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Kickstart Adjustments for ESX 3.5

Now that ESX 3.5 is generally available, I'm sure that many companies will start to cut their installations over as soon as possible to take advantage of the new features. I've been tweaking my scripted install process to accommodate the new release and have a few notes to share.

1. The way to enable VMotion on a port group has been altered in this release. The 'new' way to enable VMotion on a VMKernel port group ( assuming the port group that you want to enable VMotion on is the first VMKernel port group added ) is as follows:
vimsh -n -e "/hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0"

2. There seems to be a bug in this release when adding multiple links to a vSwitch. In the past, when a vmnic was added to a vSwitch it was added in an 'active' state. In this release, any vmnic after the first that is added is put into a 'standby' state. Putting the vmnic into an active state has proved to be quite difficult but it has been found that unlinking the vmnics, relinking them and then setting the active state with vimsh appears to be a workaround. For example if we had a vSwitch with 2 vmnics attached ( vmnic0, vmnic1 ) the workaround would look like the following:

# First Add the vmnics to the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1

# Second, remove the vmnics from the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -U vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -U vmnic1

# Relink the vmnics back to the vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic0
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1


# Restart the vmware management daemon, and wait 2 minutes for the service to restart
service mgmt-vmware restart
sleep 120


# Set the vSwitch policy with vimsh
vimsh -n -e "hostsvc/net/vswitch_setpolicy --nicorderpolicy-active vmnic0 vSwitch0"
vimsh -n -e "hostsvc/net/vswitch_setpolicy --nicorderpolicy-active vmnic0,vmnic1 vSwitch0"

I have not yet found a reliable way to expand this past 2 vmnics.

3. New hardware agents are necessary.
HP SIM Agent 7.9.1
Dell Open Manage 5.2.0
IBM Directory 5.20 Update 1

Otherwise ESX 3.5 appears to be a solid product and my scripted installs were left mostly unmodified from ESX 3.0.x -> ESX 3.5

Update 12/31/2007: New workaround for network changes
Reader Clay Kohl wrote in to let me know about a new workaround for ESX 3.5.0 to get all of the vmnics in an active state. The trick here is to create port groups, and link the vmnics to the port groups. In this example I link 2 vmnics ( vmnic0, and vmnic1 ) to the port group "Service Console" on vSwitch0 ( with 64 ports ). This method of getting the vmnics in an active state works beyond 2 vmnics reliably.

# Create the vSwitch with 64 ports
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch0:64
# Create the port group "Service Console"
esxcfg-vswitch -A VMotion vSwitch0
# Link the vmnics to the port group
esxcfg-vswitch -M vmnic0 vSwitch0 -p "Service Console"
esxcfg-vswitch -M vmnic1 vSwitch0 -p "Service Console"
# Link the vmnics to the vSwitch
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic0 vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch0

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Friday, December 14, 2007.