Kris Nijs @ Business IT Solutions

Pictures will say more than words in this case:

You can download this vSphere client plugin at the XtraVirt website: http://xtravirt.com/vsphere-client-rdp-plug-in

Kris Nijs Vmware, vCenter

In our Vmware View environment, we had some old virtual desktops left into the View Manager console.
After trying to delete those old desktops from ‘Desktop Sources’ in the Manager console, I got this error:

Failed to remove VM: /CARGLASS/vm/Vmware View/…/PC01 from SVI inventory – Fail to connect to SVI: https://OldvCenterServer:8443 – The message with To ‘https://OldvCenterServer:8443/SviService/v2_0′ cannot be processed at the receiver, due to an AddressFilter mismatch at the EndpointDispatcher. Check that the sender and receiver’s EndpointAddresses agree.

There’s no possibility to delete the old desktops using the Administrator console…you have to use ADAM-adsiedit:

* Start ADAM ADSI edit on the View Connection Server
* Choose Connect to… and make a new connection to DC=vdi,DC=vmware,DC=int like this:

* Go to OU=Servers, and now you can see all the virtual desktops activated in View…
* Each line presents a virtual desktop in View…so navigate to the properties of each to check the name of the old virtual desktops in the ‘Description’ attribute:

* Delete the lines that present the old virtual desktops and they will not be visible anymore in the View Manager console!

Kris Nijs View, Vmware

At the dutch VMUG 2009 event, Eric Sloof (www.ntpro.nl) gave a very nice presentation of the Virtualization Ecoshell, and from that moment this tool became  indispensable for!

It’s a freeware desktop application that simplifies the daily administration of increasingly complex virtual environments. Powered by PowerGUI by Quest Software, Virtualization EcoShell leverages Windows PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI to enable administrators to easily administer their environments with virtualizaiton PowerShell scripts.

Kris Nijs Geen categorie

I think that SQL 2005 Express Edition is the most famous database chosen by ‘’smaller’ companies that work with a Vmware virtual Infrastructure.
This free database platform is perfect to use for ESX-environments with 5 ESX-hosts maximum. One of the most important limitations of this Express version are the maintenance features which are not possible within the SQL Management Studio…

For scheduled backups p.ex, you will need the commandline, but also here there are not much possibilities to maintain your backup schedules…

I discovered the following tool, and this one answered my needs in this: SQL scheduler 2.0
Features:

• Supports all versions of SQL Server 2000 and 2005
• Supports unlimited SQL Server instances with an unlimited number of jobs.
• Schedule SQL Server maintenance tasks: backups, index rebuilds, integrity checks, etc.
• Runs as Windows Service
• Email notifications on job success and failure
• And more…

You can download this free tool from here: http://www.lazycoding.com/products.aspx

Register this software as a Windows service and schedule your SQL backups within a GUI interface!

Kris Nijs Geen categorie

For those of you who may have noticed the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the taskbar after upgrading your VMs to virtual hardware version 7, this is normal behaviour!

                                       
 
It’s  caused by a very nice and new feature in vSphere - ”hot plug” of items like vNICS and SCSIadapters.

This feature is very nice for most VM’s, but for servers where many users log in (terminal servers) it could be a wish to disable this feature.

To disable this, you need to add a row in the VM “Options”:

Edit Settings on the VM, and go to the “Options” tab. Select “General” in the pane on the left, and select “Configuration Parameters” on the pane on the right. From there, select “Add Row” and enter “devices.hotplug” and provide a VALUE of “false”:

Kris Nijs Vmware, vCenter

At one of my customers, we upgraded the vCenter SQL database from SQL Express 2005 to SQL 2005 Standard Edition.

Nothing spectacular you should say, but after that VirtualCenter v2.5 U4 was not showing all performance statistics for my VM’s anymore. It was possible to see live stats for e.g. CPU and memory usage, but changing the chart options to ‘weekly’ or ‘monthly’ resulted in a ‘Performance data is currently not available for this entity’.

In SQL server there are three stat-rollup-jobs (which are the ones creating the perf stats in VCenter) which were not automatically created during the upgrade. These had to be added manually following this KB article from VMware.
After running the SQL statements, these jobs in SQL server Agent were added again:

Now you can wait a couple of hours until the scheduled jobs will start, or run them manually from SQL Server Management Studio…

Kris Nijs Vmware, vCenter

When you like to do Storage Vmotion of a VM, and this VM has one or more Independent Disks, you are not allowed to do the migration.
All the disks have to be Persistent, but in the vSphere client it’s not possible to do this when the VM is powered on.

You need PowerCLI to realize this:

Connect-VIserver vCenterservername

Get-VM “vmname” | % {Get-HardDisk -VM $_ | Where {$_.Persistence -eq “IndependentPersistent”} | `% {Set-HardDisk -HardDisk $_ -Persistence “Persistent” -Confirm:$false} }

Now, all the disks of that VM became Persistent on the fly, and you are ready do the Storage vMotion!

Kris Nijs Geen categorie

After installing Exchange 2010 virtual in a vSphere Vm, and rebooting the Exchange server for maintenance, I got the error that the Exchange System Attendent service and Information Store couldn’t start anymore because of time issues…

I saw this error in Windows event viewer:

Unable to initialize the Information Store service because  the clocks on the client and server are skewed. This may be caused by a time change either in the client or the server, and may require a reboot of that computer. Verify that your domain is properly configured and  is currently online.

I checked time sync for my domain controllers and Exchange server, but everything seemed to be in place on that level…

After research, I saw that my Exchange server and domain controller (NTP) were on 2 different ESX hosts which had time differences.
Even when time synchronizing in Vmware Tools was disabled for all my VMs, and time was synchronized at domain-level, Exchange has some difficulties when ESX hosts are not in sync.

I put the same NTP-server on all my ESX-hosts, synced them all, and Exchange System Attendent service/Information Store started again…

Problem solved!

Kris Nijs Vmware

I would like to do some finetuning in the Vmware Datarecovery appliance at one of my customers. Vmware made it possible to bring a datarecovery.ini file into the appliance:

1. Log in to the datarecovery appliance with the credentials:
   Default Username: root
   Default Password: vmw@re
   
   
2. Stop datarecovery with the command: service datarecovery stop
   
   
3. Create the file /var/vmware/datarecovery/datarecovery.ini and populate it with the appropriate options . For more information, see the File Options section.Here is an example of a datarecovery.ini file: 

   [Options]
   SetVCBLogging=7
   DisableHotaddCopy=1

                  !! Note: Any option that is not listed in the file uses the default value.

    4. Start datarecovery with the command: service datarecovery start

Here you can find the datarecovery.ini options:

Kris Nijs Vmware

vLogView is a free windows application from XtraVirt to easily read, search and bundle your vmware ESX log files. 

You can download it for free at http://xtravirt.com/user?destination=/xd10132

Check it out!!

Kris Nijs Vmware