Currently working on a cloud platform for an ISP and found a great command line tool for your ESXi hosts to see how your storage is performing. SSH into one of your servers and run ESXTOP and press the D key.
This shows usful information like how long a storage command has spent in the kernel v's the amount of time that it has spent going to the device.
See link below for further information:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008205
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Thursday, 20 February 2014
Installing vCenter 5.5 Client on Windows 2012 R2
Hi all,
I had to install vCenter Client on a Windows 2012 R2 server for a customer and what a pain it turns out to be. If you just run the installer you get an error message saying "Internal Error 28173. -2146498298" which in plain English means that it doesn't have access to the Microsoft .Net framework 3.5 as this isn't installed as standard on a windows 2012 R2 box.
So the next step is to install .Net 3.5; you go about this by adding a feature. .Net 3.5 is one of the 1st items on this list, but if you just tick it and next next next all the way through the install, the install will fail. You need the windows installation DVD to actually install this and on the last option for the install at the bottom of the screen there is an option "specify an alternative source path", click this and enter X:\sources\sxs (where X is there letter of your DVD drive). When you next through the remaining sections this will now install correctly.
Talk about making something that should be a 2 minute job completly overly complicated!
I had to install vCenter Client on a Windows 2012 R2 server for a customer and what a pain it turns out to be. If you just run the installer you get an error message saying "Internal Error 28173. -2146498298" which in plain English means that it doesn't have access to the Microsoft .Net framework 3.5 as this isn't installed as standard on a windows 2012 R2 box.
So the next step is to install .Net 3.5; you go about this by adding a feature. .Net 3.5 is one of the 1st items on this list, but if you just tick it and next next next all the way through the install, the install will fail. You need the windows installation DVD to actually install this and on the last option for the install at the bottom of the screen there is an option "specify an alternative source path", click this and enter X:\sources\sxs (where X is there letter of your DVD drive). When you next through the remaining sections this will now install correctly.
Talk about making something that should be a 2 minute job completly overly complicated!
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Cisco VIC 1225 with VMware | Redundant Networking Problem
Hi all,
I have been installing some Cisco C220 servers with the VIC 1225 CNA (converged network adapter) for a local company. As part of the installation these servers were connected to a pair of Nexus 5K's with the CNA used for both fiber channel and 10gbps ethernet for VMware ESXi 5.1.
The connectivity was pretty standard to any installation of this type with one 10 gig link going to one switch and the other going to the second switch, exactly like if this was a 1 gig implementation with catalyst switches. So i installed VMware and as part of the default installation vmware takes the first network card and uses that as its management interface and also uses the MAC address of that NIC for the MAC address of the management console. FINE! But that will come back and trouble me later on.
So i give the management interface a static IP address and connect using the vSphere client and all's going well until the point where i add the second NIC, and all connectivity to the host was lost! So i connect the CIMC and run the test network connectivity and everything fails. So i remove one of the NIC's and everything comes back up again. So after lots and lots of testing and nothing working when everything looked correct, we resulted in logging a support call with Cisco.
It turns out that there is currently a fault on the VIC 1225 where by, even though all the vNIC's are in promiscuous mode, if one port see's the MAC address of another vNIC it doesn't forward the packet. I have been told that there is a fix on the way and should be available in September.
So the solution, if you get this as a problem is to delete the default VMware management interface and create a brand new one, this is given a VMWare MAC address stating in 00 and is therefore not a MAC address that appears on the VIC. Add your two network to this new management interface and everything works as you would expect.
Thanks for reading and i hope this was of use to someone.
I have been installing some Cisco C220 servers with the VIC 1225 CNA (converged network adapter) for a local company. As part of the installation these servers were connected to a pair of Nexus 5K's with the CNA used for both fiber channel and 10gbps ethernet for VMware ESXi 5.1.
The connectivity was pretty standard to any installation of this type with one 10 gig link going to one switch and the other going to the second switch, exactly like if this was a 1 gig implementation with catalyst switches. So i installed VMware and as part of the default installation vmware takes the first network card and uses that as its management interface and also uses the MAC address of that NIC for the MAC address of the management console. FINE! But that will come back and trouble me later on.
So i give the management interface a static IP address and connect using the vSphere client and all's going well until the point where i add the second NIC, and all connectivity to the host was lost! So i connect the CIMC and run the test network connectivity and everything fails. So i remove one of the NIC's and everything comes back up again. So after lots and lots of testing and nothing working when everything looked correct, we resulted in logging a support call with Cisco.
It turns out that there is currently a fault on the VIC 1225 where by, even though all the vNIC's are in promiscuous mode, if one port see's the MAC address of another vNIC it doesn't forward the packet. I have been told that there is a fix on the way and should be available in September.
So the solution, if you get this as a problem is to delete the default VMware management interface and create a brand new one, this is given a VMWare MAC address stating in 00 and is therefore not a MAC address that appears on the VIC. Add your two network to this new management interface and everything works as you would expect.
Thanks for reading and i hope this was of use to someone.
Monday, 13 May 2013
Installing ESXi onto new Dell Servers
Hi all,
just a quick post, i've recently had to install ESXi onto some new Dell server (R720 and the 1u equivalent) for some clients. I normally download the latest release from VMware and burn it to CD before i go to site to save some time, but this has caught me out with the new Dell Servers.
What you will find is that when the ESXi disk starts to boot you get an error message stating that there are no network cards in the server (even though i had on this occasion 2x quad port broadcom NIC's). What you need to do is go to Dell's website, enter in the server tag for the server you have purchased and got to the enterprise solutions part of the support and drivers section. There you can download a Dell customized version of ESXi which includes all the dell drivers you need to successfully install ESXi
Hope this helps and thanks for reading.
Andy
just a quick post, i've recently had to install ESXi onto some new Dell server (R720 and the 1u equivalent) for some clients. I normally download the latest release from VMware and burn it to CD before i go to site to save some time, but this has caught me out with the new Dell Servers.
What you will find is that when the ESXi disk starts to boot you get an error message stating that there are no network cards in the server (even though i had on this occasion 2x quad port broadcom NIC's). What you need to do is go to Dell's website, enter in the server tag for the server you have purchased and got to the enterprise solutions part of the support and drivers section. There you can download a Dell customized version of ESXi which includes all the dell drivers you need to successfully install ESXi
Hope this helps and thanks for reading.
Andy
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Increase VMware converter performance
Hi All,
I was involved with a P2V migration last week and while the number of servers to migrate were small the amount of data held on these servers were around 250gb - 500gb in size. This conversion was to a vSphere 5.1 infrastructure using the VMware standalone converter running in a VM. When i started the migration off, we were experiencing terrible transfer rates in the region of 2MB/s and it was saying well over 8 hours of the P2V to complete per server.
After a little bit of googling i found the following article on VMwares communities forum which says that from converter 5.0 and onward, the transfer of data has been encrypted by default and that this could slow down the transfer of data.(http://communities.vmware.com/message/1866091).
I stopped the job and turned off the encryption by editing the converter-worker.xml file and started the job again. The transfer rate, once stabilized went up to around 25MB/s and drastically reduced the amount of time the P2V took!
If you are experiencing slow P2V rate this might be something worth trying.
kind regards and thanks for reading
Andy
I was involved with a P2V migration last week and while the number of servers to migrate were small the amount of data held on these servers were around 250gb - 500gb in size. This conversion was to a vSphere 5.1 infrastructure using the VMware standalone converter running in a VM. When i started the migration off, we were experiencing terrible transfer rates in the region of 2MB/s and it was saying well over 8 hours of the P2V to complete per server.
After a little bit of googling i found the following article on VMwares communities forum which says that from converter 5.0 and onward, the transfer of data has been encrypted by default and that this could slow down the transfer of data.(http://communities.vmware.com/message/1866091).
I stopped the job and turned off the encryption by editing the converter-worker.xml file and started the job again. The transfer rate, once stabilized went up to around 25MB/s and drastically reduced the amount of time the P2V took!
If you are experiencing slow P2V rate this might be something worth trying.
kind regards and thanks for reading
Andy
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
Upgrade to my Cisco Lab
Hi everyone,
I'm spending a lot of spare time working towards extra Cisco certification, in particular the CCIE routing and switching. No matter what exams i take, i always seem to find something enjoyable about seeing networks converge and routers relearning different routes around a network after a failure.
So i've invested in some more kit (off ebay) for my home lab to give me some more flexibility for different Cisco certifications.
My 1/2 rack now looks like this:
I'm spending a lot of spare time working towards extra Cisco certification, in particular the CCIE routing and switching. No matter what exams i take, i always seem to find something enjoyable about seeing networks converge and routers relearning different routes around a network after a failure.
So i've invested in some more kit (off ebay) for my home lab to give me some more flexibility for different Cisco certifications.
My 1/2 rack now looks like this:
The kit list is as follows (top to bottom)
Cisco 1603 router (spare, as no power supply)
GTA Gnatbox 1000 firewall (Uses RIP v1 and V2 for dynamic routing. Can be a BB router for labs or, when i purchase an access server - segmentation for potentially renting this out for other Cisco students)
Cisco 1601 router (used as BB router for BGP/ospf/eigrp etc)
Cisco 861 router (used as BB router for RIP - access to home LAN via NAT)
Cisco 3524 switch
Cisco 2950 switch
Cisco 1841 router (R4 in lab 1x WIC 1T, 2xFE)
Cisco 2621 router (R5 in lab 2x WIC 1T, 2xFE)
Cisco 2621 router (R7 in lab 1x WIC 1T, 1x ISDN WIC, 2xFE)
Cisco 3640 router (Frame Relay Switch. 1x 4 port asyn serial , 1x 4 port sync serial, 1x 10base-t for management)
Cisco 2801 router (R6 in lab 1x WIC 1T, 2xFE)
Cisco 2501 router (R8 in lab 2x serial, 1x ethernet)
Cisco 2611 router (R3 in lab 1x WIC 1T, 1xFE)
Cisco 2501 router (R2 in lab 2x serial, 1x ethernet)
Cisco 1760 router (R1 in lab 1x WIC 1T, 1x vwic 1mft-g703)
Cisco 3550 switch (SW1 in lab with EMI IOS)
Other than the addition of another 3550, i'm really happy with this setup. The frame relay switch is connected to every Rx router in the rack, which prevents me from re-cabling, all i have to do is change the DLCI which the router is using, giving me endless possibilities for a topology. Every router is connected to their correspending switch port on SW1 (R1 - FE0/1, R2 - FE0/2 etc) and if they have multiple ethernet interfaces, the 2nd interface goes to SW2 with SW1 and SW2 being ether channeled together.
Also i run an old desktop PC with VMware ESXi free edition into one of the switches using a trunk port which allows me to put pc clients on different networks and look at the network traffic passing through any topology which i create on here.
For anyone that wants it. Here is the config of the ports on the frame relay switch.
!
interface Serial0/2
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 201 interface Serial0/1 102
frame-relay route 203 interface Serial0/3 302
frame-relay route 204 interface Serial1/0 402
frame-relay route 205 interface Serial1/1 502
frame-relay route 206 interface Serial1/2 602
frame-relay route 207 interface Serial1/3 702
no shutdown
!
interface Serial0/3
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 302 interface Serial0/2 203
frame-relay route 301 interface Serial0/1 103
frame-relay route 304 interface Serial1/0 403
frame-relay route 305 interface Serial1/1 503
frame-relay route 306 interface Serial1/2 603
frame-relay route 307 interface Serial1/3 703
no shutdown
!
interface Serial1/0
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 402 interface Serial0/2 204
frame-relay route 403 interface Serial0/3 304
frame-relay route 401 interface Serial0/1 104
frame-relay route 405 interface Serial1/1 504
frame-relay route 406 interface Serial1/2 604
frame-relay route 407 interface Serial1/3 704
no shutdown
!
interface Serial1/1
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 502 interface Serial0/2 205
frame-relay route 503 interface Serial0/3 305
frame-relay route 504 interface Serial1/0 405
frame-relay route 501 interface Serial0/1 105
frame-relay route 506 interface Serial1/2 605
frame-relay route 507 interface Serial1/3 705
no shutdown
!
interface Serial1/2
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 602 interface Serial0/2 206
frame-relay route 603 interface Serial0/3 306
frame-relay route 604 interface Serial1/0 406
frame-relay route 605 interface Serial1/1 506
frame-relay route 601 interface Serial0/1 106
frame-relay route 607 interface Serial1/3 706
no shutdown
!
interface Serial1/3
no ip address
encapsulation frame-relay
clockrate 128000
frame-relay intf-type dce
frame-relay route 702 interface Serial0/2 207
frame-relay route 703 interface Serial0/3 307
frame-relay route 704 interface Serial1/0 407
frame-relay route 705 interface Serial1/1 507
frame-relay route 706 interface Serial1/2 607
frame-relay route 701 interface Serial0/1 107
no shutdown
!
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Setting up a new DHCP server
Hi all,
I was setting up some new domain controlers with DHCP and found that the customer had a lot of reservations. Rather than having to retype everything i found this great link to export the scope and import it back into the new server. I tested it from 2003 to 2008 and it worked perfectly.
http://koolbeans.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/howto-import-and-export-dhcp-reservations-in-server-2003/
I was setting up some new domain controlers with DHCP and found that the customer had a lot of reservations. Rather than having to retype everything i found this great link to export the scope and import it back into the new server. I tested it from 2003 to 2008 and it worked perfectly.
http://koolbeans.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/howto-import-and-export-dhcp-reservations-in-server-2003/
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