VMware ESXi problem with NIC teaming and CARP with virtual firewall/router

Very tricky one to track down why a failover firewall configuration would never promote it's CARP IP's to MASTER status.

Turns out you must only have a single NIC on a vSwitch with a guest VM being used as a MASTER for CARP, otherwise will always show as BACKUP.

Can't even have a NIC in the standby list, 2nd NIC has to be completely removed.

There may well be a setting in the advanced options somewhere that might get this to work, if anyone has done this please let us know!

Setting up a High Availability NAS/SAN using Openfiler

Setting up a High Availability NAS/SAN using Openfiler

Run through on configuring DRDB to run a high availabilty cluster using Openfiler

http://www.the-mesh.org/tiki-index.php?page=OpenFilerHaSetup

Getting higher iSCSI throughput on VMware

As we are using iSCSI SANS at our datacentres, this is a very interesting article on getting higher iSCSI throughput under VMWare.

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-iscsi-customers-using-vmware.html

rPath appliance setup

If like us you don't have a DHCP server running at your datacentres, then an rPath appliance can be tricky to setup.

Easiest thing to do is edit these files at the console to get a static IP assigned.

vi /etc/sysconfig/network
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=xxxxx
GATEWAY=1.2.3.4

vi /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 1.2.3.4
nameserver 4.3.2.1

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=1.2.3.255
IPADDR=1.2.3.4
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=1.2.3.0
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet

Restart networking and then you can get to the appliance config screen with your static IP.

Also the admin is usually out of date so as root you'll need to do a conary updateall and a restart to get all the latest updates.

Low cost HP ESXi server for lab testing

If you need a cheap as chips server for lab testing but still want to use an official HP server that is on the ESX/ESXi HCL then look no further than the ML350 G5.

It can be picked up for £571.76 from imldirect.com.

This is a low spec dual core Xeon but it does have the HP Smart Array E200i and will support 6 SAS/SATA drives, only comes with 1GB RAM but RAM is cheap.

We'll be using in our lab with the HP USB embedded ESXi for testing etc.

HP product code is 470064-100.

Convert old VMWare server disk directly to ESX/ESXi format

Rather than use Converter which isn't altogether reliable especially with converting multi-disk servers, convert the disk directly and upload straight to the datastore.

Here's how to make the transition easy, assuming all your disks use LSILogic or BusLogic drives:

On your vmware server host, use "vmware-vdiskmanager -r (source disk path) -t 2 (destination disk path)" to convert your disk to "monolithicFlat"
Open "disk.vmdk" it is just a text file
Change "monolithicFlat" to "vmfs" and change "FLAT" (note the case!) below that to "vmfs".

Just add the disk to the ESX/ESXi VM and boot!

Reference: IIS6 Metabase properties

Force WSUS update

Force WSUS client update

here is what you would put in a script to force immediate WSUS checkup by client:
--------
net stop wuauserv

REG DELETE "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update" /v LastWaitTimeout /f

REG DELETE "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update" /v DetectionStartTime /f

Reg Delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update" /v NextDetectionTime /f

net start wuauserv
-----------
A more lightweight command:
wuauclt /detectnow

Moving VM's in VMware ESXi via SSH

VMware ESXi is a great product but it present's a number of challenges because of its highly streamlined feature set. Lets say for example you need to move a VM from one VMware server to another and don't have an NFS server or iSCSI target. And of course you don't have any of the licensed features like Backup or Vmotion either. Lets add another challenge that you only have SSH access to the system. Sounds like a fun challenge already.

Both machines need SSH enabling, then in the directory where the disk files are stored you can use SCP to copy to the other machines datastore.

scp * root@hostname:/vmfs/volumes/datastorename/vm-dir

Interesting binary diff tool, would help enormously for our daily backup's to SAN

Need to investigate tools such as these to save space on offsite daily backups especially databases.

Do a monthly full on first of each month then daily backups are diffed against the original. At any point a previous day backup can be regenerated from the 2 files.

I'll have to do some testing on the many terrabytes of storage to see just how much we could save! In theory savings of at least 50% size could be possible, especially with large mainly static databases and site files.

UPDATE:

Tried this and found that especially databases are never exactly the same data in the same place so it doesn't quite work out, also takes a very long time and so not really usable for daily backups.

This is not really as critical as SQL Server 2005 now has differential backup and site files are backed up with a full monthly and then incremental daily changes. This is keeping our backup sizes down small enough to not run out of space on our backup NAS drives.