July 2011 – Busy couple of weeks

Posted on July 7, 2011 by brian.wuchner

The following several weeks will be very busy for VMware enthusiasts — especially in the Indianapolis area. Here is a run down of the upcoming events:

Raising the Bar, Part V
Tuesday July 12th 2011 at Noon ET
Live webcast with VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod.
Register now at http://t.co/BSdkZ2P

 

VMware View Bootcamp
Tuesday July 19th 2011 – daily updates for two weeks
Nine-part bootcamp, showing how to get started and roll out/deploy virtual desktops and applications. Sessions will cover everything from storage and networking best practices to PCoIP tuning and optimizing base image(s).
Register now at http://www.vmware.com/go/viewbootcamp

 

Demo Day 4 VMUG User Conference (regional event)
Thursday July 28th 2011 at 7AM ET
Largest VMUG event worldwide with 1000+ attendees expected (twitter hash tag #DD4ivmug)
Register now at http://bit.ly/jeMK50

Posted in Virtualization | Leave a comment

vExpert 2011: Thank you!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by brian.wuchner

I woke up this morning to find a shocking email from @jtroyer…it started like this:

We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities.

This is very exciting news for me, as previous recipients of this title have been both mentors and role models to me for years.  Thank you to all those who read this blog and to the selection committee for selecting me. I am honored and humbled to receive such an award.

 

 

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VMware ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD) on Dell Server

Posted on June 21, 2011 by brian.wuchner

Last week I was informed of a customer who had a Purple Screen of Death on a Dell PowerEdge R810 running ESXi 4.1 Update 1. The stop screen showed the following reason:

LINT1 motherboard interrupt. This is a hardware problem: please contact your hardware vendor

After working with Dell tech support, the customer was directed to disable the C States and C1E settings in the BIOS. I was interested in this setting as I have a cluster using the same hardware with the same version of ESXi.

The following article describes C States and specifically the C1E setting; it is a method to reduce power consumption by powering off cores when not in use: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Impact+of+C1E+on+PowerEdge+11G+Servers+–+HPBD+100909.

The VMware Performance Best Practices Guide (available here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf) specifically states on page 15 to “Disable C1E halt state in the BIOS.”

I don’t spend a lot of time changing settings in the BIOS, but with the possible impact of this setting thought this was worth sharing.

Posted in Virtualization | 6 Comments

64bit DOS commands with a 32bit (two-bit) application

Posted on June 10, 2011 by brian.wuchner

This week I worked with a group of people that have a monitoring application — basically a glorified task scheduler for 32bit DOS applications. Among other things, this application attempts to check Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) failover status and send emails (using BLAT.exe) in the event a cluster was unbalanced. The code was no longer working after moving to Windows 2008R2. While helping them debug code, I realized that the ‘cluster’ command was not producing any output; likely due to the 32bit mode scheduler. A quick Google search came up with a simple solution — use the Windows SYSNATIVE directory instead of SYSTEM32 (http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/how-to-suppress-and-bypass-system32-file-system-redirect-to-syswow64-folder-with-sysnative/).

However, updating the code caused a slight problem because the sysnative path was not available on their down level clusters. Here is a very simple workaround, but one I thought worth mentioning:

if exist "C:\Windows\sysnative\cluster.exe" (
set clusterPath="C:\Windows\sysnative\cluster.exe"
) else (
set clusterPath=%windir%\system32\cluster.exe
)

echo %clusterPath%

This batch file code checks for the existence of the sysnative\cluster.exe and if it is not available fails back to the previous path. A very simple solution, but the customer is happy.

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PowerCLI vCheck 5.40

Posted on May 31, 2011 by brian.wuchner

The other day I noticed two bugs in version 5.38 of the vCheck script. This minor update resolves those bugs and adds a check for 4.1 hosts without Active Directory authentication configured.

# Version 5.40- bwuch: Host version greater than/equal 4.1.0 and AD Auth not configured
# Version 5.39- bwuch: bug fixes from 5.38 version

5.39 – Bug fixes to resolve issues with re-use of global variables in version 5.38 (a description of these bugs can be found here: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/powercli-vcheck-5-38/#comments)

5.40 – added check based completely on LucD’s Get-VMHostAuthentication function available here: http://www.lucd.info/2010/07/25/script-vsphere-4-1-ad-authentication/. This check looks for hosts running ESX/ESXi 4.1 or higher without Active Directory authentication setup. This check can be disabled by setting $ShowHostADAuth to $false

You can download the updated version here: vCheck5.40.ps1

Please feel free to leave a comment with any suggestions or problems you may encounter.

Posted in Scripting, Virtualization | 11 Comments