SiteSurvey 2.5.3 for FT - Not supported on vSphere 5.1

I was reading researching about NX/XD (KB 1993) , EVC (KB 1003212) & FT and came across the page where I saw that on vSphere 5.1 the Site Survey 2.5.3 utility is not supported.

VMware SiteSurvey 2.5.3 is actually a plugin for the vSphere Client which analyzes ESX/ESXi host/s managed by vCenter Server and reports on whether the configuration of both software and hardware is suitable for use with the VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) feature.

You will notice the following message on the Main Site Survey Page.



As you can see it is supported on all previous version than vSphere 5.1.

Another important utility is the cpuid tool which checks the CPU configuration for compatibility and other feature comparison. If you don't have this then I would recommend to download the same as you can use it any time for checking the cpu information.

You can download the CPUID zip file from here.

If you are not aware about FT then you can read the features here.

Microsoft has their own HAV (Hardware Assisted Virtualization) detection tool which you can download from here.

As everyone else I am also waiting for SMP FT which will solve so many issues in the area of BC/DR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) which helps the businesses achieving 6 9's of SLA and rethinking the RTO/RPO combination. It will make a huge difference in the availability of vCenter Server which is the core component for all other dependent products such as vCloud, vShield, vCenter Orchestrator etc. etc.

Hopefully it will come out as heard that its demo was shown at some conference in 2012 but not sure what exactly it will support. If any one witnessed the demo then please leave your comment here so the readers/users can use the information discussed during the Demo.


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Upgrade Videos of vSphere, vCloud, vCenter, VDS, vShield

Hi,


If you want to go through the upgrade process of various VMware products, there are documentation available for them but one of VMware VCDXs, Matthew Meyer @mattdmeyer has developed a whole list of videos which covers the ugprade process and setup of various products which are as follows.


VMware vCloud Director 1.5 to 5.1 Upgrade

http://youtu.be/J6vfnvOS_D8



VMware vShield Manager 1.5 to 5.1 Upgrade

http://youtu.be/qrx8tQxNPIo



VMware vCenter Single Sign-On Installation
http://youtu.be/c1QWNbea3lo



VMware vCenter Server 5.0 to 5.1 Upgrade

http://youtu.be/0ypcu5JYWyo



VMware ESXi 5.0 to 5.1 Upgrade

http://youtu.be/Kvozx6v4m50



vCloud Director 1.5 to 5.1 Agent Upgrade

http://youtu.be/D9CSNOhqfAE



VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) 5.0 to 5.1 Upgrade

http://youtu.be/MVDAwbVZd0I




VMware VXLAN Installation for vCloud Director 5.1

http://youtu.be/LK7N4o8N7ts



This will give you an idea on exactly what to do while upgrading or installing the related products.

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Thanks !!

Windows 2008 Boot issue after extending the disk on vSphere 5

Recently I came across a strange issue on my Lab where I assigned limited size Thick Provisioned VMDK to a W2K8 R2 VM. Just the OS drive.

It was ran out of space and I had to extend the VMDK so did it from the VS Client.

On next reboot I saw that Windows is not booting properly and giving me an error


=============================
File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe


Status: 0xc000000e
=============================

Now I know I still have to extend the partition within the Guest OS but that was the next part I was supposed to do but not even getting that far.

Searching the error at MS site, I found an article to fix the boot sector.

• To do that boot the VM with the Windows OS boot disk
• Select "Repair your computer"
• Open the command prompt, and run:
  
  bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd
  bootrec.exe /fixmbr
  
  (Select Yes for any prompts)
• For changes to take effect, reboot the virtual machine   

VM is up and running after fixing the boot sector so no issue there, but now looking further into the rebuildbcd issue it looks like there is some disk signaturing issue going on but was not able to track it down so still doing further deep dive in to it.

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Performance History Issue in vCenter 5.1

Recently I was reading an internal posting and also found out through my colleague Josh Gray @jasper9, on Twitter that in vCenter 5.1 the Performance History is not retaining any information beyond 30 days. (which is only a month worth of data).

Now such performance data is crucial for getting the analysis done for so many things.

At present the issue is being investigated by VMware.

The issue is discussed here in KB 2042164.

@duncanyb has posted a blog here.


The alternate solution is put forward my @vcdxnz001 on this post here about using vCOPS Foundation.

Apart from it if you have a monthly backup of vCenter VM (complete VMDK) or the VC Database (either SQL or Oracle) then have the backup verified again and if possible make another copy of them. (individual monthly backup copies). So if you need for last one years performance history then you need 12 monthly back up copies of the vCenter Database. Depending on the requirements you can go and use the back up for any performance history retained in the database. Mainly if there is a new install of vCenter Server 5.1 then this should be for few months only as vSphere 5.1 released in October 2012.  It does affect to both instances of fresh install of vCenter Server and an upgrade of vCenter Server from an older versions to 5.1.

I suggest to use the option of "Subscribe to Document" on the KB page to get notification when the fix is released.

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Storage Path Ranking in vSphere

Recently I was researching some storage related issues and found out this cool feature in @MostafaVMW's recent book on Storage Implementation on vSphere 5.0 about ranking your paths when you are using VMW_PSP_MRU with ALUA arrays or non-ALUA Active/Passive Arrays.

So by using the ranked paths you can (indirectly) actually configured preferred path without using the VMW_PSP_FIXED plugin.

As you can rank the paths in ALUA configuration, if one path is no longer valid then PSP fails back to a path which has a higher rank configured. In non-ALUA it goes by the path Group State which is Active and if not available then goes by Standby state. 

You can use the following command to setup the rank which goes in the way like "Higher the value and higher the rank for that path" (Default is 0 - Zero).

esxcli storage nmp psp generic pathconfig set -c "rank-" -p  

You can get the existing ranking for the path using the command:

esxcli storage nmp psp generic pathconfig get –p

Note: Where XX needs to be replaced by numeric value and path name should be provided depending on your requirement/s. Path names can be runtime path name or physical path name.

So to summarize if an AO path with highest rank fails , it will find the next path with highest rank and fails over to that path, but suppose there is no other AO path available with any ranking, then it will fail over to the next highest ranked path which is connected to a port in ANO state and eventually in standby state.

vSphere Client does not have the functionality at present to setup the ranking for the paths so you need to use esxcli command line only for now.

Hope you can use this feature in certain conditions where multipathing policies are not fully available but you can still benefit out of the existing setup using this feature.

I am just spreading the information for those who does not have access to the book. At the same time indeed suggesting to everyone to buy it and read it for further/deeper understanding of all the vSphere Storage related concepts.

Thanks and please share !!