Riccardo Riva

Posts Tagged ‘esx’

If you have a standalone VMware ESX 4 unmanaged or you haven’t yet configured VMware Update Manager, and you want to update it, you should do the following.

Download the update package from VMware Web Site : ESX-4.0.0-update01.zip

Copy it to your ESX Server 4 (i.e. on /tmp).

Connect to your ESX Server with SSH or to a local console.

Execute :

esxupdate --bundle=ESX-4.0.0-update01.zip update

Hope this help

Bye
Riccardo

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I started using VMware Update Manager almost immediately after its release.
In my opinion another patching software for Microsoft Windows wasn’t needed when WSUS already existed and does a great job at Windows patching.
For the above reason I’m using VMware Update Manager only for patching esx hosts.
One of the most important feauture of Update Manager is that is fully integrated with VMware DRS, so patching an ESX host cause zero-downtime because the host will be put into Maintenance Mode for patching and than become available again.

This process details the Patching of an ESX host. The remediation process involves Migrating Virtual Machines off the host using vMotion, patching and then redistributing workloads via DRS.

1) First of all connect to Virtualcenter and you must enable the Update Manager plugin.

2) Download and install the Plug-in, and enabled it.

3) When you have the plugin enables, you should see another task button and another Tab at cluster level and at host level.

4) The next step is to attach a baseline to cluster (best practice) or to host. It would be better to attach the baseline to cluster because with thi solution you will have all the hosts at the same patchlevel.
A baseline is a collection of patch, defined by some policy, baselines could be “fixed” or “dynamic”, the first one are a manually selected update lists, the second one is an update lists defined by some dynamic choice. Every baseline should be divided “Non Critical” and “Critical” classifications.

5) When you attach a baseline to an object (a cluster or an host) you should select “SCAN FOR UPDATES” and UpdateManager will check the object patchlevel do define which update should be applied to it.

6) When the task has been finished, you should choose “REMEDIATE”, and consider to run this on one host at a time.

7) Choose from the defined baselines which ones you want to apply to the selected host, and define all options requested.

After the above operations, the host will go into “Maintenance Mode” and all running Virtual Machines will be evacuated to other hosts, Update Manager will apply all needed patches rebooting the host if necessary and at the end the host will exit from “Maintenance Mode”.

Hope this help

Bye
Riccardo
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At some customer sites I have to shutdown all Virtual Machines and all ESX hosts when a power failure occurs, but I didn’t find a place in which collect all informations needed to let all works.
Finally I collect all the information needed and adjust some script find all over the internet and the following is the result.

I’ve tested it on ESX Server 3.5 Update 4 with APC PowerChute Agent v2.2.3 and APC SMART-UPS 5000i UPS

The goal was to :
If a power failure occurs then wait some minutes to check if power come back, and if not :
- try to shutdown all virtual machines running on esx host with a soft shutdown command
- if soft shutdown above fail, shut them down with a hard shutdon command
- wait for virtual machine to shutdown (300 sec).
- if virtual machine is already running then do hard power off
- shutdown esx host

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Yesterday, April, 21 VMware had announced VMware VSphere, the new major version of the VMware Infrastructure.

This is what they said on website :

VMware vSphere is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services with the efficiency and low cost of cloud computing—featuring uncompromising control over service levels.

Beautiful !

Hope to install it ASAP !

Bye
Riccardo

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In this post I am going to talk about a very particular piece of hardware, unique on the market at this moment and that should be very useful for virtualization or clustering purpose, with a very low budget.

This product is called DamVirtualOne.

DamVirtualOne is a modular server (not a Blade) and have some very interesting feature :

- Fully redundant hot swap power supply.
- Fully redundant hot swap Gigabit ethernet switches with failover.
- Fully redundant hot swap storage controller, with multipathing and failover support.
- Up to six (6) compute module double socket (for Intel Xeon 5400 or 5500 CPU family).
- Up to 96GB of RAM each compute module.
- Up to 14 HDD SAS.
- Up to two redundant external SAS connection to storage expansion or SAS device connection (i.e. Tape Unit).

But the more important things that lead me to write this post is that storage is shared between the compute module, but not as other Blade Server on the market right now, with DamVirtualOne you should create a Virtual Disk (similar to a SAN LUN) and share it between all compute module if you need it.

At this time only IBM Blade Center S should have the same possibility, but it’s a Blade server, not a modular server, and there is a big price difference.

I had the luck to test the DamVirtualOne for few days (a lot) and I’ve installed the following :

- VMware ESXi 3.5
- VMware ESX 3.5
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008

I’ve created some fully function, and very performance VMware HA and DRS Cluster, and some Linux Cluster based on RHEL, and a large number of my previous post was written based on the installation above.

The standard server virtualization or clustering best practices require shared storage to use all benefits of the technology and this lead to buy SAN, Storage array (tipically Fibre Channel) who is very expensive, difficult to maintain and create a very complex infrastructure.

So you should know why I’m so excited about DamVirtualOne, because it’s a “single package” that contains all things you need for virtualization or clustering purpose : servers, storage and network a real datacenter all in one.

With the maximum configuration this machine should support up tp two hundred (200) Virtual Machine !! And his price will be very similar to two or three phisical server (as you are useful to see) and a shared storage, so you should understand that is a beautiful “piece of iron”.

I truly believe that modular server is sometimes under valuated, but in my opinion there is an enormous potential in it and it will be beautiful if this post lead some people to find out a solution, cheaper than other more famous one, using this piece of technology.

You should found more details about DamVirtualOne at the following websites.

http://www.damvirtualone.it

Feel free to ask, they will answer you !

Riccardo

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This post will show a simple post installation script for VMware ESX server to avoid a lot of manual configuration and some reboot to apply changes.
In the script I’m going to :
- Add an SSH banner text
- Unload unuseful modules (i.e. vmfs2 support)
- Adjust some settings for SAN access
- Increase Service Console Memory reservation to 800 MB
- Configure networking with portgroup and vlan
- Set mgmg.local as the local domain
- Add to hosts file all other esx
- Configure NTP

This script assume you have 4 esx hosts (esx01.mgmt.local, esx02.mgmt.local and so on), and you have 4 phisical NICs on each host.
Assume also you want to create networking for the following networks :
- LAN (with VLAN ID 1) for Internal Network Virtual Machines
- DMZ (with VLAN ID 10) for Virtual Machines accessible from externals network
- TS (with VLAN ID 11) for Terminal Service Virtual Machines
- LAB (with VLAN ID 12) for LAB VMs
- TEST (with VLAN ID 99) for Testing purpose

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The following is some Networking Stuff about VMware ESX networking.

You could also find all these information on VMware WebSite but I like to keep some info also here for personal quick reference.

Virtual Ethernet Adapters

There are three types of adapters available for virtual machines :

1. vmxnet is a paravirtualized device that works only if VMware Tools is installed on the Operating System. This adapter is optimized for virtual environments and designed for high performance.
2. vlance emulates the AMD Lance PCNet32 Ethernet adapter. It is compatible with most 32-bit guest operating systems and can be used without VMware Tools.
3. e1000 emulates the Intel E1000 Ethernet adapter and is used in either 64-bit or 32-bit virtual machines.

There are two other virtual adapters that are available through VMware technology. Vswif is a paravirtualized device similar to vmxnet that is used by the VMware ESX service console. Vmknic is a device in the VMkernal that is used by the TCP/IP stack to serve NFS and software iSCSI clients.

Virtual Switches

VMware technology includes virtual switches that you can build on demand at run-time to provide different functions, including:

1. Layer 2 forwarding.
2. VLAN tagging, stripping and filtering.
3. Layer 2 security, checksum and segmentation offloading.

This modular approach reduces complexity and maximizes system performance, VMware virtualization technology loads only those components it needs to support the specific physical and virtual Ethernet adapter types used in the configuration. Additionally, the modular design enables VMware and third-party developers to incorporate new modules to enhance the system in the future. Up to 248 virtual switches can be created on each VMware ESX host. Following are important features of virtual switches:

• Virtual ports: The ports on a virtual switch provide logical connection points among virtual devices and between virtual and physical devices. Each virtual switch can have up to 1,016 virtual ports, with a limit of 4,096 ports on all virtual switches on a host. The virtual ports provide a rich control channel for communication with the virtual Ethernet adapters attached to them.
• Uplink ports: Uplink ports are associated with physical adapters, providing a connection between the virtual network and the physical networks. They connect to physical adapters when they are initialized by a device driver or when the teaming policies for virtual switches are reconfigured. Virtual Ethernet adapters connect to virtual ports when you power on the virtual machine, when you take an action to connect the device or when you migrate a virtual machine using VMware VMotion. A virtual Ethernet adapter updates the virtual switch port with MAC filtering information when it is initialized or when it changes.
• Port groups: Port groups make it possible to specify that a given virtual machine should have a particular type of connectivity on every host, and they contain enough configuration information to provide persistent and consistent network access for virtual Ethernet adapters. Some of the information contained in a port group includes virtual switch name, VLANIDs and policies for tagging and filtering, the teaming policy and traffic shaping parameters. This is all the information needed for a switch port.
• Uplinks: With VMware technology, uplinks are the physical Ethernet adapters that serve as bridges between the virtual and physical network. The virtual ports connected to them are called uplink ports. A host may have up to 32 uplinks.

REFERENCE: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf
Hope this help

Bye

Riccardo

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Hi, this is a simple doc who explain the main TCP/IP communications established in a VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Hope this help to open “all” the rights ports on your firewalls.

Bye
Riccardo

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Sometimes (frequently as a lot of people think) you have to use command line for VMware ESX.

#Enter into Maintenance Mode
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

#Exit from Maintenance Mode
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit

#Checking Maintenance Mode
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/runtimeinfo | grep inMaintenanceMode | awk ‘{print $3}’

#Temporarily open all ports through the ESX firewall:
esxcfg-firewall -allowIncoming
esxcfg-firewall -allowOutgoing

#Enable services through the ESX firewall:
esxcfg-firewall -e sshClient
esxcfg-firewall -e ntpClient
esxcfg-firewall -e snmpd

#Unload the VMFS-2 module to improve LUN and volume scan speed and improve overall performance:
vmkload_mod -u vmfs2

#Ensure the firewall is enabled and running before final build completion:
service firewall start
esxcfg-firewall -blockIncoming
esxcfg-firewall -blockOutgoing

#create portgroup for the Production VLAN and tag with id: 1 because this is configured as the native VLAN
esxcfg-vswitch -A LAN vm_switch0
esxcfg-vswitch -p LAN vm_switch0 -v 1

#Configure time zone and NTP:

cp /etc/ntp.conf /etc/ntp.orig
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Italy /etc/localtime
echo “server 0.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo “server 1.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo “server 2.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo “server 3.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo “server time.ien.it” >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo “server 0.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp/step-tickers
echo “server 1.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp/step-tickers
echo “server 2.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp/step-tickers
echo “server 3.vmware.pool.ntp.org” >> /etc/ntp/step-tickers
echo “server time.ien.it” >> /etc/ntp.conf
esxcfg-firewall -e ntpClient
chkconfig –level 345 ntpd on
service ntpd restart
hwclock –systohc

#SAN multipathing best practice:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Disk/UseLunReset
esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /Disk/UseDeviceReset
service mgmt-vmware restart

#Set Disk.MaxLUN to 40 to reduce rescan time:
esxcfg-advcfg -s 40 /Disk/MaxLUN
service mgmt-vmware restart

#Inject install completion date/time stamp into Message Of The Day:
dateTime=`date ‘+%c’`
echo “Built on “$dateTime” by Riccardo Riva.” > /etc/motd

Hope this help

Bye
Riccardo

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This morning I had to reduce the size of a disk in a Linux VM (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9) because I had not enough space on my Storage Area Network to add a new VM.

My system has 3 partions and one virtual disk.

I have :
/dev/sda1 (500 MB) (ext3) mounted on /boot
/dev/sda2 (2 GB) mounted as SWAP
/dev/sda3 (68 GB) (ext3) mounted as /

What I want to do is to resize my /dev/sda3 from 68 GB to 40 GB.

This is the procedure I’ve follow.

1) Shutdown my VM

2) Boot with Knoppix Live CD

3) Convert File System from EXT3 to EXT2 (to remove Journal and permit resizing from Gparted) with the following commands :

$ sudo tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda3
$ sudo e2fsck /dev/hda1

4) Resize disk with Gparted

5) Convert File System again from EXT2 to EXT3

$ sudo tune2fs -j /dev/sda3

6) Reboot VM and check if all works with the new dimension.

7) Shutdown VM

7) Add a new VirtualDisk (40 GB).

8 ) Boot with Knoppix

9) Copy all content of /dev/sda (the old disk) to /dev/sdb /the new 40 GB disk) with the following command :

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 o=/dev/sdb3

10)  Shutdown VM

11) Remove old disk (don’t delete it until the end).

12) Reboot your VM and check if all works.

If you want to be sure, run a “fsck /dev/sda3″ to check the File System once again.

If all works correctly you can now delete the original virtual disk.

Hope this help

Bye
Riccardo

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I toke me a long time on getting this to work right because of a number
of things like the firewall in ESX 3 and what BE Linux agent to use..
so that is why I have made this webpage so you can save time on this
when you setup a new ESX 3 server and don’t have the time to fight with
this.

Remote Agent for Linux and UNIX Servers (RALUS) 10.x

First the RALUS 10.x does not work on ESX because it can not see the
VMFS file system and Veritas will not fix this before next version
because it do not understand “links” in the file system.. so don’t use
time on.

you can see this Veritas
href=”http://support.veritas.com/docs/278671″>KB
id=”DOCUMENT_ID”>278671 about it and
her is what they write

Backup Exec UNIX Agent 5.0 revision 5.046

This is the Linux agent to use as it works and it can be download on
this Veritas
href=”http://support.veritas.com/docs/262592″>KB262592
or if you have Backup Exec 9.1 installed on your Windows server then is
found in a subfolder of the app.

Backup Exec on remote Windows server

This howto and the “Backup Exec UNIX Agent 5.0 revision 5.046″ is
working with Backup Exec 9.1, 10.x and 10D for Windows
Here is how to install it on the VMware ESX 3.0 and setup
Backup Exec for Windows

1. Download the linux agent software to a folder on the ESX 3.0 server

2. Login as Root on the ESX server

3. Change to folder and verify the TAR file is there

5. Starting the Installation

6. Select OS as Linux 2.4 (number 5)

7. Type Y to install in the default folder

8. Hit Enter to continue

9. Type in the host and domain name of this ESX server

10. Select N (can be changed later if you like)

11. No matter how many netcards you have select Y two times and enter
the IP number of the ESX COS IP

12. Select the / to be export and then wait with other paths as we type
them into the config file later!

13. Enter the IP number of the remote Backup Exec 9.1, 10.x or 10D
server that you like to backup this server.

14. Enter 30 as the advertisement time, note that if you select another
value there is maybe a regkey on the windows server you need to change
also but Veritas write about it in the documentation.

15. Just select 1 and go on

16. Now the software is installed and pre config

17. Goto the remote Backup Exec server and into the options, then
change the settings to be like this.

18. Now on the ESX server again, Config the ESX firewall to allow
Backup exec Linux agent to talk with the remote backup exec server

19. Config the ESX firewall to allow the remote Backup exec server to
talk with the agent on the ESX server.

20. Reload the firewall config

21. open and edit the agent config file

22. Change the config file to match your setup and write the file to
disk

21. Restart the Backup Exec agent so it read the new config

22. Now go to the remote backup server and make a test backup job where
you select some folders to backup with a lot of data so you can see
that it is stabile.

23. Monitor it is backup the file and the speed is what you expect it
to be, I have a LTO3 autoloader and the network is 1gbit and I can see
the network traffic is around 250mbit between the server so that is
just fine.

24. Now monitor the verify, note the high speed is because it just
verifying checksums and there for fast, the network is also note
showing any trafic at all.

Now Backup exec Linux agent is installed on the ESX 3.0 server
and works well

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Follow a very useful article form VMWare-Land (http://www.vmware-land.com) on resizing virtual disk method on VMWare ESX.

Thanks to VMWare-Land for the great Job.

There are several methods to re-sizing virtual disks listed below. If you want to shrink the disk in ESX3 then using Vmware Converter is the best way to do this, you can no longer use vmkfstools to shrink a disk in ESX3, you can also try using QpartEd to shrink a disk. With all these methods you should make a backup copy of your original vmdk file in case something goes wrong. Also make sure you shutdown the OS cleanly before restarting the VM (GpartEd will sometimes fail otherwise). Methods 1, 4 & 5 are essentially the same using Linux boot CD’s and either GpartEd or QpartEd.

Method 1 – Using vmkfstools and gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) to extend a disk

• Download the gparted livecd ISO and make it available so it can be mounted by the virtual machine’s CD-ROM
• Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize
• Log into the ESX Server console via Putty
• Type “vmkfstools –X /vmfs/volumes///” ie. /vmfs/volumes/Storage1/my_vm.vmdk New disk size can be specified in kilo, mega or gigabytes and will be the total size of the new disk. So if you want to increase a virtual disk from 20GB to 24GB you would specify either 24000m or 24g
• Power on the Virtual Machine and make sure it boots properly, load Disk Management and you will see the new unallocated space
• Now to join the unallocated space to the primary partition, first shutdown the Virtual Machine
• Connect the Virtual Machine to the GpartEd ISO file and make sure you enable Connected at Power On
• Power on the Virtual Machine
• Press ESC at the Bios screen to get to the Boot Menu
• Select CD-ROM as the Boot device
• Gnome Partition Editor will load, press Enter at the boot screen
• At the Boot option screen select Manual Video Card and then select Done
• Select US English at the Language screen
• Select qwerty/us.map at the Keyboard screen
• Select Generic VESA Compatiable at the Video Driver screen
• Select 8 at the Display Depth screen
• Select 1024×768 at the Resolution screen
• Once the partition editor loads, click on /dev/sda1 in the partition list
• Click the Resize/Move button
• Click and drag the arrow to extend the size of the partition, make sure you do a resize (double arrow) and not a move (four way arrow) so you should 0 free space preceding and following and then click the Resize/Move button
• Next click the Apply button and then the operation will start, you can expand Details to see the progress, once completed click the Close button
• Click the power button in the bottom right corner, then select reboot
• Edit the VM and remove the ISO from the CD/ROM device (change to Client)
• When the server restarts it will do a Check Disk, let this complete, Windows will prompt for a reboot after you login
• Reboot and load Disk Management and your Primary Partion will be the new size without any unallocated space

Method 2 – Using Vmware Converter (http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/) to shrink or extend a disk

When you use Converter to copy a VM it will transfer the data to the destination server by one of two ways. If you do not change the disk size or increase the size of your original disks then it does a block level clone of the drive. If you reduce the size of your original disks it instead does a file level clone of the drive.

• Download and install Converter on the VM that you want to resize the drives, reboot after the install completes
• Start Converter application, click the Import Machine button
• Click Next at the Welcome screen and then Next again at the Source screen
• Select ‘Physical Computer’ and click Next o Select “This Local Machine” and click Next
• At the Source Data screen select your volumes and change “Maintain Size” to “Type Size in GB” and enter your new disk size and click Next
• At the Destination screen click Next
• Select “Import this machine to a Vmware ESX Server or VirtualCenter virtual machine” and click Next
• At the Destination login screen, select your ESX/VC server and enter the login information and click Next
• At the Virtual Machine Name and Folder screen enter a new name for your VM and select a folder and click Next
• At the Host or Cluster screen select a host for your destination and click Next
• At the Datastore screen, select a datastore and click Next
• At the Networks screen, configure your NICs and click Next
• At the Customization screen, click Next
• Click Finish and the conversion will begin
• Once the Conversion is complete, edit the new VM settings and remove any extra hardware that Converter adds (USB/serial/parallel ports, etc.)
• Shutdown your original source VM and power on your new destination VM
• Make sure everything is functioning properly on the new VM and you can delete the original VM

Method 3 – Using vmkfstools and another Windows virtual machine to extend a disk

• Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize
• Log into the ESX Server console via Putty
• Type “vmkfstools –X /vmfs/volumes///” ie. /vmfs/volumes/Storage1/my_vm.vmdk New disk size can be specified in kilo, mega or gigabytes and will be the total size of the new disk. So if you want to increase a virtual disk from 20GB to 24GB you would specify either 24000m or 24g
• Shutdown the second helper virtual machine
• Edit the settings of the second VM and add the hard disk from the first VM
• Power on the second VM and load the Disk Management snap-in and verify that the disk from the first VM has un-allocated space on it
• Select Start, Run and enter diskpart.exe
• The command ‘list volume’ will show you all volumes.
• Select your volume based on the results of the list volume command, ie. ‘select volume 1’ o Type the command ‘extend’ to extend the volume
• Check the Disk Management snap-in again and the volume should be extended with a larger capacity
• Shutdown the second VM and remove (not delete) the disk from it
• Power on your first VM and the new space should be there and ready to use

Method 4 – Using vmkfstools and System Rescue CD (http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Recovery/System-Rescue-CD-188.shtml) to extend a disk

• Download the System Rescue ISO and make it available so it can be mounted by the virtual machine’s CD-ROM
• Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize
• Log into the ESX Server console via Putty
• Type “vmkfstools –X /vmfs/volumes///” ie. /vmfs/volumes/Storage1/my_vm.vmdk New disk size can be specified in kilo, mega or gigabytes and will be the total size of the new disk. So if you want to increase a virtual disk from 20GB to 24GB you would specify either 24000m or 24g
• Power on the Virtual Machine and make sure it boots properly, load Disk Management and you will see the new unallocated space
• Now to join the unallocated space to the primary partition, first shutdown the Virtual Machine
• Connect the Virtual Machine to the System Rescue ISO file and make sure you enable Connected at Power On
• Power on the Virtual Machine
• Press ESC at the Bios screen to get to the Boot Menu
• Select CD-ROM as the Boot device
• Press Enter at the boot screen
• Press Enter after boot sequence is complete and then type ‘startx’
• Once X-windows loads, double-click the GpartEd icon (drive icon, 3rd down on the right hand side)
• Once the partition editor loads, click on /dev/sda1 in the partition list
• Click the Resize/Move button
• Click and drag the arrow to extend the size of the partition, make sure you do a resize (double arrow) and not a move (four way arrow) so you should 0 free space preceding and following and then click the Resize/Move button
• Next click the Apply button and then the operation will start, you can expand Details to see the progress, once completed click the Close button.
• Click the power button in the bottom right corner, then select reboot.
• Edit the VM and remove the ISO from the CD/ROM device (change to Client)
• When the server restarts it will do a Check Disk, let this complete, Windows will prompt for a reboot after you login
• Reboot and load Disk Management and your Primary Partion will be the new size without any unallocated space

Method 5 – Using Knoppix Live CD with QtPartEd- (http://www.knoppix.org/) to shrink a disk

• Download the Knoppix Live CD and make it available so it can be mounted by the virtual machine’s CD-ROM
• Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize
• Add a second virtual disk of the new smaller desired size to the VM you want to resize
• Connect the Virtual Machine to the Knoppix Live CD ISO file and make sure you enable Connected at Power On
• Power on the Virtual Machine
• Press ESC at the Bios screen to get to the Boot Menu
• Select CD-ROM as the Boot device
• Press Enter at the boot screen
• Click on the K Menu icon and then select System and then QTPartEd
• Select your original drive (usually sda) and click on the partition 1
• Select Operations from the top menu and then Resize, resize the drive so it is just less then the new drives (sdb) capacity
• Select File from the top menu and then Commit, click Yes at the warning window
• Once complete, select Cancel if you get a unmounted hard disk window and then OK at the Progress window
• Open a Konsole window and type “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb” This copy will take a long time and will not show a status while it is running. Yyou will get an insufficient space error at the end of the copy, this is normal because the drive you’re copying from is bigger then the destination. But as long as the partition is smaller, everything will work
• Shutdown the VM and edit the VM settings, remove the original C: drive and change the SCSI ID of the new drive to match the old one (usually 0:0)
• Power on the VM and it will run a Chkdsk and you will be all set

Method 6 – Use Ghost or another 3rd party imaging product to shrink a disk

Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize

• Add a second virtual disk of the new smaller desired size to the VM you want to resize o Use Ghost to clone the first disks partition to your second virtual disk
• Once complete make sure the second virtual disk is ‘Active’
• Switch your disks by editing the virtual machine settings and switching the SCSI id’s (0:0 and 0:1)
• If the virtual machine boots OK and you verify that everything works then shutdown the VM and remove the larger disk and delete it

Good Luck

Riccardo

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Investigating to deploy an MSCS on VMWare VI3 I’ve finally found that :

Virtual Machine (Cluster Node) have forementioned boundaries

• Only LSI Logic virtual SCSI Card
• Only VMXnet
• Only 32-Bit VMs
• 2-Node Clustering only
• Nic teaming is not supported
• iSCSI clustering is not supported
• Boot from SAN is not supported
• VMs part of clustering cannot be part of VMHA & DRS
• Cannot VMotion on VMs using clustering software
• ESX 2.5 and ESX 3.0 is not supported
• Different HBA’s card manufacturer not supported
• When using N+I SCSIPort Miniport driver must be present on Physical Node and not Storport Miniport driver, also there must be no powerpath software installed on physical node.

Take care of this.

Riccardo

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Very very very good article written by Massimo Re Ferrè on his Blog (IT 2.0) about sizing of an infrastructure based on VMWare Virtual infrastructure 3.

As always, thank you Massimo.

http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/11/26/83.aspx

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