WJPatton.com » KB

VMware KB1024051 – MSCS vCenter Clustering Unsupported

wjpatton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:40:13 +0000

A newly published VMware KB1024051 article now states that “VMware does not support third party clustering products.”

This means that Microsoft Clustering Service or Veritas Cluster Services are not supported for vCenter 4.x.

Please take this into account when designing mission-critical vCenter deployments. These customers should be looking at VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat with VMware HA instead of third-party clustering products.

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

VMware KB1003797 – Unable to migrate: Virtual machine is configured to use a device that prevents migration

wjpatton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:13:26 +0000

There seems to be a lot of confusion about vMotion and bus-shared VMDKs. For the record, and from VMware, it is not recommended nor supported to vMotion your VM between ESX Hosts when using either Virtual or Physical mode bus-sharing.

Please see the KB here.

I know there are plenty that will disagree and have found ways of doing it, but within our environments for our MSCS clusters using Physical mode, we disable DRS and only Cold vMotion once the resources of the cluster have been moved off the Node and the VM is Powered Off.

VMware KB1011170 – Checking Zero vs EagerZero Disk Status

wjpatton — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:43:59 +0000

VMware has released a KB with a handy vmfstools command to check your VM’s disk status. If the VMFS output shows a “Z” it is Zerothick with blocks that have not been written to yet.

Read the article here.

This allows you to check the disk status for options such as Fault Tolerance or Microsoft Cluster Services. The disks must be in an Eagerzerothick format for these options to work.

VMware KB1016262 – vCenter Agent Install Fails on ESXi 4 Host

wjpatton — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:52:34 +0000

VMware just posted an alert on this for ESXi 4 Hosts managed by either vCenter 4 or 4 Update 1. If you remove and re-add the Host to vCenter, or upgrade vCenter to Update 1 you may experience this issue.

At this time, there is no official fix, however it appears a reboot should fix the issue but with the Host disconnected from vCenter; vMotion is not an option and the disconnect may trigger HA, but I would hope that you have placed this host into Maintenance Mode prior to disconnecting from vCenter…right? Also, HA should have been disabled prior to your Update 1 patch…you did that as well, right?

Read the official VMware Alert here.

VMware KB1016070 – ESX 4 Update 01 and HP Management Agents Failed Upgrade

wjpatton — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:26:12 +0000

VMware has posted a bug when upgrading ESX 4 to Update 01 with HP Management Agents running. (ESXi is unaffected)

You may have your host end the update unsuccessfully, and in a non-responsive state. To avoid this, disable all the HP Management Agents prior to running the update.

Read the full article here.

VMware KB1009607 – Pegasus CIMSERVER Memory Leak

wjpatton — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:56:26 +0000

VMware has acknowledged an issue that we have been battling for some time with a Pegasus CIMSERVER memory leak. It has been fixed under ESX 4, as it does not use Pegasus, otherwise setup a CRON job for restart Pegasus periodically.

This issue has been extremely frustrating in our environment for a very long time, and initially we suspected that HP SIM may be to blame, turns out we may have gotten that wrong.

We have worked with VMware Support many times, and this is the first time they have acknowledged this leak and that HP SIM is not the culprit.

Read the KB here.

VMware KB 1008886 – Unable to read partition from Add Storage Wizard

wjpatton — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:46:23 +0000

These are great instructions if you have received errors when trying to add a LUN to an ESX Host, and suspect that the LUN may not be READY, or write enabled these instructions can help you troubleshoot and/or fix the LUN.

Read the KB here.

If you are unable to re-write the LUN label, the disk is not READY or not write enabled. Otherwise, if the label is something other than msdos, it should now be able to be added after following these instructions.

*Warning* Using Parted incorrectly could destroy data on LUNs in use, if not used properly!

VMware KB1005184 – Decoding ESX Purple Screen Error

wjpatton — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:38:23 +0000

VMware doesn’t use the “Purple Screen of Death” or “ESX PSOD” terminology in their documents so if you Google it, you won’t get directed to VMware.com and this document for this information. I know in the past I have spent far too much time searching for PSOD information, so keep this link handy. This document applies to all versions of ESX, from 1.x to 4.x.

Thank you to Rick Blythe of VMware for the link from the VMTN Community site.

Document located here.

VMware KB1003490 – Restarting ESX Management Agents

wjpatton — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:53:17 +0000

You will find these instructions in other How To posts and links here, but I thought I would post a simple KB from VMware for quick reference. service mgmt-vmware restart, will NOT cause a Guest to reboot or go down.

Click here for the article.

VMware KB1010213 – Basic SCSI Storage Troubleshooting

wjpatton — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:25:36 +0000

VMware has posted a new KB with some useful quick troubleshooting for slow storage issues. I personally use DAVG/cmd frequently with our Fiber DMX infrastructure.

Check out here.