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VM BIOS Delay

One of the great advantages of VMs is their ability to boot incredibly fast. You don't have to wait for any of the device initialization that plague traditional physical system. One of the *disadvantages* of having a VM boot so quickly though is that it's hard to get into the BIOS of a VM. VMware has addressed this issue in ESX 3.5.0 with an option under the device settings which will allow you to adjust the delay that the BIOS has, and a checkbox to force the VM to enter BIOS on the next reboot:

This feature received little to no announcement in the 3.5.0 release, but to anyone who has to maintain VMs this is a great improvement.

Labels: vm boot delay

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Monday, January 28, 2008.

Setting Static MAC Addresses

Here's my version of how-to set static MAC addresses in VI3 VMs.

Select a static MAC. NOTE: Static MAC addresses must be in the range of 00:50:56:00:00:00-00:50:56:3F:FF:FF to work with this procedure.
Remember to record the Static MAC addresses registered for future reference.
Unregister vm:
Note the datastore, vm inventory folder, and name for the vm in the summary tab
Power down the virtual machine
Right click the vm and select remove from inventory
Edit vmx:
Ssh to the esx host system (use putty)
cd /vmfs/volumes/
cd to the system’s folder
cp .vmx to .vmx.bak
vi .vmx
find the ethernet0 section
make the following changes:
change ethernet0.addressType = "vpx" to ethernet0.addressType = "static"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:50:56:01.01.00" to ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:01.01.00"
rearrange so the following items are in this order and grouped together: ethernet0.address, ethernet0.addresstype, uuid.location, uuid.bios
Write the changes to the disk and exit
Reregister the vm:
In virtual center, browse to the host datastore (configuration, storage, double click on the vm’s datastore)
Browse to the edited .vmx file
Right click the .vmx file and select Add to Inventory
Enter the system name
Select the host
Select the resource pool
Click Finish
Power on the vm and verify the mac address
Windows: ipconfig /all find “Physical Address”
Linux: ifconfig /a grep Hwaddr

EXAMPLE

ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:88:6f:98"

ethernet0.addressType = "static"

uuid.location = "56 4d 6b b4 70 cc 85 24-59 1b 2d 24 0a 2b d7 7a"

uuid.bios = "50 08 5b 0d e1 f7 fb 8b-ba 39 74 1b 30 fc 0c 40"

Posted by Jae Ellers at Monday, January 28, 2008.

Storage VMotion Bug

I've been tinkering with Storage VMotion quite a bit lately as the org where I work recently purchased a new storage array and we've been trying to vacate the old one. Lucky for me VMware also introduced Storage VMotion just last month ( Dec 21st ) with the release of VMware ESX 3.5.

But when I went to migrate the data from one storage array to another ( one of which is unsupported in ESX 3.5.0 at this time ), I had about a 15% failure rate. The VMs would get to 99% complete, and then fail ungracefully. The failure would halt the operation of the VM, not commit the snapshot that was used during the process and not update the .vmx to point to the new .vmdks ( on the target lun ) so the VM would have to be manually manipulated before it would power on again. The error in VirtualCenter reported:


Received an error from the server: A general system error occurred: DMotion: 
Failed to unstun VM after disk reparent. You will have to manually 
perform the relocation.

Several threads about users with similar problems were spawned on the VMTN message boards, and one of the VMware employees appears to have identified the source of the problem to be VMs that have the 'thinProvisioned' flag set in their .vmdk header file. It seems that even if your VMs were only spun up from a template that was thin provisioned, that the flag carries ( erroneously ) to the .vmdk of the VM which is not thin provisioned.

You can check to see if your .vmdks have the thinProvisioned flag by looking at the header of the your .vmdks. As you can see below I have put the problem flag in bold.


# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=dee36311
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 41943040 VMFS "VM01-flat.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base 
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "2610"
ddb.uuid = "60 11 C4 90 87 a8 e8 12-89 ff 22 11 96 40 eb cd"
ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"
ddb.toolsVersion = "7299"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"

VMware was very responsive to the problem even though one of the storage arrays that I was utilizing was not on the HCL. I have also been informed that VMware plans to make a announcement either today or Monday on how they plan to address the issue.

Labels: storage vmotion bug

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Friday, January 25, 2008.

vmpmotion.pl updated to version 1.1

Taking in some suggestions, I've modified the vmpmotion.pl script to be a little more user friendly by making the following additions:

- Constrained to only listing VMs within the specified cluster
- VMs are sorted and listed alphabetically
- Datastores are sorted and listed alphabetically
- When datastores are listed, the source datastore is now identified
- Added a 'lun filter' which can be used to stop displaying a set of names based on a regular expression

You can find the latest version of the script here.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Tuesday, January 22, 2008.

VirtualCenter Database Schema

For those of you working with VirtualCenter, sometimes there's just nothing you can do but get your hands dirty and dive into the database. I'm working on a few articles regarding some of these I've done lately, but for now here's a useful bit of info.

I needed a reference of how the database constraints and keys work together. Here's a simplified version that shows you all of the fields in all of the tables and how they're related.

It's a big document, so you'll have to either print it on a large format printer or get used to zooming around your PDF viewer.

Labels: VirtualCenter sql schema

Posted by Jae Ellers at Friday, January 11, 2008.

ESX 3.0.x patches released 01/02/2008

VMware dropped quite a few patches on us in the last day or so. ESX 3.0.2 received 11 new patches, of which all but 2 require a host shutdown and reboot. ESX 3.0.1 also received 11 patches brining the running total up to 79 patches. It looks like ESX 3.5.0 hasn't been around long enough yet to be included in the patch cycle.

Visit the utilities page for updated patchlist.txt files for the esx-autopatch.pl script.

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Wednesday, January 02, 2008.

vmpmotion.pl - Simplfied Storage VMotion

I've written a little wrapper script to make the Storage VMotion process a little more user friendly. Instead of learning the Storage VMotion command-line syntax, you can just select the VM that you want to migrate and the datastore from a simple text-based menu. You can find it on the utilities page or go to it directly. If you've got a pile of VMs to migrate from one datastore to another this can save you a ton of typing.