esx

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)....

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...

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....

We filed support requests with IBM and VMware and went through a very lengthy process without any results. Each of our hosts had the following iSCSI HBAs: QLA4010 QLA4050C A while ago we found out QLA4010 is not on the ESX 3.5 HCL even though it runs with a legacy driver. As our virtual environment grew we noticed storage performance lagging. This was particularly evident with our Oracle 10G Database server running our staging instance of Banner Operational Data Store....

I have no problem making it clear I’m relatively new to the virtual world. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn fast. Here are a few tools I’ve used to become a better VI Administrator: Training. Pros: Certified knowledge from the source. We hosted a VMware Jumpstart, and that training is without a doubt my catalyst into the rest of the virtual world. Training teaches you how to talk the talk so that other sources of knowledge are useful....

Most of this was taken from this site: http://conshell.net/wiki/index.php/Linux_P2V Up front work Determine exactly what you’re doing, and the resources you’ll need on the VMware side. as root: sfdisk -s /dev/hda: 39070080 total: 39070080 blocks To find the size in GB, divide by 1024 twice. 39070080/1024/1024 = 37.260 GB Partition layout - know exactly the partitions, sizes and FS types. This can be gleaned from the output of `fdisk -l /dev/sda` and the content of /etc/fstab....

Since I enabled alarms in VirtualCenter on 10/07/2008 we have encountered 14 seperate false alarms regarding host connectivity. Here’s the alarm: Target: hostname.goes.here Old Status: Green New Status: Red Current value: Host connection state - (State = Not responding) Alarm: Host connection state ([Red State Is Equal To notResponding]) Description: Alarm Host connection state on hostname.goes.here changed from Green to Red Here’s what we went through with support. Sending Diagnostics from VC Found out we are running an unsupported HBA (QLA4010’s are not supported in ESX 3....

We had some storage issues. We still have some storage issues, but it’s getting better. Here’s what we’ve fixed: Overbooked storage Storage Switch Failure Tolerance Adapter Failure Tolerance Overbooked Storage Units The most immediate issue that could be addressed was the storage bloat. This did not require additional hardware. Previously, our storage allocated for VMware was as follows: VMFSLun1 (600 GB) VMFSLun2 (900 GB) All 30 virtual machines the university ran (46 individual virtual hard disks) were running on two LUNs....