VMware: Alarm 'Host IPMI System Event Log Status'

Today I logged-in into vSphere Client and stepped into this alert.

According to KB 1033725 this alarm is triggered when IPMI System Event log is full.

So...to resolve this issue click on the host with this alarm and go to Hardware Status tab, you should see something similar to this which states the log archive is full.

Click View -> System Event Log then click Reset event log. Once done alert will disappear from host but to complete the process you have to click Reset sensors button.

That's all!!

VMware: How to extend system volume on Windows 2008

In this post I will simply explain how to increase the size of System partition on a Windows 2008 R2 server. According to Microsoft this procedure applies to Windows Vista and Windows 7 too.
I will increase my C:\ drive from 60GB to 80GB while the VM in powered on.
Open vSphere Client right click the Windows 2008 VM you need to expand disk, and select Edit Settings.

 

Select hard disk, in this case I have a 60GB hard disk.

 

Increase capacity to your desired capacity, in this case I bring it to 80GB:

Now go to your Windows VM, run diskmgmt.msc
You will see the unallocated capacity. If not click Refresh button.

Select disc C:\ and right click then click Extend Volume

Follow the wizard assigning all unallocated space to the disk C:\, or, if you prefer, just a portion of it.

After this you will see the system partition increased to the new added capacity.

That's all!!

VMware: Some good readings

This is a bit different post, infact it's not something that will help you solve "things" but its a suggestion of good VMware ESXi related books I would like to share with you.

Lately I'm deeply involved in VMware projects. I  always have been fascinated by VMware products, in particular by vSphere because it's a rock solid hypervisor that is pretty easy to install and configure and besides it offers a LOT of possibilities.
You can consider vSphere as the first brick of your "virtualization house" upon which you can add other bricks that incredibly expands vSphere capabilities. For example you can add the Horizon Suite that brings Desktop Virtualization benefits to your enterprise, or you can add the vCloud "brick" that bring your datacenter and move it to the cloud allowing you to aggregate computing resources from all of your datacenters even if they are geographically dispersed and opens it to new Organizations allowing you to provide VMs for Organizations creating a public cloud infrastructure.
So...I spent last months introducing VMware products to a lot of new customers and then recreating their datacenters moving them from physical world to the virtual world (or "vWorld" as VMware-fanboys would say).

This process brought a lot of effort in constant documenting about what are the best practices and the "gold rules" for the modern datacenters. I consumed a lot of reading material and in this post I would like to briefly discuss it with you.

Starting from the basics I found two really interesting books: VCP5: VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5: VCP-510: Exam VCP-510 - Brian Atkinson which is a book dedicated to VCP certification. It covers all the basics aspects of VMware vSphere and it's a great start point. Another good book, but in my opinion not good as the former, is The Official Vcp5 Study Guide - Bill Ferguson. This book also covers all VCP materials based literally on exam blueprint but I think it does cover it in a not-so-well-organized-way because when I say "literally" it is...content is not so linear as in the former book but it could also be a great reading.

Another great book that is beyond VCP scope is Mastering VMware vSphere 5 - Scott Lowe that covers pretty everything vSphere concerned in a quite detailed way.

Last book I would recommend is for those who likes deepdiving, a book that really fascinates me,VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive - Duncan Epping which interely covers VMware HA explaining how this feature works giving great detailed schemes and pointing also out some differences from HA implemented in ESXi 5.1 with ones implemented in previous releases.

That's all!!

VMware Data Recovery: Could not connect to the Data Recover service on the appliance

In this post I would explain this issue I encountered while deploying Data Recovery vApp.

...Yes, I know Data Protection Suite is the current backup solution and Data Recovery is now old anyway our customer just needed it so I was  told to install it.


After VM deployment I went to vSphere Client -> Solutions and Applications -> VMware Data Recovery selected Data Recovery appliance and clicked connect.

After a while it returned me this error:

Could not connect to the Data Recover service on the appliance. If the problem persists, please restart or redeploy the Data Recovery appliance.

Well, after logging in into Data Recovery console I figured out my error:

vCenter is in 192.168.0.0 network while VMs and consequently Data Recovery appliance runs in 10.0.0.0 network so obviously Data Recovery was unable to reach vCenter.

To solve this issue was enough to add to Data Recovery appliance an IP in 192.168.0.X class.

So...

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/

By default Data Recovery appliance is deployed by an OVF which attaches two NICs to this VM. In my case just one of these (eth0) was used so I had eth1 connected to VM but with no IP assigned. For me it was sufficient to edit eth1 config file; if you have eth1 already configured you need to add another network adapter to Data Recovery virtual appliance and edit the corresponding ifcfg-ethX file under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/

vi ifcfg-eth1

DEVICE=eth1
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.19
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
HWADDR=00:50:YOUR:MAC:ADDRESS:HERE

service network restart

ping your_vcenter_ip

Then back to vSphere Client I was able to connect to VMware Data Recovery appliance and schedule backup jobs.

That's all!!