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100,000 I/O Operations Per Second, One ESX Host

See http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2008/05/100000-io-opera.html for full text.

Understanding and fixing VMware ESX problems without pulling the plug

VMWARE MANAGEMENT, MIGRATION AND PERFORMANCE
Understanding and fixing VMware ESX problems without pulling the plug
Eric Siebert, Contributor
06.24.2008
LINK TO ARTICLE

VMware: configuring a static MAC address in a VM

Original article from http://virtrix.blogspot.com/2007/04/vmware-configuring-static-mac-address.html

Sometimes it can be necessary to configure a static MAC address in a VM. A typical issue during P2V is an application that has its licensing based on the MAC address.

VMware has defined that VirtualCenter does not use the following range: 00:50:56:00:00:00 to 00:50:56:3F:FF:FF where 00:50:56 is the OUI.

The steps:

1. Power off & remove the server from the VirtualCenter inventory. This is a necessary step, because VC will overwrite your settings during Power On!
2. Edit the .vmx file and locate the following generated MAC address:
Ethernet0.addressType =
and
Ethernet0.generatedAddress =
3. Change the value for ethernet0.addressType from “vpx” to “static”
4. Change ethernet0.GeneratedAddress to ethernet0.Address
5. Change the current MAC to a MAC address in the following range:
00:50:56:00:00:00-00:50:56:3F:FF:FF
6. In VirtualCenter, select an ESX host and go to storage
7. Browse the data store & locate your VM
8. Right-click on the .vmx file, and select Add to inventory
9. Power On the server. Issue the command ipconfig /all and locate the VMware NIC. Your manually assigned MAC address should be there.

I know you can set your MAC address inside Windows, but I would avoid this.

Sysprep Virtual Center integration for Win 2003 SP3

http://virtualizationinformation.com/?p=28

Unix Notes

http://unixnotes.wordpress.com/

DELL Professional Services aneb GICS

Presne 15.5.2006 jsem nastoupil do DELLu a psal jsem o tom, ze DELL krome produktu nabizi i profesionalni konzultanty, architekty a inzenyry. Viz.
http://davidpasek.blogspot.com/2006/06/dell-jak-ho-mon-neznte.html

Presne 15.5.2008 jsem se stal clenem byvaleho DPS - DELL Professional Services, ktere se dnes jmenuje GICS - Global Infrastructure Consulting Services. Moje zamereni je primarne na serverovou konsolidaci a virtualizaci, nicmene jelikoz jsem zatim prvni Solution Architect DELLu v Ceske Republice, tak mam na starosti i enterprise storage a networking.

TeamViewer

I have to try
http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking

Following article is from blog.scottlowe.org

...
There are actually two different pieces described in this article. The first is NIC teaming, in which we logically bind together multiple physical NICs for increased throughput and increased fault tolerance. The second is VLAN trunking, in which we configure the physical switch to pass VLAN traffic directly to ESX Server, which will then distribute the traffic according to the port groups and VLAN IDs configured on the server. I wrote about ESX and VLAN trunking a long time ago and ran into some issues then; here I’ll describe how to work around the issues I ran into at that time.
...

Full article:
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2006/12/04/esx-server-nic-teaming-and-vlan-trunking

Other useful technical paper about VLAN on ESX is at
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/412

SSH Tunel - howto (Czech Language)

http://www.cryptofest.cz/2003/slajdy/sshtunel/ssh.html

How to Set up VNC on Debian GNU/Linux

Installation and usage

You've just installed Debian, but your wife wants her monitor back. That's OK, you were planning on running it headless, anyway. But, wouldn't it be nice to check out some of those groovy GUI apps? Don't fret, VNC will let you interact with a desktop environment from just about any platform available.

Install vncserver (as root):
apt-get install vncserver

Choose your desired window size and color depth, then, as an ordinary user, open a terminal and type:
vncserver -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24
or
vncserver -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24 -pixelformat rgb565

This will prompt you to create a password:

You will require a password to access your desktops.

Password:
Verify


The server will start and tell you where to access it:

New 'X' desktop is foobar:1

Starting applications specified in /etc/X11/Xsession
Log file is /home/jorey/.vnc/foobar:1.log


Open the VNC viewer on your remote machine, enter the hostname:screen and password (use a hostname or IP that your client machine understands), and your Linux desktop will open in a window! Network speed and processor power will affect performance, but it's amazing how many apps will run fine under VNC. You might not be able to play Frozen Bubble, but you can use productivity applications without any trouble.

To kill the server enter a command similar to this, using the appropriate settings:
vncserver -kill :1

The reason for killing the session is that you may need to edit the default configuration file that vncserver creates for you, for example to get the vncserver to run the K desktop environment instead of twm, you may want to edit the $HOME/.vnc/xstartup file to replace the line:


twm &


with this line is you use KDE:


startkde &


and with this line if you use GNOME:


gnome-session &


before launching the vncserver again using:


vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565


VNC over OpenSSH

The following is just a summary of the full explanation. To use VNC over OpenSSH, first you need to run an ssh session on the machine where you will be running the vncviewer, to request that ssh listen on a particular port on your local machine, and forward communication on that port down the secure connection to a port on the machine running the vncserver.

For example:

ssh -L x:localhost:y vncserver_machine

means "Start an SSH connection to the vncserver_machine, and also listen on port x on my machine, and forward any connections there to port y on the vncserver_machine."

Now, the VNC protocol normally uses port 59xx, where xx is the display number of the server. So a VNC server on a Windows machine, which normally uses display number 0, will listen on port 5900. The first VNC server on linux will probably use display number 1, and subsequent servers would use 2, 3, etc. and so the vncservers on linux will be listening on ports 5901, 5902 and so forth. By forwarding these ports to a remote machine running vncserver, you can make the remote VNC server appear to be a server running on your local machine. So, imagine you had a VNC server running as display :1 on vncserver_machine, and you wanted a secure connection to it from your local machine. You could start the ssh session using:

ssh -CL 5902:localhost:5901 vncserver_machine

After that, starting up the vncviewer as follows on your local machine: vncviewer -encodings "copyrect hextile" localhost:2 would actually connect to display :1 on the vncserver_machine.

Note that the above OpenSSH command-line is deliberately meant to accept incoming connections only from the local machine. This means that to use the ssh connection that we have just set up, we must connect to it from the same machine, using the special name localhost, rather than using the local machine's own unique name.

This article is compiled from following resources:

http://www.joreybump.com/code/howto/debian/vnc.html
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/TightVNC

X Window Servers

"X Server" for Windows XP and Vista
http://mediakey.dk/~cc/x11-for-windows-xp-and-vista/

X Ming "X Server"
http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

"X Server" for Mac OS X

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/
macosx_updates/x11formacosx.html

@@VMWARE@@ UTS_RELEASE

Paolo Conti wrote how to hack VMware tools to work on linux kernels 2.6.18

[CITATION FROM http://www.atlink.it/~conti/2007/12/19/vmware-uts_release/]

Well, VMWare tools sometimes fails to install into a Linux guest with recent kernel.

The error is something like this: The directory of kernel headers (version @@VMWARE@@ UTS_RELEASE) does not match your running kernel (version 2.6.18.2-34-default). Even if the module were to compile successfully, it would not load into the running kernel.

With this bug you cannot sync the time with your hosting server, automate shutdown tasks, etc… This problem exist because the kernel source code structure is changed in recent kernels (I guess > 2.6.18). The VMWare tools installation script is looking for the string “#define UTS_RELEASE $kernel_number” into /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)*/include/linux/version.h but the UTS_RELEASE variable is now into the file utsrelease.h.

To fix this, you can patch the VMWare tools installation script or just add the content of utsrelease.h to version.h. I suppose the second solution is the fastest one

To do this:

cd /usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)*/include/linux
cat utsrelease.h >> version.h

Happy virtualization folks!

Eth0 disappears after cloning

When I used VMWare Cloning of Debian Gold image everything was OK except networking. Eth0 disappeared and Eth1 came up. It's due to MAC address persistent association in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules. Solution is to avoid persistent association. If you open this file you'll see that old MAC address is associated with eth0 so you can change this MAC address. However, the easiest solution is just delete file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules. File will be created after next reboot but with MAC address of current network card.

System Management & Monitoring server - ZENOSS

Looks interesting http://www.zenoss.com I would like to practically test it. Hope to have time soon.

Apple advertisment

Very nice Apple advertisment against Microsoft ;-)

Very interesting blog about DB & STORAGE performance

Christian has a lot of practical experiences with DB & Storage performance tunning. Look at http://christianbilien.wordpress.com/ and read some articles there. I have similar practical experiences.

AJAX suite

I found very interesting AJAX suite of dynamic web components. See at Zapatec web site.

VMWare appliances with pre-installed Operating Systems

Pre-installed OS images for VMWare should speed up deployment of particular OS. You can find out some images at http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/

Internet FailOver script for FreeBSD written in Perl

I wrote Perl script to automatically detect internet uplink failure and switch over to backup internet link. When primary link is up again script will switch it back. Script must be run in crontab as often as you wish.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Frame::Device;
use Net::Ping;

$uplink1_interface="sis0";
$uplink2_interface="sis1";
$lan_interface="sis2";
$primary_gateway="10.0.3.1";
$secondary_gateway="10.10.1.1";

# print current date and time
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = gmtime(time);
$year=$year+1900;
print "GMT Time: $year-$mon-$mday $hour:$min:$sec\n";

my $device_uplink1 = Net::Frame::Device->new(dev => $uplink1_interface);
my $device_uplink2 = Net::Frame::Device->new(dev => $uplink2_interface);
my $device_lan = Net::Frame::Device->new(dev => $lan_interface);

print "Current default gateway:", $device_lan->gatewayIp, "\n";
print "Primary default gateway:", $primary_gateway, "\n";
print "Secondary gateway:", $secondary_gateway, "\n";

print "Checking primary internet uplink ...\n";
if (check_uplink($primary_gateway)) {
if ($device_lan->gatewayIp ne $primary_gateway) {
# set default route to $primary_gateway
`route delete default`;
`route add default $primary_gateway`;

# Change uplink interface to uplink1_interface
change_nat_interface($uplink1_interface);

# restart IPFW and NATD daemon
`/etc/rc.d/ipfw restart`;

print "Default gateway has been changed to $primary_gateway via interface $uplink1_interface\n";
} else {
print "Current default gateway is set to primary gateway and is ok\n";
}
} elsif (check_uplink($secondary_gateway)) {
if ($device_lan->gatewayIp ne $secondary_gateway) {
# set default route to $secondary_gateway
`route delete default`;
`route add default $secondary_gateway`;

# Change uplink interface to uplink2_interface
change_nat_interface($uplink2_interface);

# restart IPFW and NATD daemon
`/etc/rc.d/ipfw restart`;

print "Default gateway has been changed to $secondary_gateway via interface $uplink2_interface\n";
} else {
print "Current default gateway is set to secondary gateway and is ok\n";
}
} else {
print "Any uplink is up and working\n";
}

print "----\n";

######################################################
# Ping IP address and decide if it's reachable or not
# 1.parameter: IP
######################################################
sub check_uplink {
my ($ip) = @_;

my $p = Net::Ping->new("icmp");
my $ok = $p->ping($ip);
$p->close();

return $ok; # 0 - false; 1 - true
}

######################################################
# Change NATD interface file
# 1.parameter: network interface
######################################################
sub change_nat_interface {
my ($nat_if) = @_;

$filename="/tmp/natd_iface";
if (open(F, "> $filename")) {
print "change_nat_iface: writing $nat_if to $filename\n";
print F $nat_if;
close F;
} else {
print "change_nat_iface: Cannot write to $filename\n";
return 0;
}

return 1; # 0 - false; 1 - true
}