Well, this is the most troublesome P2V Redhat 64bit machine I ever had this year. It’s recommended to run $mkinitrd first on the source machine before I P2V it. Unfortunately, since we will try to avoid any changes made, we decided to only run $mkinitrd later once the conversion completed.

After almost two hours waiting, the Redhat conversion suddenly failed at 97%. If you experience this before, failed at 95% most likely your VM conversion stuck at the Grub configuration. While at 97% this is highly because of initrd configuration failed for the VM and if you try power on this machine, you can expect the boot process will going to fail with error message “kernel Panic not sync”.So, why this problem happened?. Well this probably caused by new initrd image not properly configured or the converter do not configure new initrd with proper scsi driver (mptscsih) for the new VM and causing root device can’t be mounted.

No matter what causing this, I decided to make new initrd image for this VM but before that, I did minor troubleshooting steps as below :

• Change scsi adapater from LSI to Bus Logic = Failed (64 bit do not support BUS Logic)
• Change the OS type to 32 bit & Bus Lofic = Failed (Kernel Panic)
• Linux Rescue then modify grub.conf = Failed (kernel Panic) Read more
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Another short “how to” VMware Update Manager(VUM) Installation 4.1 from me :

My Setup :

• Windows Server 2008 64bit (VM)
• vCenter 4.1
• SQL Server 2005 Express
• System DSN32 bit
• C:\drive = 8gb
• VUM Installation Media (.iso)

CLICK HERE FOR HOW TO INSTALL VUM 4.1

Notes : You will need system DSN 32bit for VUM installation using other than SQL server 2005 express which come together with VIM-4.1 installer. Please check this url on how to create 32bit system DSN.

Silly, after successfull scheduled power maintenance today in our office, I’ve been asked by my Boss to power on remotely virtual machines (VMs) in vSphere Hypervisor 4.1 via TSM mode (SSH). On legacy ESX, I always do this using vmware-cmd command (vmware-cmd /vmfs../../.vmx start trysoft) and this shouldn’t be a problem to me. Once my Boss said he already powered on the hypervisor, I wait a few minutes till SSH service is fire up and running. Then, with full confident I run command “$vmware-cmd -l” to view the list of registered VMs available on this host and you know what? Surprisingly there is no vmware-cmd command was found. Okay my next try is to use “$vimsh” command instead but as expected, the command also cannot be found in this ESXi 4.1 host. Huh! after 10 minutes, my Boss called me and said he still cannot login to Exchange 2010 (one of the VM). Sigh, I know I can do this from vSphere RCLI but I have to download it first before I can use it from any workstation. Okay, my last resource is VMware KB . Luckily I found the actual command which can power on the VMs via TSM :

• $vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
• $vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on VMID
• $vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 32

Hehehe I never thought vimsh & vmware-cmd have been taken out from ESXi.

VMware KB

While updating vSphere 4.1 documentation for my future project reference, I found out this interesting vCenter caveat. As we know, vCenter 4.1 only can be installed on 64 bit system with 64 bit system DSN. But there is a situation whereby we will require to use both 32 and 64 bit system DSN on the same machine. This is necessary when we are going to install VMware Update Manager 4.1 (VUM) on the same machine as vCenter and as quoted here, VUM 4.1 is still a 32 bit application, the 32 bit system DSN need to be created in place first before we can proceed with VUM installation. Read more

Just finished with the installation of vCenter 4.1 and as usual, I took few screenshots for those who want to know how to perform this. The whole process is quite similar prior to this one except you will notice there is one extra step was added (vCenter JVM Memory) to the wizard. My advice is before you are going to proceed, just make sure you meet with all the requirements first and you should be safe then.

My Setup:

• vCenter 4.1 (258902 )
• Virtual Machine
• 3GB memory & one vCPU
• Windows Server 2008 std 64 bit

I just want to confirm first that the installation will fail when we perform this on 32 bit operating system (OS) and the answer is “Yes” we only can install it on 64 bit supported OS. Read more

I never thought this was possible before. But few days after I installed ESXi 4.1 on one of my office servers and want to do some testing, suddenly I saw four virtual machines(VMs) called “ESX” already running inside this ESXi. No way, this must be a joke isn’t it?. Perhaps one of my Junior may accidently bang his head to the wall and couldn’t differentiate between ESX and vCenter, I open the console for one of the VM and you know what,I’m totally wrong

Read more

Another great free tool from vKernel! You can now monitor easily your five most important VMs performance and resources within your VMware environment using vKernel AppView. The tools will help you to figure out very fast which VMs having problems or what resources may cause this. If you have extra budget, get “Capacity Analyzer” to take deeper look at the problems or “Optimization Pack” to reclaim wasted resources.

Just download the tools from vKernel site, install it and you are ready to roll.

AppView Download

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