Based on the fact that ESX 4.1 is the last major release of ESX, I decided that I would make myself familiar with managing ESXi hosts. Since I monitor all my hosts via Zenoss, I figured that I needed to get snmp up and running first
Vmware
Getting Started with the VMware Management Assistant
I've seen a lot of blog posts as of late regarding the death of the Service Console (COS). The rumors are that ESX is going to be replace completely with ESXi. While most Widows/Vmware Admins probably don't care, us Linux/Vmware admins are less than happy as we want nothing to do with the Windows PowerShell. … Continue reading Getting Started with the VMware Management Assistant
Resolving SCSI Reservation Conflicts/Locks in Vsphere 4.0
A few days ago we got hit with a ton of alerts which indicated that a handful of VMs were down, then up, and down again. This cycle continued several times. At first, after a bit of digging through logs, we thought that the issue was related to scsi reservation errors, but we were already … Continue reading Resolving SCSI Reservation Conflicts/Locks in Vsphere 4.0
ESX Post Install – Enable NTP and SNMP
This post is the first in what I suspect will be a semi-long list of post-install hints and tips as I go through and start rebuilding my cluster as Vsphere 4. Hopefully I will learn a lot along the way... like for example the fact the ntp and snmp traffic is not allowed by default … Continue reading ESX Post Install – Enable NTP and SNMP
How to Configure NTP in a RHEL/CentOS Vmware Guest
HourglassSuccessful time keeping in a Virtual Machine can be a bit confusing. At times I have been told to use Vmware Tools to sync time between the Guest and the Host, and at time I have been advised to avoid this functionality and use NTP. The following information is direct from a VMwareKB article (updated, 4/16/2010) so I am going to follow their lead on this and use NTP exclusively.
Troubleshooting Performance Issues on Multiple Vcpu Virtual Machines
I've been doing a bit of research on performance issues with virtual machines that have multiple Vcpus. In my case there are several 4 Vcpu machines that often seem to have performance issues. Specifically these are Windows 2003 Virtual Machines running Cold Fusion. Found the information below in the Vmware Community Forum. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/129970?tstart=0 "An ESX … Continue reading Troubleshooting Performance Issues on Multiple Vcpu Virtual Machines
Troubleshooting Vswif0 Via the Command Line (Vsphere 4.0)
Troubleshooting network connectivity issues in ESX can be a real pain in the rear if the only method that you have to connect to your ESX host is via the command line over the ILO. In this instance a simple reboot turned into a host down with only ILO connectivity remaining. When this occurs you … Continue reading Troubleshooting Vswif0 Via the Command Line (Vsphere 4.0)