Well I had some serious issues going to vSphere 4.1 from v4.0U2. The steps for the upgrade seemed straightforward:

1. Upgrade vCenter Server
2. Upgrade ESX

Well, it was not all that easy. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade: Going to 4.1 (Updated)”

In my last post “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail” I realized that I badly configured my SAN from the start. So I bit the bullet and started a process to change the number of spindles per LUN to 11 of 12 disks, with the 12 disk being a hot spare. Performance on SAN LUN is directly proportional to the number of spindles in use by the RAID set and my old setup had 3 Disk LUNs instead of using virtual LUNs ontop of one larger physical LUN.

Now that I know how to configure this, I wanted to make use of the higher performance. To do this, I had to

1. first offload all VMs from the SAN to some other storage by way of SVMotion
2. backup any RDMs I have
3. update the LUN layout of the IBM DS3400 to be 11 disks in a Raid 5 with virtual LUNs presented to ESX
4. SVMotion the VMs to the new LUNs Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade: Rearranging LUNs for Better Performance: Updated”

Recently my IBM DS3400 SAN gave an alert that the controller batteries had to be changed out. So after ordering some batteries, receiving them, it was time to perform a battery exchange.   The steps are quite straight forward but still require a bit of forethought. I run  IBM System Storage Manager 10 from within a VM running Windows 2008 R2, it is actually my VMware vCenter Server. In order, for me to exchange the batteries the IBM System Storage Manager 10 must be able to talk to the controllers either over the network or over the fibre connection. Since this is a VM, all I can do is control the SAN over the network at this time. Continue reading “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail”

I recently donated the last of my DL380 G3 systems to Keefe Technical Highschool for use as their ESX v3 Cluster. The only issue was that this machine was also my last remaining server that I had yet to virtualized and it was my backup server with quite a bit of disk space, connection to my tape libraries and my DISC Blu-Safe backup library. To virtualize my backup server was going to be difficult at best as I am switching entirely from Tape devices to Blu-ray devices.

I explained this choice in another post but suffice it to say, I need to be able to connect this USB device to a VM and then use it as part of my backup solution. This required a bit more work than before as now I had to include in my vNetwork a USB over IP device that would allow not only my printer but my Blu-Safe to be seen by multiple and individual VMs.  For this I chose the Belkin FL5009 5-port USB over IP device. While it has its issues, such as not working across a NAT, it does however allow me to share my printer with other VMs while locking the Blu-Safe to a very specific VM. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade – The Backup Saga”

Thanks to Cody Bunch of the twittersphere helped me to solve the latest mystery within my vSphere environment: vCenter would fail to start after a reboot of the Windows 2008 vCenter Server VM. This has been plaguing me since I started this process, but it finally needed to be fixed!

The problem is that VMware Update Manager and VMware vCenter Server collide when they are both trying to access the MSSQL 2008 database for some odd reason.

The solution is fairly easy, add a service dependency on VMware Update Manager so that it requires VMware vCenter to start first. To do this open up regedit and navigate to HKLMSystemControlSet001servicesvmware-ufad-vci key and add a new Multi String Value named ‘DependOnService’. Give this new registry element a value of ‘vpxd’.

This will now place a dependency on VUM such that it requires vCenter to start first. Now on reboots, vCenter starts properly and I no longer have to manually start the service.

Well I got bit by the 2nd disk issue that occurs with hardware 7 on Windows 2008 Datacenter server. It was very troublesome until the twitter-sphere pointed me to an article written by vStu about this issue. Yet this did not entirely fix the problem. It took some more twitter-sphere assistance to find the solution to the problem.

As vStu discovered all virtual machine disk files (VMDKs) are presented to VMs as SAN disks and Windows 2008 changed how SAN disks were handled, in effect they are offline until you set them online. I kept getting a pesky, “Disk is Offline because policy was set by an administrator” message. Microsoft’s website does not even know about this error message apparently. But the solution is a combination of websites. First you need to change how Windows 2008 sees the SAN devices, then you need to clear a readonly flag, then you are good to go. Using ‘diskpart’ enter the following commands: Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade – 2nd Disk Issues with Hardware 7”