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…...
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...
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....
Yesterday I made a mistake. We have a virtual machine set up to test Spacewalk which runs CentOS. It has a virtual disk for this OS on datastore1 and a virtual disk for the data on datastore2. datastore1 had 11 gb free and datastore2 had 300 gb free. I snapshotted the VM, we did some work, and I committed the snapshot. Except it didn’t work. Now the machine won’t stay booted....
AutoPager is a Firefox extension which follows the “Next” links on lots of pages and loads them inline. If you’re already using the extension, go to AutoPager -> Update Setting -> Update Setting Online. The authors just added VMTN forums and NetApp Technology Network to their supported sites. This means if you’re reading a long thread you don’t have to click next. You can just keep scrolling – the next page is loaded inline....
In our organization, the storage administrator is completely separate from the VI Administrator. This process requires some coordination with the storage administrator. Here is our process for restoring a VM from our SAN snapshots. A lot of this information was gleamed from Scott Lowe’s posts on FlexClones. Unfortunately, we do not have SMVI (the jaw dropping video demo is here) at this moment. It appears NetApp has made this process trivial with that application....
Here’s my PlanetV12n Wish List (in no particular order): Provide feed customization. Strategy/Administration/Business Case/etc. Virtualization has turned into an extremely broad topic. Too much noise in the feed reader is a loss of value to PlanetV12n. Provide more virtualization related feeds from vendors like EMC, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. Require full articles. If there is resistance on this, just politely remind publishers that advertising is available via RSS Give us the option of having OPML output of PlanetV12n....
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....