In vSphere 5 Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is supported. CDP and LLDP can be handy for example when you want to know that the correct network switch port is used when installing or troubleshooting ESXi hosts. 

LLDP is only available on the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS), so you need an Enterprise Plus license to use LLDP!

Enable the LLDP protocol

• Right-click the vSphere distributed switch in the inventory pane, and select Edit Settings.
• On the Properties tab, select Advanced.
• Select Enabled from the Status drop-down menu.
• Select Link Layer Discovery Protocol from the Type drop-down menu.
• Select the LLDP mode from the Operation drop-down menu.

There are three operation modes:

Listen 
ESXi detects and displays information about the associated physical switch port, but information about the vSphere distributed switch is not available to the switch administrator.

Advertise
ESXi makes information about the vSphere distributed switch available to the switch administrator, but does not detect and display information about the physical switch.

Both
ESXi detects and displays information about the associated physical switch and makes information about the vSphere distributed switch available to the switch administrator.

Checking LLDP statistics

After configuring LLDP, you can check the port statistics by clicking on the ‘blue Information icon’ on the NIC in the ESXi host:

To report these ‘hidden’ snapshots (prior vSphere 5), I created a script that searches all the datastores  for ‘*.delta’ files and reported them by mail.

In vSphere 5 you have a new feature that reports and make it possible to consolidate these  ‘hidden’ snapshot(s). In vSphere 5 you get  a warning ‘Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed’ when the virtual machine snapshot consolidation has failed.

The snapshot manager shows no snapshots but there are delta files present on the datastore(s).

In the vCenter server on the Virtual Machines tab you can enable the field “Needs Consolidation” to filter all the VMs that needs consolidation.

To consolidate the snapshot, right-click the virtual machine and choose Snapshot - Consolidate.

Confirm the consolidate

Check the datastore and all the delta files are consolidated

With PowerCLI you can use the following one liner to list all the VMs that needs consolidation (thanks to Luc Dekens ):

Get-VM | where {$_.ExtensionData.Runtime.consolidationNeeded} | Select Name

Steps:

• Make sure SQL Server Management Studio is installed on the vCenter server.  See “Add SQL Server Management Studio to Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008 R2”
• Open SQL Server Management  Studio
• Change  Server Authentication to Mixed Authentication (SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode)

• - Select “New Query”

• The following script (from vCloud Director installation and configuration guide) creates a database named “vcloud” on the c-drive  and a special SQL user "vcloud” . Customize this script for your environment.
• Paste this script in the “New Query” window”

  USE [master] 
  

  GO

  CREATE DATABASE [vcloud] ON PRIMARY

  (NAME = N’vcloud’, FILENAME = N’C:\vcloud.mdf’, SIZE = 100MB, FILEGROWTH = 10% )

  LOG ON

  (NAME = N’vcdb_log’, FILENAME = N’C:\vcloud.ldf’, SIZE = 1MB, FILEGROWTH = 10%)

  COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS

  GO

   

  USE [vcloud]

  GO

  ALTER DATABASE [vcloud] SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;

  ALTER DATABASE [vcloud] SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON;

  ALTER DATABASE [vcloud] SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON WITH NO_WAIT;

  ALTER DATABASE [vcloud] SET MULTI_USER;

  GO

   

  USE [vcloud]

  GO

  CREATE LOGIN [vcloud] WITH PASSWORD = ‘vcloudpass’, DEFAULT_DATABASE =[vcloud], DEFAULT_LANGUAGE =[us_english],CHECK_POLICY=OFF

  GO

  CREATE USER [vcloud] for LOGIN [vcloud]

  GO

   

  USE [vcloud]

  GO

  sp_addrolemember [db_owner], [vcloud]

  GO

   

  • Execute the script (1)  and make sure it has executed successfully (2)

  

  • Open Start – All Programs – Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – Configuration Tools – SQL Server Configuration Manager
  • Expand the “SQL Server Network Configuration” (1)
  • Select TCP/IP (2) and open the properties

  

  • In the IPALL section, select the TCP port and fill in “1433”

  

  • Restart the SQL Server (VIM_SQLEXP) service

  

  • Open the command prompt on the SQL Server and check if port 1433 is listening by using this command:

  netstat -an | find "1433"

  

  • Configure vCloud Director and point to the SQL Express instance

In this example a VM called “test” that has two disks (VMDK’s) placed on two datastores. The first disk is created on the VMFS01 datastore and the second disk is created on the VMFS02 datastore.  When a snapshot is created,  the VM “test”, the snapshot redolog (-delta.vmdk) files are place in the working directory (home directory). So the snapshots files are created on datastore VMFS01.

In ESXi 5 the snapshot delta disks are stored in the same home folder as the base disk. On every disk a snapshot file is created.

I have seen VMware ESX(i) 3.x and 4.x environments were only the working directory (home directory) is sized to store snapshot files . The other datastores didn’t have enough room for storing snapshot files.  So be sure before upgrading to vSphere 5 that all the datastores have enough free space to store snapshot files!

The snapshot location can changed in ESXi 5 but when performing a Storage vMotion, all the snapshot deltas will get migrated to the same folder as the VM’s base disk on the destination. 

Be sure to check this before upgrading to VMware vSphere 5!

More Information:

• Creating snapshots in a different location than default virtual machine directory
• Changing the location of snapshot delta files for virtual machines in ESXi 5.0
• Storage vMotion, Storage DRS & Virtual Machine Snapshots Interoperability

Two Ictivity colleagues are on the list too. Edwin Friesen made it for the fourth year and Michael Wilmsen for the second year. Congrats guys!

I want to thank John Troyer, Alex Maier and the VMware team for making this possible.

The full list of all the 2012 vExperts  can be found here.

In a Hyper-V cluster are normally a lot of NICs involved. Identifying the right can be challenging. It is important to consequently label your network adapters on all the servers in the Hyper-V cluster.

In Windows Server 8 there are PowerShell Cmdlets that can be used for identifying NICs.  Once you identified the NIC, rename it to meaningful name.   The PowerShell Cmdlets listed below can be executed on the following versions:

- Hyper-V Server 8

- Windows Server 8 Core

- Windows Server 8 GUI

Three ways are listed using PowerShell to identify the NIC in a Windows Server 8 Hyper-V environment.

Before you begin

Execute PowerShell and import the Hyper-V module using the following command:

Import-Module Hyper-V

1. Identify the NIC by connection State

Connect one NIC and use the following command:

Get-NetAdapter | Select Name, InterfaceDescription, MediaConnectionState | FL

Look at which NIC is connected and rename the NIC to a meaningful name (listed below)

Add the second NIC and execute the command again and rename the name of the NIC. Do this for all NICs

2. Identify the NIC using the MAC address

When you know the MAC address of the NIC (for example in a HP Flex-10 environment) it can be identified using the following command:

Get-NetAdapter | Select Name, InterfaceDescription, MacAddress | FL

Look at the corresponding MAC address  and rename the NIC to a meaningful name (listed below). Do this for all NICs.

3. Identify the NIC by PCI bus ID

The last option is to identify the NIC by PCI bus ID. The following command list all NICs PCI bus adapter information:

Get-NetAdapterHardwareInfo | select Name, InterfaceDescription, DeviceType, 
Busnumber, Devicenumber, Functionnumber | FL

Look at the corresponding PCI bus and rename the NIC to a meaningful name (listed below). Do this for all NICs.

Rename the NIC

Rename the NIC to a meaningful name, for example, rename the name “Wired Ethernet Connection 2” to “MGMT-LOM01-VLAN20” use the following command:

Rename-NetAdapter “Wired Ethernet Connection 2” –NewName “MGMT-LOM01-VLAN20”

To solve this problem, you need the do the following in the guest customization specification:

- Enter the FQDN name in Windows Server Domain field (1)

- Enter the user@domain_FQDN in the username field (2)

I used the NetBIOS domain name in the “Windows Server Domain” field and “domain\username” in the username field what doesn’t work with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 anymore.

More information can be found here state that you need to fill in:

I tested the installation of  Windows Server 8 in VMware Workstation TP, enabled the Hyper-V role and run a Windows 7 64-bit VM in Hyper-V. Here are some screenshots (Hyper-V manager and the Windows 7 64  bit running in Hyper-V): 

To make the above configuration work, add to following options to the end of the VMX file before starting the Windows Server 8 installation:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
mce.enable = "TRUE"

The VMware Workstation TP VMs are started in debug mode which impacts the performance!  

More information can be found here:

- VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2012 Overview

- Download

I decided to create one physical host for testing VMware vSphere 5, vCloud Director, VMware SRM, VMware View 5 etc. The possibility to create a physical ESXi5 server, create virtual ESXi  hosts on it and start VM on the virtual hosts is great! This feature is called nesting. How to do this, can be found on William Lam blog found here.

Components used for the ESXi 5 whitebox:

- Intel i7-3820 CPU 3.60 GHz, 4 cores, with Hyper threading 8 cores

- Zalman CNPS10X performance cooler

- Asus P9X79 s2011 motherboard. Some specs:

Socket 2011

8 DIMM slots, supports 64GB memory

Expansions slots: 2 x PCIe 3.0 (dual x16), 1 x PCIe (x8 mode), 2 x PCIe 2.0 x1, 1 x PCI

2 SATA 6 Gb/s port, 4 x SATA 3 Gb/s

LAN: Intel 82579V Gigabit LAN controller

- 2 x Corsair Vengeance DDR3- 1600 16GB (4 x 4) kit, total 32GB memory

The case, power supply, graphical card, RAID controller and extra NIC(S) are reused. Here are some photos of the configuration:

When the hardware  configuration was done and tried to power on the system, nothing happened (black screen). The appears that BIOS of the motherboard didn’t know the i7-3820 CPU yet. The cool thing is that the motherboard has a function called “USB BIOS Flashback”. It is possible to flash the BIOS without CPU or memory installed. Here are the steps:

- Download the latest BIOS from the Asus site;

- Extract the BIOS on a USB stick;

- Rename the BIOS file, example: rename “P9X79-ASUS-0906.ROM” in “P9X79.ROM” (important);

- Place the USB stick in the USB port with the WHITE interior on the back;

- Press the BIOS flashback button for 3 seconds and the light will begin to flash;

- Don’t turn of the computer during the BIOS flash;

- When the flashing light stop, the BIOS has been complete;

After the BIOS update was finished, the system boots and I was able to install VMware ESXi and Windows Server 8.

vSphere 5 / ESXi 5 screenshots:

Hyper threading enables 8 cores	32GB memory
The onboard SATA controller is listed as Patsburg 6 Port SATA AHCI controller. Software-RAID does not work The hardware RAID controller is added as extra PCI card	The onboard Intel 82579V NIC is not supported in ESXi5. Use the procedure found here to add the NIC. Use at your own risk! The Intel 82574L NIC is added as extra PCIe card.

Physical Windows Server 8  screenshots:

The onboard Intel 82579V NIC is not recognized in Windows 8, so I used an extra NIC (Intel 82574L NIC).

Cmdlets are very powerful, that lets you automate all aspects of Hyper-V.  Here some guidance how-to find the Cmdlets you need.

To view all the Hyper-V PowerShell Cmdlets:

Get-Command -Module Hyper-V

To search for Cmdlets, for example with the name “host” in it: 

Get-Command -Module Hyper-V -Noun *host*

To get the Cmdlet syntax:

Get-VMHost -?

Get the Cmdlet syntax and available parameters, details and examples:

get-Help Get-VMHost -Full

More information over the Hyper-V Cmdlets can be found here. PowerShell 3.0 is available as Community Technology Preview (CTP) found here.