2009 May 26 - Tue

VMWare Datastore Browser

I'm sure the VMWare people have hidden this on purpose... just so you think you are forced into installing command line utilities or buying licensing for their management products.

Anyway, I have a couple of ESXi 3.5 U4 servers installed. I created a Virtual Machine on one server, then used the SSH scp command to copy the Virtual Machine from one host to the other. That is all well and good, but how do you get it to show in inventory?

The answer to that is to run the VMWare Infrastructure Client. That is no problem. The trick is to click on the Summary tab while in Inventory mode, and right click on the datastore. One can then browse the datastore. And one can right click on a .vmx file to register the Virtual Machine in Inventory. That same menu allows one to upload and download images from a local computer.

I think it would have been more intuitively obvious to have the datastore(s) listed in the left hand tree, but I guess that would make too much sense.

Some random notes on ESXi 3.5 U4:

• One needs to purchase at least the foundation license in order to get the remote command line tools to work
• When in the ESXi console, one can use vmkfstools to create and resize virtual drives. The GUI does not allow the 'thin' command, but the vmkfstools command does. 'thin' is the ability to indicate what the overall size is, but not to preallocate all the space necessary all at once.
• When using an Asterisk based server in VMWare, allocate at least 500MHz to the server in order to maintain non slipping time. More VMWare Timekeeping Best Practices
• Veeam FastSCP: Veeam FastSCP- VMware ESX/ESXi managment tool FastSCP provides a fast, secure and easy way to manage files and bulk copy VMs across your VMware ESX environment.

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2009 May 24 - Sun

VMWare on HP DL360 G6

I recently acquired a couple of decently configured HP DL360 G6 servers. Each boots VMWare directly from an embedded USB Token. Now that is a server that works right out of the box. And it did.

It is an excellent ability to be able to use HP's management tools to view the console remotely. I've not laid hands on the server, but I have almost complete visibility into the unit. There are about 20 different temperature sensors, I can monitor and cap power usage, evaluate processor utilization, and much more. Remote access to CDRoms is also available through a virtual media Java mechanism. I'm using that now to upgrade to U4 of ESXi.

HP has their own special image and after a bunch of searching, I found it at Software Depot Home.

I had tried the U4 version from VMWare's site, but it wouldn't install itself in the correct spot. That is when I figured that HP must have a special version. Don't try to install HP's v8.20 of management tools either. They are frought with installation problems.

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Enable SSH on VMWare ESXi

VMMWare ESXi is installed and started with SSH disabled. To enable it is an unsupported option, as it allows a user access to the console, operating system and associated file system.

My primary reason for accessing the VMWare ESXi file system (vmfs), is the ease in which one can get ISO images on to the system. When running the VMWare Infrastructure Client, during the creation of a virtual machine, the virtual CD Drive can be attached to an ISO image resident in the DataStore, with the DataStore basially being the vmfs file system.

So to get read/write access to vmfs, one needs to activate SSH on VMWare:

• At the console of ESXi host, press Alt-F1 to access bypass the simple management window and gain access to the console window.
• There is no prompt and no text echo, but type unsupported and hit the enter key.
• Enter the password you've assigned for root.
• A prompt of ~ # will become visible.
• Use vi to edit /etc/inetd.conf.
• Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #, and save the file.
• Use ps | grep inetd to find the existing inetd process id.
• Restart the process with kill -HUP id.
• You will now have access via SSH.

After logging in, the default datastore can be found at /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1. I created a sub-directory there named ISO to hold my ISO images. The directory and files are accessible from the VMWare Infrastructure Client when creating a new Virtual Machine. ISO files can be retrieved with the wget command.

I havn't done it yet, but one could add a .ssh directory on /root, do the appropriate magic (covered in another article), and login with an ssh key rather than root password.

Much of the information here was extracted from a couple of web sites, with VM-Help being the primary one. It's forum entries have additional useful information.

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2008 Apr 25 - Fri

Running VMWare with LVM on Linux

In order to get a slight speed boost out of an OS resident in a VM, the hosted OS can be made to use raw disks or partitions.

On my computer, I use Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to manage my partitions. VMWare doesn't know how to decode those types of partitions.

I first looked to vmware-bdwrapper as a work around. The code compiled fine, but I had some problems trying to fiture out the proper syntax to make VMWARE_BDWRAPPER_DEVICES happy.

I then gave vmgbd a try. This is a VMWare generic block device patch. This one worked much easier. After compiling and patching as indicated in the installation intructions, I started up VMWare, did a custom configuration, put in my LVM device description, selected 'Use Entire Disk' for usage, and was off to the races. The caveat at this point is that I had to run VMWare as root. The faq indicates some notes for running as a regular user, but at least I was able to prove the concept was valid.

As a side note, here is a A Beginner's Guide To LVM. Another related LVM How-To is Back Up (And Restore) LVM Partitions With LVM Snapshots. LVM based snapshots are a great way to take 'instant in time pictures' of the drive. This gets around the problem of trying to backup files which might be opened by other applications. Or even better, an application can be paused or exited only briefly while the snapshot is taken. Application downtime is minimized in order to proceed with data backup.

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