VM-Aware

One of the great new bits of functionality in ESX 3.5 Update is the ability to hot extend non-boot virtual disks without shutting down the VM.

I decided to give it a go with a Windows 2003 Standard VM and thought I’d provide a How To for anyone that might need/want it.

You can download the pdf here.  It is the first version of the document so please feel free to comment and let me know how to improve it.

I’m working on a Linux equivalent, but to be honest, I have never tried this before in Linux so it might be a while until the Tech Note appears

VMware have recently announced an update to 3.5 & ESXi. Normally VMware slip a few cool features into interim releases, but nothing as major as the inclusions in Update 2. Here’s an overview of some of the major functionality additions.

• VSS quiescing support - Windows 2003 VMs now have application & file system level VSS support via VMware tools.
• Hot Virtual Extend Support - This will allow virtual disks that are running out of disk space to be increased on the fly while the VM is running
• iSCSI & NFS over 10GB Ethernet
• Live Cloning of Virtual Machines - This means that instead of having to power off a machine to clone it, this can now be done while the machine is turned on. Possibly a fore-runner to continuous availability?

All of these features have a massive impact on the way VMs are used and administered and take another leap away from Microsoft in terms of functionality.

I can’t wait to see what will be included in ESX4.

The much vaunted, but still experimental Virtual Machine level High Availability gets discussed in this post by Eric Siebert over at TechTarget.

It goes through all the advanced settings that need to be enabled and some default settings for all the tweaks as well. Below is an overview of all the settings that need to be added:

Check out the post for all the pre-requisites that need to be complied with in order to get VM HA working.

Nick Triantos has posted another brilliant post over at his Storage Nuts & Bolts blog about VMware Site Recovery Manager and the adapter that NetApp have created to plug into SRM.

The article talks about what is supported in the SRA (Site Recovery Adapter) including:

• SnapMirror integration with SRM
• Support for Sync, Async & Semi Sync
• Dissimilar H/W configuration support
• FC & iSCSI Support
• FlexClone support for DR testing

He also ponders on what VMware might want to consider for future releases including:

• Multiple live sites to a single DR site
• Failback as well as Failover
• NFS Support

If you can it is well worth bookmarking his site, or even better using the RSS feed to get the new posts immediately.

A great list over at VMwareLand has been compiled of lots of top tens relating to VMware and Virtualisation.

They include:

Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator’s toolkit

Top 10 things you must read when trying to sell VMware as a solution to managementTop 10 things you must read about VirtualCenterTop 10 things you must read about VMware PerformanceTop 10 things you must read about Memory

• Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator’s toolkit
• Top 10 things you must read when trying to sell VMware as a solution to management
• Top 10 things you must read if you are new to VMware
• Top 10 things you must read to get more technical with VI3
• Top 10 things you must read about VMware Storage (SAN/NAS/iSCSI/NFS)
• Top 10 things you must read about VMware Security
• Top 10 things you must read about VMware Troubleshooting
• Top 10 things you must read about VMware Networking
• Top 10 things you must read about VirtualCenter
• Top 10 things you must read about VMware Performance
• Top 10 things you must read about Memory
• Top 10 things you must read about the ESX Service Console
• Top 10 things you must read about Disaster Recover/Business Continuity and VMware

Check it out here.

ICT Freak have posted about how to use a connection to the VirtualCenter SQL Server database from Excel to display useful VMotion information.

Check out article here.