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Ivan Versluis August 13th, 2008

Who could ever believe and see VMWare releasing their ESX for free. Last night I read small post on my Windows Mobile device.

What is VMware ESXi 3.5?
VMware ESXi 3.5 is the industry’s first, thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware. With its next-generation architecture embedded in hardware, VMware ESXi enables a plug-and-play data center with greater security, reliability and manageability. Requiring no installation and minimal configuration, VMware ESXi accelerates server deployment—IT organizations can take servers from boot-up to running production applications in virtual
machines in minutes.

List of features is amazing and now we all get them for free. Check the full list here, but these are which I like:

• Bare-metal architecture
• Small Footprint with only 32MB
• Virtualization for storage and support for iSCSI
• VLAN tagging support
• Wake-on LAN
• 64bit support

Basically all features I missed with VMWare Server and now getting them for free with ESX3i version.

Why is VMware making ESXi free? VMware is making its standalone ESXi hypervisor available at no cost in order to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Customers have shown tremendous interest in ESXi due to its innovative architecture, simple setup, and high performance. Allowing IT administrators to obtain VMware ESXi for free enables everyone to gain access to VMware’s datacenter technology and prove its value in their own companies.

I have nothing more to add than just go download the VMware ESXi data sheet for more information and get a free copy of VMware ESXi and try it for yourself. I am running couple of production host servers with VMWare Server  and will upgrade them very soon.

Tags: 3.5, ESX, free, i, VMWare

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis June 12th, 2008

If you need to create 5 or more of Virtual Port groups on a vSwtich and you don’t want to use the VI client than logon on the service console and run the commands below.

For creating a new Virtual Port Group use:

Assigning a special VLAN to this a Virtual Port Group:

With these two simple commands I was able to push my sh script and create same “Networking” configuration on dozen of my ESX servers.

esxcfg-vswitch [options] [vswitch[:ports]]

  -a|–add              Add a new virtual switch.

  -d|–delete           Delete the virtual switch.

  -l|–list             List all the virtual switches.

  -L|–link=pnic        Set pnic as an uplink for the vswitch.

  -U|–unlink=pnic      Remove pnic from the uplinks for the vswitch.

  -M|–add-pg-uplink    Add an uplink to the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -N|–del-pg-uplink    Delete an uplink from the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -p|–pg=portgroup     Specify a portgroup for operation

                        Use ALL to set VLAN IDs on all portgroups

  -v|–vlan=id          Set vlan id for portgroup specified by -p

                        0 would disable the vlan

  -c|–check            Check to see if a virtual switch exists.

                        Program outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -A|–add-pg=name      Add a new portgroup to the virtual switch.

  -D|–del-pg=name      Delete the portgroup from the virtual switch.

  -C|–check-pg=name    Check to see if a portgroup exists.  Program

                        outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -B|–set-cdp          Set the CDP status for a given virtual switch.

                        To set pass one of “down”, “listen”, “advertise”, “both”.

  -b|–get-cdp          Print the current CDP setting for this switch.

  -m|–mtu=MTU          Set MTU for the vswitch.

  -r|–restore          Restore all virtual switches from the configuration file

                        (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY).

  -h|–help             Show this message.

Tags: commandline, ESX, howto, Script, vlan

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis May 29th, 2008

Last two days I worked with a VMWare Premium Support engineer troubleshooting my VMWare ESX problem for booting the system. I will post another post with exact error messages, but we were not able to get into the service console nor did the other two boot options work. At some  point he asked me did I have a Linux Live-CD? I was think ooh Yeah going back to old school and grabbed my case and found a BackTrack2 cd from two years ago.

After the reboot  and boot into BackTrack we went trough couple of system settings and logs and he asked hey can you forward me the esxcfg-boot.log to me  by email…. I was using the DRAC console and copy and paste is not going to work ;-(.  Guys from past remember the real tricks when we did those back than with IIS and within couple minutes I was able to get the orginal file to one of my tftpd daemon on the network.

How did I get the log files?

•  
  • Download, burn the iso and boot from CD-rom
  • Login with root/toor
  • I prefer the GUI and start KDE by running startx
  • Open Console session
  • ifconfig eth0 up
  • dhcpcd eth0
  • check you ip address with ifconfig eth0
  • now run tftp
  • open ip address
  • put esxcfg-boot.log or any other.

That’s all. For more information and download go to http://www.remote-exploit.org/.

Tags: ESX, howto, livecd, logfiles, network

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis May 19th, 2008

If you are curios and interested like I am than the latest VMWare Workstation 6.5 beta is definitely something to download and install on your system.

Why Participate in a VMware Beta Program?

Here are a few reasons why you should participate in VMware beta programs.

• Exposure to the next generation features helps you grow your technical skills and understand the direction of the virtualization industry.
• Ability to prove that the product will work properly in your environment and report areas where it doesn’t.
• Prototype your solution during the beta program and be ready for deployment when we reach General Availability.
• Help shape today’s product and tomorrow’s features.
• Ability to work with VMware engineers on some programs.
• Problems encountered have a higher probability of being fixed by GA.

Join the new beta program for Workstation 6.5 here.

New Features in VMware Workstation 6.5:

• Seamless integration of guest and host applications with Unity
• Enhanced advanced VM Record and Replay
• Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
• Link state propagation networking
• Enhanced ACE authoring capabilities
• Easy Install Option’s support for Linux
• Improved 3D graphics Support
• Release 91182 supports ESX 3.5 and 3i installations

For me personally I would like to explore Unity and ESX in virtual machine support features. I like to keep my system as clean as possible and right now I can have one virtual machines hosting all my applications which I use occasionally. I don’t want to install Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop,  Visual Studio and many others on my host system; with Unity I can bring all those application to my host system. Definitely  something I will use quite often.

Since the release of ESX 3.5 and 3i I have been waiting to have a working installation of those products into VMWare Workstation. Thanks to Eric from NTPRo.nl who is confirming that ESX is up and running in the latest release of VMWare Workstation 6.5 beta.

Tags: 3.5, beta, ESX, support, unity, VMWare, workstation

• Workstation
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Ivan Versluis February 6th, 2008

Today I installed my first Windows Server 2008 RTM release in ESX3i. My MSDN subscription helped me to active the server ;-). The performance of the guest is pretty good.

For more details check out my screencast.

Tags: ESX, installation, screenshots, Windows Server 2008

• Windows Server 2008
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Ivan Versluis February 6th, 2008

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) allows ESX Server 3 administrators to determine which Cisco switch port is connected to a given vSwitch. When CDP is enabled for a particular vSwitch, you can view properties of the Cisco switch (such as device ID, software version, and timeout) from the VI Client. You can use the service console command-line interface to enable CDP.

Using this information and without going to the server room and locating the network cable in the rack I was able to configure the interface on the switch real time.

The switchport should be set as trunk and for security reasons also configure the allowed vlan’s.

interface GigabitEthernet0/15
description ** ESX-01 Trunk port LAN **
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1,200
switchport mode trunk
spanning-tree portfast
!

Tags: 3i, cdp, Cisco, ESX, trunk, vlan, VMWare

• VMWare
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Ivan Versluis February 6th, 2008

ESX 3i host server has sensors builtin that allows you to monitor the health of the following host components:

CPU processors
Memory
Fans
Temperature
Voltage

On systems without IPMI, only CPU sensors are available. Storage sensors are available only on systems with an LSI MegaRAID controller installed. If a particular component cannot be monitored on a given host, that component does not appear.

Screenshot of my Dell PowerEdge 2900 series server.

CIM-based framework & SNMP are available for hardware monitoring in ESX 3i. For more information check out this document.

Tags: 3i, ESX, health, monitoring, status

• VMWare
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Ivan Versluis December 10th, 2007

Youtube screw up my 10 minutes video. This time I encoded the video into a flash format.

Check out the video which was based on the tutorial of installing VMWare ESX server into a VMWare Workstation6 guest.

Click here to open the file (8mb).

Tags: ESX, Screencast, VMWare

• VMWare
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