About a month ago I moved to Texas to take on a new exciting opportunity and work on cloud computing with Rackspace. While I will no longer be working on VMware products as a part of my day to day, the virtualization concepts are largely the same. With such a large personal and professional change, a rebooting of Virtual Andy is necessary. Virtual Andy’s new direction can be summarized with a paraphrased interview with Paul Maritz:...

Over the past few years our organization has been tried to adopt a pricing model for providing virtual machines. We are a small college with several semi-independent units to support. We need to be able to quickly quote, chargeback, and fulfill our incoming requests. This is a very big update to the post I made in December 2009 entitled VMware Expert System with PowerCLI and Excel. Problem 1: Solved. Problem 2: In progress…...

I’ve run into the issue lately where P2Ving a Windows 2000 machine will result in a blue screen when the new virtual machine boots. [A google search shows many others with this problem](communities.vmware.com windows 2000 blue screen p2v). The root cause of the issue is related to Update 1 of Service Pack 4. Luckily, with vCenter Converter, not VMware Converter Standalone, VMware delivers a nice fix for this issue. Follow normal steps in vCenter Converter - import a machine, setup your source, and as the Converter Agent is installed you’ll be prompted for a location to the VMware SCSI Disk Driver (scsiport....

Banner Unified Digital Campus (Banner UDC) is the most used administrative suite of applications specific to higher education. A specially crafted Google search shows almost 30,000 different universities running Banner UDC! If you are wondering if Banner UDC can be virtualized the answer is YES. VMware’s website has very little information about virtualizing Banner UDC… there’ just info about virtualizing Banner Xtender, the integrated document imaging solution. Many sysadmins will have difficulty finding a definitive answer to the “Are we supported on VMware?...

First post in months. Hopefully I’ll have more to post on in the next few weeks. Onto more pressing issues… “The N Series VMware ESX Host Utilities” have a couple of ISOs that have scripts for tweaking the guest OS disk timeouts. From the IBM Redbook IBM System Storage N series and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices: This is a job for PowerCLI. Inspired from Jase’s script. Considerations for Linux: Use an account that can do passwordless sudo (or root- you don’t have to have root SSH enabled for Invoke-VMscript)....

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post, but I couldn’t keep this to myself: From the VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 for vCenter Server 4.1 Release Notes: What’s New The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new functionality (previously found only in vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.x): Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux sources including: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2....

This post is a writeup of a project for a master’s class in Decision Support Systems at Murray State. This is my first dive into VMware PowerCLI aside from some one shots. All feedback is welcome. Our Problems Problem 1: Servers are not being virtualized due to a decentralized procurement process A decentralized server procurement process presents many problems to an organization. There are many gains with standardizing OS/hardware platforms. Problem 2: Servers are not being virtualized because knowledge is required to make “Virtualize/Don’t Virtualze” decision...

It’s been months since I’ve updated. It’s been a busy summer but I’m delivering some new posts: iSCSI SAN performance woes in ESX 3.5 ESX 3.5 -> ESX 3.5 U4 and Virtual Center 2.5 -> vCenter 2.5 U4 ESX 3.5 U4 Kickstart for IBM xSeries and QLA4050 While the big boys are at VMworld the small shops are back to getting things done.

This was our shop’s first real dive into kickstarts. The material I read in Visible Ops really emphasized track able/repeatable processes for setting up systems. One great way to do that is through kickstart scripts and some kind of version control system. We used Subversion. I’ve edited a few parts out of this, but I spent a while finding several kickstart scripts that accomplished parts of what we needed. I highly customized one for our environment....

Here’s the ‘script’ read from while doing our ESX upgrades: In general: Do lots of up front work with kickstarts and analysis Each ESX Host Put host in maintenance mode Shut Down File request with storage administrator to make only boot LUN is visible to host as we are about to do some potentially damaging operations Put in new HBA (QLA4050) Boot to floppy diskette with QLA 4050 BIOS firmware updates Upgrade HBA BIOS iFlash If the system detects a QLx40xx controller, it displays the following message: QLx40xx Adapter found at I/O address: xxxxxxxx You will need to enter the adapter address Select “FB” to flash the BIOS....