Category: vmware

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Tips vmware

How to Kill a Stuck VM in ESX 3.5

This morning my VM’s decided to become schizophrenic and stop opening consoles. Virtual Center showed the VM’s as still running but some weren’t responding to pings, some were but all had this error when trying to connect via console:

error connecting to vmfs volumes

Ok, well luckily this was a test environment VM so I tried hard restarting it and I got this lovely message:

Operation failed since another task is in progress.

Really?!? Crap, ok time to head to the oracle of all knowledge Google and BLAM-O I found this thread in the VMware Communities forum with my solution. I learned some nice new things including nice commands via the vmware-cmd as well as the vm-support commands which ended up helping me in the end. Here’s the solution from the thread, thanks to users Duncan Epping and Kim Rubeck for these commands/tips.

vmware-cmd -l = list all the vm’s running, copy and paste the full path to the below command.vmware-cmd <config> stop trysoft
if trysoft doesn’t work you could always kill the process ->
ps -ef | more
find the proces related to the world
kill it.

ps -auxwww | grep -i <vmname>

Find the PID and kill -9 pid

or

vm-support -x – to list vmid’s
vm-support -X <vmid> to kill it.

For the record my solution wound up being identifying the vm’s PID and killing the process directly. After doing that Virtual Center shows the VM as not running. Once that happens simply power it back up like you normally would.

 

Categories
Review vmware

VMware Unveils New vSphere 4

vSphere Ok so now VMware has officially unveiled their new platform vSphere 4 (aka ESX 4.0) I figured I would give my quick reactions to today’s announcements. First off, to be fair, I’m a rabid VMware fan-boy. Not that I won’t give the other virtualization platforms a fair shake but from a business standpoint VMware is way out in front and with this new release it looks like they’re staying there. Second, will the folks at VMware PLEASE invest in someone to make a better presentation? You have enough capital, make it happen.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the features that we’ll have available in this new version:
I’m sure I’m missing some but these are just the quick major points to run through. Kudos to VMware for acknowledging the movement of virtualizing databases and addressing that specific issue. With this release it looks like they really focused on optimizing an environment for database servers to thrive in. Today’s demo showed a virtualized Oracle instance hammering the server (CPU) on a physical box. In the new virtualized environment the server’s resources were much better and they were actually able to move 2 SQL Server instances on to the same box and performance still didn’t degrade by much. Now granted this demo was for Intel’s new Xeon 5500 processors and it depends on the type of database as well as 3,000 other "what-ifs" but at least it showed where VMware’s head is at. Brent Ozar recent did a webcast on performance monitoring your SQL instances and warned that once virtualized its much tougher to get true metrics from your instances so be wary with rosy numbers.
The next exciting feature I saw was thin provisioning of storage for VM’s. The way this works is that if you create a VM that you specify as 20 GB the system doesn’t really take 20 GB away from your storage, it only takes what is ACTUALLY being used. This is key since you actually start over-allocating storage to your machines which can be a blessing or a huge curse. What was really awesome is the fact that you can thin provision on-the-fly while performing a storage vMotion which I thought was really slick.
VMware’s flavor of clustering is finally coming to us in the form of VMware Fault Tolerance. I, for one, have been waiting for this with baited breath since often it is often a cumbersome and annoying process to setup a Microsoft cluster. Fault Tolerance technology allows you to run two instances of the same VM on separate hosts. If one goes down the other picks up the work seamlessly. The folks at VMware demo’ed this by bringing up a Blackberry emulator that had emails continuously streaming to it. The presenter pulled out the blade that held one of the VMs and the emails never stopped flowing. They also did a similar demo at VMworld with a streaming movie. Very exciting stuff!
The last big one I’ll go over is their new move towards policy-based management with Host Profiles. Anyone who has setup multiple ESX hosts in their environment can attest to the pains of discovering 1 or more of your servers had one little setting that was different from the rest in a cluster or environment which caused all sorts of headaches. Now with Host Profiles you create a standardized policy of what settings should be set in your host servers. Now when you deploy your ESX servers you simply apply this policy to your servers and you can see which servers are in compliance and which are not. The policy system also lets you see on the fly if someone makes a change and causes your server to fall out of compliance. Lots of really exciting possibilities with this especially in fast-growing shops.
Overall I was very impressed with the new offering although the recent naming changes for marketing’s sake I could do without. One thing that hopefully they’ll show on their website in the coming days is the improvement for monitoring in VCenter. When virtualizing your infrastructure metrics are gold and currently I feel the Virtual Center’s monitoring is OK but can definitely use improvement.  I’ve been pining for waiting this new release ever since the first announcement was made at VMworld so I’m very anxious to get a copy of this in our environment and start putting the new features to use and putting the virtualized databases through their paces. VMware states that vSphere 4 will be available "this quarter".

Categories
Presentation vmug vmware

University Community Hospital VMware Presentation

Hello everyone! Well our presentation last night went very well. Glenn actually came out of the meeting with a new iPod Touch so now he’s joined the Dark Side with a few of us others in the office that have iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve uploaded our presentation to my SkyDrive (links below)

PowerPoint 2003 version – Click here to download
PowerPoint 2007 version – Click here to download

Overall it was a lot of fun presenting and I’m that much more motivated to work on more presentations to bring to our SQL Server User Group and one day, hopefully, even present at PASS! The slide deck is a little sparse on information as I’m not one of those “read everything off the slide” guys so if you have any questions feel free to leave comments below or contact me on Twitter. Any feedback is appreciated!

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Syndication user group vmug vmware

Tampa VMware User Group Meeting Tonight!

Hey all just a reminder that tonight is the VMware User Group meeting here in Tampa. The meeting will be held at the Tampa branch of the Southwest Florida Water Management District starting at 5pm. Myself and Glenn Trail will be presenting on our VMware environment here at the hospital and I will also be covering our virtualized database servers.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmug/us-southeast/tampa

Time: 5:00pm – 8:30pm

Location: Southwest Florida Water Management District
7601 U.S. Highway 301 – Building One
Tampa, FL 33637

Directions: http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Tampa&state=FL&address=7601+Highway+301+North&zipcode=33637

To register: http://tinyurl.com/cx75jf

Agenda

5:00 pm – Introduction
5:05 pm – SWFWMD: The VM Saga continues – Jack Garvey
5:20 pm – Audience Q & A
5:25 pm – Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office – Chris Peek
5:40 pm – Audience Q & A
5:45 pm – University Community Hospital – Jorge Segarra-Rovira
6:05 pm – Audience Q & A
6:10 pm – Refreshment Break
6:40 pm – HP/Lefthand Networks – Mark Hall
7:10 pm – Audience Q & A
7:15 pm – Riverbed Technologies
7:45 pm – Audience Q & A
7:50 pm – Door Prize Drawings
8:00 pm – Birds of a Feather, Group Discussion, Vendor Off-line Interests, Information Exchange
8:30 pm – End of Meeting

Snacks will be available to all attendees and door prizes will be awarded at the close of this meeting.

Sponsored by Riverbed and HP/Lefthand Networks

Register today to join us for this free informative event. Space is limited, so respond as soon as possible to reserve your seat. 

Become a Tampa Bay VMUG Member or visit the community forum to stay current with updates: http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/vmug/localgroups.html