I'm quite excited. Just found on the VMware website that VCOPS for Horizon View is GA. Together with this release there is also a new version for VCOPS -> 5.7.0.

One of the cool things with this release is the .pak file usage. No longer you'll need an additional Windows instance (or multiple when having multiple PODs) for passing the data to VCOPS. VCOPS is capable of handling the datastream direct from the broker agents and client agents. Installation is a breeze - just install the .pak file on the /admin part on VCOPS, just like doing the update to VCOPS 5.7.0.

Using Super Metrics in VCOPS is quite common and well documented. There are also nice blog posts (http://www.batchworks.de/using-super-metrics-to-monitor-cpu-ready-part1/ and http://www.virtualclouds.co.za/?p=254). When creating a report or a dashboard, I like to show the metric in percentage. Percentage is nice as you know, since the human mind instantly sees this value as 'wow, that's high or hmm, that's pretty low' since the range is between 0 and 100 most of the time.

VCOPS includes a lot of percentage metrics already. However, if you look at for example CPU Co-stop, System, Idle - they are only available in milliseconds (ms). Now there is a small catch you'll need to take into account which I'll show you in this blog post.

When trying to import users from LDAP I'm getting:

One or more users already exist and haven't been imported.

I'm in the process of re-registering my vCenter servers to VCOPS (with another username). Once in a while I have this error message:

Unable to connect to vCenter Server. Details: Failed to get RMI connection. Ensure that vcops service is running and retry the operation. Registration failed for VC : ( vCenter Server address: https://bla-host/sdk, vCenter Server username: bla-user, vCenter Server name: BLA blabla ) RMI interface unavailable

Yesterday I tweeted a picture showing off my Raspberry Pi with bi coloured LEDs (Red and Green). I've always wanted something to put on my desk, with LEDs, checking vCenters and/or ESX(i) hosts. After experimenting with the Arduino, I knew this system would be a stand alone application (requiring something like an external VM, doing the checks, sending the Arduino the status). I wanted a standalone device, as small like the Arduino, capable of checks against vCenter. As you all know, the Raspberry Pi is suitable for that task.

Goals in mind

While having my thoughts run freely, I knew I wanted something:

Last week I got back from holiday, had a wonderful time in France with great weather. Anyway, we're looking into changing one pool with virtual desktops from one vCPU to two vCPUs. Looking a CPU load on every host in the cluster should allow that, but we are very curious what the ready time would be.

Ready time is a VM metric, but we want to know the 'average' on the whole cluster. PowerCLI to the rescue:

I'm writing a Powershell script on getting info from a View environment. One thing I noticed was the amount of time the 'Get-Pool' commandlet takes to finish when using '-pool_id'. Now I know the commandlets are not very well written (it is sooo 1980s to run the commands from a broker), but take a look at this example:

Measure-Command{$poolinfo = Get-Pool -pool_id $PoolName}
Measure-Command{$poolinfo = Get-Pool}

This is just a very little tip for today: fill your blade chassis vertical, instead of horizontal. Here is a little illustration:

On the left we fill a chassis from left to right, top to bottom. On the right we fill the chassis from top to bottom, left to right and for full height blades, we start filling from the right.

No sorry, there is no plug-in for Synology to download patches (would be cool though - anyone?). However, I've been fiddling around with vSphere UMDS and wanted to have the patches downloaded to my Synology NAS box. And through the Synology webservices act as a patch store - AND IT WORKS :-).

Setup is quite easy, running a Windows 2008 machine. Now there are excellent tutorials and manuals available online to install UMDS, so I'm not going to repeat that.

Triggered by @esloof his post on Freesco 0.4.3, I wanted to create such router into a VM, but for version 0.4.4. I also wanted to move it to a virtual disk so I could make an OVF and do multiple deploys. While trying to get this to work after a few hours, I finally found a really fast and reliable method to do it myself in like 10 minutes (and so can you after reading this manual).

What do you need?

- freesco, get it from here (download the ZIP)
- ext2-0.4.4-lewis.pkg get it from here

I was rebuilding my homelab and wanted to create 'sites' using vlans. I am using the HP Procurve 1810G-24 switch (cheap, works great) but I had to fiddle some things out and I got it now. I know other sites have nice tutorials, but this is a quick recap from me.

Setup

I have three vlans right now. Default (1), lab1 (101) and lab2 (102). Click VLANs and the image below should say enough:

Hi all. Today (17-4-2012) William Lam provided a method to prevent HBA drivers to be loaded during installation and upgrades. This makes the removevmhba script obsolete. Since I got asked quite often wetter this would be possible for ESXi, I couldn't answer. However, check out this post, since that would be the current solution right now. I have updated the download description accordingly.

I got a question from @repping yesterday which got me thinking. His question was: "Do you know a good site where I can find memory prices for enterprise hardware.". Later it became clear he wanted to use that price to calculate chargeback for memory. He wanted to know the amount/GB. My fist reaction was: well, looking at the total amount of memory in combination with certain size DIMMs - the price rises with larger and larger DIMMs.

I think Dell uses a quite transparent site, with reasonable prices. Let's take a typical server, an R720 which can hold 2 XEONs and hold 24 DIMMs. Here is a table with the current price at time of writing this post:

Mr. @esloof did a nice tweet about this one and caught my attention. It's a very nice diagram in pdf format showing the memory management for vSphere 5. The thing I like best is the way it is set up: screenshot from esxtop, vSphere client and very clear mapping of virtual memory into physical memory. I'm printing it on A2 and stick it onto a wall and look at it from time to time. I suggest you do the same . Check it out here.

This post is just a reminder for me - however, there might be a thing or two for you to pick up too...

Take a look at the image below (you can click it to enlarge):

I received a link to this: VMware Technical Journal. Also @duncanyb also blogged about this one already. However, I want to stress how cool this document actually is!

Like: did you know VMware developed a tool called vmtar. A normal TAR is unaligned and vmtar makes sure the files inside the tar are aligned. Why do we care? Well, as the tar holding the core which makes ESXi tick are loaded into memory, some 'writable' files are copied to ramdisk. So the ramdisk and the tar are both in memory and somewhat the same. And there we have Transparent Page Sharing, optimizing the memory. If we didn't had vmtar, the tar files would be unaligned and TPS wasn't so effective - however, thanks to vmtar, TPS is more effective, saving more memory.

I got this nice question from my colleague last week:

We have cloned a VM, but I want to prevent the original from being started. Also when we do a failover to an other datacenter - I do not wan't this VM to be started.

...

Hi all,

I've just updated my complete site. I wasn't really happy with the whole template so it was time for me to update it. I also updated the BLOG section, filtered out relevant articles and upgraded the joomla back-end to the latest version. Overall, I'm very satisfied.

Last Friday I was at the DutchVMUG in the NBC Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. The DutchVMUG is a large (700+) VMware Usergroup event. During this event you'll get great speakers in 4 parallel sessions, the ability to do workshops, visit awesome sponsors and meet peers in the industry. My experiences were just plain awesome. I had a GREAT day. I was invited to do a presentation and since I was involved in implementing and maintaining a large VMware View environment I thought: "Why not share my knowledge to the community?". So I created a little presentation in Prezi, my favorite presentation tool and called it: VMware View in the Enterprise. But, first things first...