ESX/ESXi/vCenter Ports

Here is a link to a great PDF diagram outlining all of the network port requirements for your virtual environment. Great resource to have, and your firewall admin will love you! vSphere Network Ports

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Network Ports

ESX vs Hyper-V…VMware vs Microsoft

Like most others out there, I have recently started hearing the ESX/VMware vs Hyper-V/Microsoft questions popping up throughout my day. Check here to get my thoughts!

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Microsoft vs VMware

ESX/ESXi root login over SSH

This is an old one, but worthy of documentation… By default root login over SSH is disabled in ESX 3.X and vSphere 4.X. While it is best practice for security to leave this disabled, from time to time a situation [...]

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putty

ESX Best Practice – Service Console memory

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Something I’ve known the benefits of for a while, but didn’t actually make part of my standard ESX build until fairly recently, is increasing the service console memory during install to 800MB. Out of the box, VMware has given  (in both ESX 3.X and vSphere) the service console 272MB of memory. This may be fine in most cases but there’s absolutely no harm in making this change during your install.  Most systems today have plenty of memory, giving up a couple hundred MB really shouldn’t be an issue.

If you are planning on running any type of management or backup agents in your service console (dell server administrator, etc.) then this is a must.  During your inital ESX install/configuration, be sure to set your swap partition at 1600MB. This is double the maximum of 800MB of memory VMware allows you to assign to the service console. This setting can be changed once your host is up and manageable via the VI client, but does require a host reboot. 

Several times I have seen cases of hosts disconnecting from VC because the vpxa agent is utilizing all available service console memory. I have also been instructed by a couple of different vendors (for example, for vizioncores vRanger product) that slow snapshot deletion, lots of service console paging, as well as host disconnect from VC while utilizing their product is caused by lack of service console memory.

Long story short, do yoursef a favor during your initial install. Create that 1600MB swap partition, and give your service consoles 800MB of memory. You may save yourself from a complete rebuild in the future.

  1. Log in to VirtualCenter from the Virtual Infrastructure Client with a user that has administrative rights. If you don’t have Virtual Center, log in directly to the ESX Server host as root .
  2. From the Inventory select the ESX Server host.
  3. Click the Configuration tab.
  4. Click Memory.
  5. Click Properties.
  6. On the Memory window and enter 800MB for the service console parameter.
  7. Click OK.

ESX snapshot deletion times out

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First, let me say that in my dealings with ESX, a snapshot deletion process will rarely timeout if your snapshots are properly managed. Snapshots are meant to be taken before modifying the guest OS, and then removed within 2 or 3 days. Forgotten snapshots can cause a multitude of problems ranging from filling up your datastores to taking hours and hours to commit/delete. In some cases, snapshot removal can cause the hostd process of your ESX host to not respond, which may even disconnect it from virtual center temporarily.

It is also important to keep in mind that commiting multiple snapshots (hitting “delete all”) on multiple VMs will put considerable load on the service console of your host, as well as generate signifigant disk IO.

So, how do you monitor the removal of a snpashot once the task has timed out in virtual center? Easy…

When logged into an ESX server, change to the directory containing your virtual machines vmdk file (and ultimately snapshot delta). Enter the following command:

#watch “ls -Ghtu –full-time *.vmdk”

This will give you a real time view of wether or not the snapshot has been deleted. Once you no longer see the snapshot file, it’s gone!

I would also suggest either using a powershell script (via the vSphere Power CLI) or a tool like RVTools to identify any old snapshots.

vMotion issues after upgrade to vSphere

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I recently upgraded two test hosts to vSphere. Both hosts were placed in a non EVC enabled cluster. After upgrading the vmware tools and the virtual hardware version from version 4 to 7  I noticed I was no longer able to vMotion some virtual machines. Turns out that during the virtual hardware upgrade there may be CPU masks added to the virtual machine. Adding the two hosts and all of the VMs to an EVC enabled cluster fixed the issue, so I wasn’t too worried about it. Today I read KB1011294…

My new blog…

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Welcome to virtublog. I’ve been saying for months and months that I was going to start myself a blog based around virtualization, but considering there are so many of these types of blogs, I’ve been hesitant. Today I realized that with all of the new virtually related technologies I’ve been evaluating lately (vSphere, SRM, etc.), I needed a place to organize the tips and tricks I’m learning along the way. I hope to use this blog as a resource to keep track of thing I come across during my day to day activies, wether they’re virtualization related or not. If it happens someday that somebody hits this site and something I’ve posted helps them out, then this is a success!

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