technology…

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Sorry for the lack of updates

I’m currently in the process of moving, my lab is dismantled and I have no spare time available for playing around with virtualization. So, sorry, no updates for a while…

Hopefully, things will change when I am settled in the new place and have figured out what my new job is all about :)

Breaking VMware Update Manager

You should believe that the VMware Update Manager was capable of handling missing files. But no, it does not. I removed a couple of files from the repository by simply pressing delete on them. These files were part of a host upgrade baseline and were no longer needed.

After the delete operation, I can no longer scan the hosts successfully. The scan failes with “invalid state” even though the event list says the scan was successful. After tried restarting the update manager service and vCenter, I guess the next step is a full reinstall since I do not like poking around in the database..

Performance monitoring problem

My new R710 running ESXi 4.0 has one problem: When the CPU load comes close to maximum, all performance monitoring for the host failes. Only a few, random monitoring requests comes through, making the resource graphs in vCenter look pretty ugly.

Read more »

Automatic installation of ESX 4.0

Mike La Spina has written a nice post about automatic installation of ESX 4.0 hosts utilizing PXE, kickstart and a lot of scripts. Mike has done a nice job creating configuration scripts, making it easy to copy his ideas for use in your own environment.

Auto installation becomes necessary if you need to deploy a large number of hosts. Now, if VMware only could copy Virtual Iron’s way of automatically installing and setting up hosts. My dream is an automatic installation and configuration of ESXi hosts without the need for painful point-and-click-customatization after the host is added to vCenter. Host profiles, as far as I know, solves only half the problem (and yeah, I know that it is possible to achieve this by using some custom scripts)…

RIP Virtual Iron

According to The Register, Oracle is going to kill Virtual Iron fron the end of June 2009. Now, I’m not that surprised, there are a lot of Xen based virtualization products on the market. The only difference between them is the management software. Read more »

Clever solutions: Microsoft Azure and its fabric controller

I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft Hyper-V which I assume is the hypervisor used in their Azure solution. As illustrated earlier, Hyper-V has its problems, especially with live migration and iSCSI support. But, the Azure have some clever solution on its own. Read more »

Cloud computing: Addressing on a global scale

My interest for virtualization solution includes cloud computing. Now, cloud computing is the new buzzword. Users, system administrators and investors hope that cloud computing will solve all redundancy and administration problems that currently exists. I am currently not that optimistic, especially when I think about all the new problems that cloud computing introduces. Read more »

Feature requests, take two

It’s been nearly 11 months since I wrote the feature request post where I asked for some features currently missing in VMware. Now, it’s time to see how it went: Read more »

Changing host name and IP address of a vCenter server

I recently had the pleasure of trying to change the host name and IP address of the vCenter server. The old host has two networking interfaces. NIC1 was connected to the Internet while NIC2 was connected to an internal network with IP address 192.168.30.0/24. The vCenter and the plugins were configured to use the internal IP address. Read more »

Dell PowerEdge R200 and ESXi 4.0

I promised some more details on the R200 and ESXi 4.0. Read more »