How to Cable an EMC VNXe for Failover & VMWare

I really struggled with cabling a new VNXe for failover with vSphere. It's not difficult. There's just not a lot of documentation or explanation out there for it. The best practices docs and howtos treat iSCSI like a 3rd class citizen and assume you'd really rather be using Fiber or NFS. So here's how you really do it and a little explanation about why. We'll go into the details of the vSphere configuration after covering the hardware end of things.

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ESXi-Customizer

ESXi-Customizer is a Windows script that automates the process of re-building the VMware ESXi Install ISOs with custom drivers.

Download : ESXi-Customizer-v2.7.1

Synchronizing ESX/ESXi time with a Microsoft NTP Server

An ESX or ESXi host configured to use a Microsoft Windows or newer Domain Controller as a time source never synchronizes its clock with a default configuration.follow this steps to setup correct sync.

Download NTP server and support details
http://www.4shared.com/rar/69DxFWGw/NTP_Settings.html

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0, 5.1 - Installation from PXE Boot

A small tool for deploying VMware ESXi from another computer running with Microsoft Windows.

Download Tool
http://www.4shared.com/rar/1CcYk0zr/New_folder.html

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1?

vSphere 5.1 is VMware’s latest release of its industry-leading  virtualization platform. This new release contains the following  new features and enhancements:

Compute

• Larger virtual machines – Virtual machines can grow two  times larger than in any previous release to support even the  most advanced applications. Virtual machines can now have  up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM).

• New virtual machine format – New features in the  virtual machine format (version 9) in vSphere 5.1 include  support for larger virtual machines, CPU performance  counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration designed   for enhanced performance.

Storage

• Flexible, space-efficient storage for virtual  desktop infrastructure (VDI) – A new disk format  enables the correct balance between space efficiency and I/O  throughput for the virtual desktop.

Network

• vSphere Distributed Switch – Enhancements such as  Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore,  Roll Back and Recovery, and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support and deliver more enterprise-class networking functionality and a more robust foundation for cloud computing.

• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support – Support for SR-IOV optimizes performance for sophisticated applications.

Installing a driver in an existing VMware vSphere 4.1 ESX/ESXi host

We recently purchased some new "Intel Eth QP Ser Adapter T4" cards for our existing VMware ESX 4.1 hosts. The card has four ports, each capable of transmitting one Gbps each.
Unfortunately, the driver for this card isn’t in the default set installed with VMware vSphere. Like all things VMware, getting these to work in an existing host is not the easiest of things. During ESX installation, a big glaring warning message is displayed: “If you choose to not install additional drivers at this time, you will not be able to do so later.” Well, that’s not exactly true. To work around this, just follow the instructions below.

1. Verify that the card is supported by the VMware HCL.
2. Download the driver from VMware’s Driver CD Repository.
3. Put your ESX/ESXi host into maintenance mode.

At this point, you can install additional drivers one of two ways: via the vSphere CLI, where you run the files from your own workstation, or via the esxupdate command on the ESX host itself. I personally prefer to do it via the vSphere CLI.

1. If you haven’t already installed the vSphere CLI, you can get it at VMware.
2. Burn the downloaded ISO to a CD and leave it inserted in your drive.
3. Open a command prompt at “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin” (assuming you are using an x64 flavor of Windows).
4. Use the vihostupdate Perl script as shown: vihostupdate.pl –server <IP Address of host> -username root –install –bundle <path to offline bundle> The “path to offline bundle” is much like what was used in the other option, but it just looks at your local drive. An example would be “D:\offline-bundle\driver.zip”.

vihostupdate.pl --server 192.168.123.10 --username root  --install --bundle D:\offline-bundle\driver.zip

Source : http://4sysops.com

Enable SNMP on ESXi 5.o

use Putty to connect to your host or use the ESXi console.
cd to vmware folder : cd /etc/vmware/
do and ls you will see your beast snmp.xml here

Edit the file using vi
vi snmp.xml
you will see a single line. press i to enter the edit mode.

we need to change false to true  and add Public  between   <communities></communities>

once happy with this, Press Esc and the :wq to save and quit.
we will have to restart the services.sh under /sbin/ folder with /sbin/services.sh restart
you should now be able to use any monitoring software to monitor your hosts.
Enjoy.

source : http://vm-blog.info

How to: Add iSCSI SAN storage to VMWare ESXI

In this Tutorial I am gong to show you how to add a LUN on a SAN through the iSCSI initiator on VMWARE ESXI Server.
The SAN I had available to do this on, is the Promise VessRAID 1830i
NOTE: Your interface to your SAN might look different, but the terminology stays the same.
  1. Creating the storage LUN on the SAN�
Login to your SAN interface, and create a new logical drive / LUN (whatever your SAN calls it)


For the purpose of the tutorial, I created a LUN of 500GB in space, in RAID 5 configuration.



My SAN asks if I want to edit lun mapping (Masking), once a LUN is configured. I always mask luns, as I want devices to only see the LUNs they are entitled to. I clicked “OK”

Converting A VMware Image To A Physical Machine

This tutorial shows how to convert an existing CentOS VM to a Physical machine. This tutorial covers the cloning of the VM to an unpartitioned HDD and troubleshoot some of the possible errors that you may have booting the OS on your new hardware. To illustrate this procedure I will use VMware Workstation 7 as the handler to transfer the VM installation to a physical HDD.

1 Requirements

To perform this procedure you will need:

• VMware Workstation, VMware Server or VMware Player.
• CloneZilla ISO image.
• Unpartitioned HDD with enough space to hold your VM image.

2 Preliminary Notes

This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of the cloning process and requires no previous experience on the use of Clonezilla. Make sure your OS is not using in any way the target HDD that will hold your final copy of the VM, otherwise VMware will complain about your disk been in use and CloneZilla will not perform a successful copy of the VM.

3 VMware Configuration

Installing VMware Tools in BackTrack

NOTE:  GNOME VMware image of BackTrack has VMware Tools installed by default.

Backtrack 5 R2

NOTE: KDE Users, please run the following command before installing VMWare tools on BackTrack 5 R2:

root@bt:~# mkdir /etc/cups/ppd

For google's sake, here's the error you get if you do not create that directory, on a BT5R2 KDE install:

Unable to create symlink "/etc/cups/ppd/VMware_Virtual_Printer.ppd" pointing to file "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/thinprint.ppd".

• On an upgraded or freshly installed BackTrack 5 R2:

root@bt:~# prepare-kernel-sources

• Next on the VMware Player, we click Virtual Machine -> Install VMware Tools.
• Now let's quickly setup the VMware Tools by issuing the following commands:

root@bt:~# mkdir /mnt/cdrom; mount /dev/cdrom  /mnt/cdrom
root@bt:~# cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-<version>.tar.gz /tmp/
root@bt:~# cd /tmp/
root@bt:~# tar zxpf VMwareTools-<version>.tar.gz 
root@bt:~# cd vmware-tools-distrib/
root@bt:~# ./vmware-install.pl 

NOTE: After this a series of questions will come, if you are unsure about them just leave them default. At the time of this posting, the VMWare tools do not compile cleanly with kernel 3.2.6. In particular, the vmxnet driver fails to compile. However, the BackTrack 3.2.6 kernel already has a native vmxnet driver, so there should be no overall loss of performance.