Go Scalable http://goscalable.com May the cloud be with you Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:54:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 My VCAP5-DCA Beta Experience http://goscalable.com/2012/08/my-vcap5-dca-beta-experience/ http://goscalable.com/2012/08/my-vcap5-dca-beta-experience/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:07:04 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/?p=480 It’s been a while since my last post, but what better time than the present to get the momentum going again.

After two months of waiting I finally received the good news that I passed my VCAP5-DCA. And I am really humbled to have gotten this one given that I only had a few weeks to prepare. I was invited to sit the beta exam earlier this year and took the exam June 4th. Now you can understand the wait!

The exam itself was very similar to the VCAP4-DCA but I do feel that they upped the difficulty level somewhat. The VCAP5-DCA consists of 26 questions now (vs 36 for VCAP4-DCA) which is a good move as you’ll have to be superhero to finish all 36 questions. Even completing all 26 questions is a push but had I not stopped to give feedback on some of the questions I’m sure I could’ve done it. You have to keep a close eye on the clock and not get too hung up on any specific question – you can move on and come back later as you never know what the next question is – perhaps one you know? It is all about collecting maximum points.

For VCAP5 I only finished about 22 of the questions and walked out there feeling the same as I did for the VCAP4 – not knowing if I passed or not!! Also it is a very very long exam @ 3 1/2 hours. You’ll feel it afterwards and a trip to the gents will mean even less time troubleshooting and loss of concentration – so I just had to keep it in for the last hour. Watch your water intake!

The exam itself is 100% hands-on; you get 26 questions however each question can consist of multiple tasks. Some questions later in the exam are dependant on you having completed earlier one’s – other one’s are not. You can move back and forth between questions. You only get a single monitor @ 1280 x 1024 and you have to click on a special button to flip between the question and the actual RDP environment. It takes you a while to get accustomed to the environment and also as it was a beta, I was left wondering many times if something is broken by mistaken or if it was part of the exam… hopefully they have the bugs all ironed out now.

One thing that irritated me immensely is not having a taskbar at the bottom (ie windows taskbar) in the live environment. I learned this from VCAP4 – windows management is of the utmost importance!! Minimise a window and it’s gone (I never tried but was told so buy someone else so you’re on your own if you do). So you end up with windows all over the place… its fun at best.

In terms of performance of the live environment: it was ‘ok’. As there wasn’t a testing centre in Cape Town where I’m based to sit the exam I had to fly out to Johannesburg to take it – which also meant a bit more latency (the environment is hosted in the US somewhere I believe) Maybe the fact that I work remotely helped as I am used to a bit of latency but it certainly wasn’t as bad as some reviews out there – ie click on an item and wait a minute for the screen to refresh. For you guys actually in the United States – I think the performance will be just stellar. I did however try to be ‘smart’ about solving some of the issues and tried to avoid unnecessary switching of windows.

The thing that I enjoyed most about the VCAP-DCA exams is learning new hands-on skills – VMA, esxcli, everything about multi-path plugins, distributed switches, etc. And also the ‘new’ features such as Storage Profiles, Storage DRS, advanced HA settings, etc. Ensure you know them well! A lot of the exam is also command-line based, I’d say 40%+ so a lot of my time preparing was purely memorising & practising command lines and advanced options!! No matter your proficiency, I’m sure you will discover something new. Off course it is also a fantastic feeling to be ‘taken to the cleaners’, having your skill-set put to the test, and coming out victorious afterwards.

Is it worth it – absolutely!! I’d highly recommend for anyone thinking of doing it to give it a go. Lab time is key here – theoretical knowledge is good but you have to be able to demonstrate it in a live environment. If you fiddle around hunting for options you’ll waste time and lose marks.

Update: Here is a nice link that demonstrate the VCAP5-DCA lab environment:
http://mylearn.vmware.com/courseware/82526/VCAPDCA_Tutorial.swf

Good luck!

]]> http://goscalable.com/2012/08/my-vcap5-dca-beta-experience/feed/ 0 Restoring vCenter Alarms http://goscalable.com/2011/11/restoring-vcenter-alarms/ http://goscalable.com/2011/11/restoring-vcenter-alarms/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:57:31 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/11/restoring-vcenter-alarms/ If you’ve ever worked in a vSphere deployment consisting of several vCenters you probably would’ve had the need to either create your own custom vCenter alarms or to disable or delete some of the default alarms. Sometimes things can get out of sync, so here are some tips to get things back on track:

#1 Copy alarms between vCenters

Unfortunately not quite as easy as ‘copy & paste’ but there is nice PowerShell script written by the great folk @ VMware to get the job done:

Restoring and copying vCenter Server alarms
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1032660

 

#2 Restoring the Default vCenter Alarms

This is as simple as deleting all of the defined alarms and have vCenter recreate the defaults as if it were a fresh installation.

NOTE: You will have to manually re-create or copy (see solution #1 above) all custom alarms you may have defined following this procedure:

Restoring the default vCenter Server alarms
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2009166

Once you’ve removed all of the alarm definitions change the alarm version in vCenter Server:

  1. Connect to vCenter Server using the vSphere Client.
  2. Click Administration > vCenter Server Settings.
  3. Click Advanced Settings.
  4. Set alarm.version to 0.
  5. Set alarms.upgraded to false
  6. Restart the VMware VirtualCenter Server service.

All the default vCenter alarm will have been restored.

Lastly also have a look this great community reference document containing all of the vSphere alarm triggers, together with detailed instructions on how to create your own custom alarms. Pretty cool!

vSphere alarm triggers
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-12145

image

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/11/restoring-vcenter-alarms/feed/ 0 View vMotion progress from the Command-Line http://goscalable.com/2011/10/view-vmotion-progress-from-the-command-line/ http://goscalable.com/2011/10/view-vmotion-progress-from-the-command-line/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:12:06 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/10/view-vmotion-progress-from-the-command-line/ This slide was taken from the VMworld vCenter Troubleshooting Unleashed session (great session by the way and definitely worth watching). Basic symptom is that your vSphere Client shows a host communication or timeout error whilst you have a vmotion is in progress.

 

image

 

What to do? Well, what I’ve learned (and maybe someone else will find useful at some stage too) is that you can actually confirm if the vmotion is still in progress from the ESX service console by running:

  watch –d “cat /proc/vmware/migration/active”

Unfortunately this is ESX classic only. If anyone knows how to do the same from ESXi then please drop me a line in the comments. I have to say I think this is pretty neat and may just come in handy one day.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/10/view-vmotion-progress-from-the-command-line/feed/ 1 Reset vMA Networking http://goscalable.com/2011/10/reset-vma-networking/ http://goscalable.com/2011/10/reset-vma-networking/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:54:05 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/10/reset-vma-networking/ Sometimes things doesn’t work out as planned and you want to run the original network configuration wizard – just like the first time when you imported your vMA Virtual Appliance.

As it’s based on CentOS, you can try to poke around in the network configuration filesor, for the safer option, you can just run the vMA Network Configuration wizard which I’ve learned today:

cd /opt/vmware/vma/bin
sudo ./vmware-vma-netconf.pl

image
I’ve confirmed that the above works just fine with vMA 4.1. Download vMA & documentation here.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/10/reset-vma-networking/feed/ 0 vSphere 5 Compatibility Matrix http://goscalable.com/2011/09/vsphere-5-compatibility-matrix/ http://goscalable.com/2011/09/vsphere-5-compatibility-matrix/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:04:27 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/09/vsphere-5-compatibility-matrix/ With the recent release of vSphere 5 chances are you will start to plan for the big upgrade at some point if you haven’t done so already. And to help you just with that straight from the vSphere Upgrade Center you’ll notice a link to the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix.

We are running quite a large install base and still have some legacy ESX 3.x boxes hanging around. And as it turns out your hypervisor has to be at a minimum level of ESX 3.5 Update 5 to be compatible with vCenter Server 5.0 as shown here:

VMware Product Interoperability Matrix

Off course, that is not the only thing to check but is a good starting point I guess Smile. Also keep in mind that with vSphere 5 you now also have the option to migrate to ESXi 5 directly from ESX 4.x classic (NOTE: and not ESX 3.5…) So yet another reason to finally bite the bullet if you have been holding out up until now.

The tool also seem to cover off most of VMware’s products including Lab Manager, vCenter Heartbeat, Site Recovery Manager, etc. so is definitely worthwhile to keep handy. Here’s a video showing it in action when it was first released about a year ago:

 

 

Related Documents / References:

vSphere 5 Upgrade Guide
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-upgrade-guide.pdf

vSphere 5 Product Documentation
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/09/vsphere-5-compatibility-matrix/feed/ 2 Failed to create journal file provider http://goscalable.com/2011/08/failed-to-create-journal-file-provider/ http://goscalable.com/2011/08/failed-to-create-journal-file-provider/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:09:20 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/08/failed-to-create-journal-file-provider/ This is just a quick post ‘for the record’. One of our ESX clusters kept on giving the following error:

A general system error occurred: Failed to create journal file providerFailed to open /var/log/vmware/journal/1314015204.259

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

SNAGHTMLb6a7b7

After poking around on the hypervisor the VM was running on for a while I couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary so I contacted my good friend Mr. Google. VMware KB1005516 pointed straight to the issue:

This issue may be caused by:

  • Lack of resources within the VMware ESX service console.
  • Lack of disk space on the VMware ESX host.
  • Lack of disk space on the VMware VirtualCenter server.
  • An anti-virus program is running on the VirtualCenter server, which prevents access to the files located in the folder:

My vCenter had plenty of diskspace as well as the source hypervisor – however the destination hypervisor was not so lucky as /var/log was 100% full. In my instance most of the space was used by a TTY_00000000.log file which seems to be a used by Dell OpenManage. After deleting TTY_00000000.log the vCenter journal errors disappeared and the VMs could again vmotion without issue.

Also see VMware KB1003564 for a few tips & tricks on how to investigate diskspace issues on an ESX or ESXi host.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/08/failed-to-create-journal-file-provider/feed/ 0 How to restart ESXi management agents http://goscalable.com/2011/08/how-to-restart-esxi-management-agents/ http://goscalable.com/2011/08/how-to-restart-esxi-management-agents/#comments Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:49:56 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/08/how-to-restart-esxi-management-agents/ So out of the blue one of our ESXi hosts in the lab started to give the following error:

Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host. A general error occurred: vmodl.fault.SystemError. This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS

DRS resource settings error

To cut a long story short, I wanted to reboot the management agents on this box to see if that will help things along but since it’s running ESXi the normal ‘service mgmt-vmware restart” yada-yada it not applicable anymore.

After a bit of hunting, and if you have Tech Support Mode enabled, then its a case of simply SSH’ing to the server and then to run: 

 /sbin/services.sh restart

Here it is in action:

Restarting ESXi Management Agents

 

Off course this can also easily be done if you have console access to the hypervisor. Here’s a great video demonstrating just that:

How to restart management agents on an ESXi hypervisor

 

Following the restart the host temporarily lost vCenter connectivity (which was to be expected) after which it reconnect automatically with the DRS error now history Smile

References:

Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003490

Service mgmt-vmware restart may not restart hostd
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005566

The host does not have sufficient memory resources to satisfy the reservation.
http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/the-host-does-not-have-sufficient-memory-resources-to-satisfy-the-reservation/

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/08/how-to-restart-esxi-management-agents/feed/ 0 Hyper-V Component Architecture (with SP1) http://goscalable.com/2011/06/hyper-v-component-architecture-with-sp1/ http://goscalable.com/2011/06/hyper-v-component-architecture-with-sp1/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 07:12:04 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/06/hyper-v-component-architecture-with-sp1/ Although the original Hyper-V Component Architecture poster has been out for a while, this one in particular was fairly recently updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and again caught my eye whilst digging through ‘ye old archive’.

It focuses on architecture, snapshots, live migration, virtual networking, storage, RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Component Architecture with SP1

Download link here

If you love this sort of thing, then also have a look at some of the other Windows 2008 R2 component posters:

Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Components

Windows Server 2008 Feature Components

Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster

I think these look great and if you have a big enough printer, having a component architecture poster of anything on your wall is just simply cool! It would be fantastic if VMware could have similar for vSphere/ESX.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/06/hyper-v-component-architecture-with-sp1/feed/ 0 Best Practices for uninstalling vCenter Server http://goscalable.com/2011/06/best-practices-for-uninstalling-vcenter-server/ http://goscalable.com/2011/06/best-practices-for-uninstalling-vcenter-server/#comments Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:42:04 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/06/best-practices-for-uninstalling-vcenter-server/ Another day, another best practice. I’ve been secretly collecting these in the background hoping to do a nice page with them all listed when time allows. But for now, here’s how to ‘properly’ uninstall vCenter Server:

      1. Uninstall vCenter Server and its components.
      2. Delete all subfolders within C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure.
      3. Uninstall VMwareVCMSDS
      4. Delete the ADAM folder located at C:\Windows.
      5. If running Windows 2008, remove the LDAP role from Server Manager.
      6. Delete these registry keys:

        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/VMware Inc./VMware VirtualCenter
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/VMware Inc./VMware Infrastructure
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/VMware Inc./WOW432NODE/VMware VirtualCenter
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/VMware Inc./WOW432NODE/VMware Infrastructure

      7. Remove vCenter Server from the domain and add it again to the domain.
      8. Reinstall the VMware VirtualCenter Server service.

KB article here.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/06/best-practices-for-uninstalling-vcenter-server/feed/ 1 Purple Screen of Death of the Day http://goscalable.com/2011/05/purple-screen-of-death-of-the-day/ http://goscalable.com/2011/05/purple-screen-of-death-of-the-day/#comments Mon, 30 May 2011 10:56:09 +0000 Andre Smith http://goscalable.com/2011/05/purple-screen-of-death-of-the-day/ We don’t get to see too many of these lately, especially on the ESX 4.1 platform. Here is today’s ESX Purple Screen of Death (PSOD) which started to occur following a memory upgrade on a Dell PowerEdge R810:

ESX41PSOD

Mike Laverick from rtfm-ed.co.uk also has a nice collection on his PSOD page.

]]> http://goscalable.com/2011/05/purple-screen-of-death-of-the-day/feed/ 0