Well I just noticed, among thoses active members in VMware Communities, I’m one of them. No wonder, I’ve had no time for other things and as a result, I recieved a sarcarstic comment last night from my daughter & my darling . But, what I’ve to do? John Trayer’s Blog really make me want to throw my precious time more towards VMware Communities.

I just went to HP Lefthand P4000-G2 last week and below are some info which maybe useful for those who currently looking for powerful iscsi storage. As claimed by HP, this storage can do most what Dell Equalogic can do specially storage virtualization via iscsi, cluster high-availability between remote sites, thin provisioning, syncronize & asynchronize via remote copy, snapshot, smartclone & etc. The best part is, you can also have VSA (an appliance + RDM) do storage virtualization for your existing storage before presenting it to any machines like what IPStor did.

Storage virtualization can let you have your ESX datastore stored in P4000-G2, present it via iscsi and manage it from HP Lefthand CMC. High-availability will let you to bring up quickly remote site P4000-G2 automatically in the event when your primary storage goes down. Remote copy offer asynchronize backup which you can schedule it while snapshot offer you to manage your snapshot, rollback or mount it for files level restore & etc from CMC. Unlike others, all this features already included in CMC with one price and you no need to by its separately.    

HP Lefthand Centralize Management Console help you to configure one or more remote storage easily without much headache. I believe, most administrator without deep technical background will find out that CMZ is easy to install and configuring P4000-G2 storage is not a big problem to them anymore.  Read more

I won’t say this is my great finding but, for the past few years I found out too many people had complaint the same issue I faced with ESX Datastore over NFS. While IP storage base (iscsi & nfs) become top choice for some of us who have little budget in the pocket, I’m still believing we should think twice before choosing NFS for the next ESX implementation.

Often we heard people had their NFS datastore become “inactive” and somehow won’t reconnect even though after NFS storage is back and available. The worse part is, sometime ESX reboot won’t change the situation and the only workaround I think most of us already knew is by removing NFS storage and add it back to the our ESX host. If it’s not your lucky day, you will not even able to remove your existing NFS datastore without remove first all your VMs from ESX inventory. Imagine if you have so many VMs need to be removed and add it back to your host manually after you successfully mounted your NFS datastore?. Read more

VMware just released new update for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 (Release Notes)

This new release will improve :

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements
• Support for Firefox 3.x Browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access
• Bug and security fixes

ariyossss

Perhaps this could be too late for sharing however, I did some testing with my junior on how we can patch ESX 3.5 U3 to U4 via “esxupdate” command. Though we knew, we can do this via ESX 3.5 U4 CD, I still prefer “esxupdate” method due to it’s success story. Since ESX3.50 U4 patch inclusive of more than twenty(20) .zip files, unzip and patch process could take longer time if we do this manually one by one. Therefore, I create one script (patch-esx350u4.sh) for my junior so that he can do ESX 3.5 U4 upgrade easily for one of my customer next week.

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1.First we download the patch ESX350-Update04 (include file dependencies around 1.2GB in size) from VMware site.
2.Download script patch-esx350u4.sh here
3.Upload all zip files to target ESX (Make sure all zip files uploaded specially ESX350-20090903201-UG.zip)
4.Upload patch-esx350u4.sh to target ESX
5.cd to your upload folder —> $cd /root/ESX3U4
6.Make it executable —> $chmod +x patch-esx350u4.sh
7.Run patch script —> $./patch-esx35u4
8.Give your location of .zip files eg:/root/ESX3U4
9.Verify patch status once finished with $esxupdate -l query
10.For unsuccessfull patch, please patch manually or rerun “patch-esx350u4.sh” (read manual-patch.txt)
$esxupdate -n -r file:/root/ESX35U4/ESX350-200909012-UG update

Notes :

• Make sure all patchs/zip included in $esxupdate -l query (specially ESX350-Update04)
• The patch-esx350u4.sh will unzip and patch ESX one by one without reboot the system until finished