Buenas...and welcome to my ongoing blog on VMware ESXi5. In this edition we will be looking at VMFS. We will go through adding an extent to a VMFS datastore.
In section A we went over detaching the LUN from the ESXi host this can be referenced here.
In section B we went over expanding the LUN, re-attaching the LUN to the ESXi host and Expanding the VMFS file systems. This can be reference here.
In section C we are going to add an extent to an exsisting file system. This is typically done when you have an older SAN that does not support expanding out the LUN.
If you are not already in the vSphere Client, open it up and go to Home / Inventory / Hosts and Clusters. Click on the Configuration Tab and clcik on Storeage.
From here you can see all of the VMFS Datastores. In order to have an extra LUN to work with you will need to right click on Test iSCSI and select delete. Prior to deleting this make sure that there is nothing that you need on this datastore. The deletion is unrecoverable.
You will get a warning that this will delete all of the data on the DataStore. Click on OK.
Now we can work with Test iSCSI1 select this by left clicking on it once and click on the Properties... link in the lower panel.
Once you are in the properties of Test iSCSI1 LUN take notice tha tin the Extend Device the device capacity and the click on the Increase... button.
néih hóu...welcome to my blog about installing VMware Tools on a Guest OS. VMware tools is a bunch of utilities that make the Guest OS run better. This is done by replacing standard OS drivers for drivers that were specifically made for a virtual environment.
When VMware tools are installed, the VMware tools service is installed, as well as a set of drivers which include SVGA display, vmxnet nic drivers, mouse drivers, a memory control driver, a buslogic SCSI driver, and a sync driver to quiescence I/O on windows guest OS. Also there are additional options added to perfmon, a control panel icon is added for VMware Tools, a VMware user process is added to control copy and paste to and from the VM's, and a set of scripts that help automate many tasks are added.
All in all, it is very important for these tools to be loaded for your environment to run optimally.
In this blog I will be using a Virtual Machine running Windows XP.
From the Guest OS Console view, go to VM / Guest / Install/Upgrade VMware Tools
When you do this a virtual CD rom is mounted. You will get a pop up explaining VMware Tools a bit.
Click on OK
If Auto play is enable the installation should begin. If it is not you will need to browse to the CD-ROM directory, and double click on setup.
Once you get to the Welcome Screen, Click on Next.
Next you will see the Setup Type screen.
Keep the default radio button selected.
Click on Next.
Now you will see the Ready to Install the Program Screen.
Click on Install
The installer will go through and install all of the VMware tools.
When it is complete you will get the Installation Wizard Completed Screen.
Click on Finished.
Depending upon the version of your operating system you may be prompted for a reboot.
If you are click on YES.
Once your OS is reloaded you can go into the services control panel and take a look at the new services that are loaded. You should see two, VMware Physical Disk Helper Service, and VMware Tools Service.
The VMware Tools Service performs many tasks behind the seen that are important for the health of the Virtual Machine. The heartbeat function sends regular messages to the VMware Server. This allows the server to monitor if the Virtual Machine is up and functioning properly.
VMware Tools Service also handles managing the message to and from the guest OS. An example of this can be seen when you use the VI Web Access management interface. You have the option to power off, restart, or suspend the OS. The VMware Tools service listens for this command and then translates it into the native commands for windows to do a proper and clean power off, restart, or suspend. This also opens up the options for admins to write custom scripts to be able to take advantage of this communication.
There is also a VMware User Process that runs as a background process. This provides the mouse pointer and screen resolution functionality provided by the VMware Tools Service on Windows.
The VMware Tools Control Panel provides a nice interface for you to control some advanced functions in Windows. It is broken up into 6 tabs. On the Options Tab, there are check boxes to enable time sync, show tools in tasks bar, and notify if there is an update. There is also the option to update the tools.
As you can see the install is fairly simple. Do not underestimate the importance of having this installed however. The performance of all of the advanced functions of VMware are dependent on your VMware tools being installed and up to date.
Salud...and welcome to my ongoing series of VMware Blogs. This is part 3 of the Standard vSwitch blog. In this part we will be creating a separate virtual switch for all of the ESXi Virtual Machine Traffic to travel over.
It is best practice to break up traffic types over several virtual switches. This is possible providing that you have enough physical nics to do this. As I have stated before even for a small 2 node cluster, I would recommend 8 NICs to take advantage of all of the networking options that VMware has to offer.
To start off go to Home/Inventory/Hosts and Clusters and click on the ESXi host that you want to work with.
Click on the Configuration tab in the left hand panel.
Click on the Networking Link. This will take you to the standard vSwitch layout.
Click on Add Networking...
This will open up the Add Network Wizard.
At the Connection Type screen, select Virtual Machine. We are selecting this one because we want to create a network for VM traffic.
Click on next.
This will take you to the Network Access Screen. Here you will pick the NICs that you want to use for VM traffic.
You will need to take note of how your physical network is layed out. In the example we are going to use vmnic1 and vmnic5 because they are both on VLAN 104 with a subnet of 192.168.104.x.
Click on next.
Next you will see the Connection Settings screen.
Keep the default Label of VM Network and the Default VLAN ID.
Click Next.
This will take you to the Summary screen.
Click on finished.
Once you click on Finished you will see a task for Updating Network Configs in the recent tasks screen.
When this is done you will see your new vSwitch in the VSphere Standard Switch Config. Remember you should do this for each ESXi host you want to attach to this cluster.
Hola...and welcome to my continuing blog on VMware ESXi5. We will continue to take a look at Standard vSwitches. In this blog we are going to create a new standard vSwitch for vMotion traffic to travel over.
To start off go to Home/Inventory/Hosts and Clusters and click on the ESXi host that you want to work with.
Click on the Configuration tab in the left hand panel.
Click on the Networking Link. This will take you to the standard vSwitch layout.
Click on Add Networking...
This will open up the Add Network Wizard. The first screen is the Connection Type screen. Here we have the option of choosing what type of traffic we want to use this switch for. The default is Virtual Machine. This traffic is the standard traffic that a VM will use.
The second option is VMkernel, this traffic is for vMotion, iSCSI, NFS or management traffic. Select this radio button and click next.
This will take you to the VMkernel Network Access screen. Here you will select the physical nics that you would like to assign to the vMotion Network. In our example we are going to use vmnic3 and vmnic7.
Remember that when physically wiring these nics if possible you want them to go to separate switches that both have access to the same layer 2 vlan. Redundancy!
Click on Next.
Now you will see the Connections Settings screen. Change the Network Label to vMotion. Also check the box to Use this port group for vMotion.
You have other options as well, including Using this port group for FT or management traffic. It is best practice to split up the traffic on virtual switches so that you have everything nice and segmented. This is not always possible, but always preferred.
Click Next.
This will take you to the IP Connection Settings. This is a non routable vlan, so even though there is a default gateway, it will not be used.
I am creating a new subnet and vlan or 192.168.106.x. All of the ESXi hosts will be on the same virtual switch so no routing will be done.
I will match the final octet of the ESXi host management network with the final octet of the vMotion network. So for incp-esxi1-vm we will put in 192.168.106.10 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
Click Next.
This will bring you to the summary. Review the settings and click on Finished.
This is going to be a side blog, that I will be referencing in my main VMware series. Veeam Fast SCP is a great product that everyone who is using VMware should be using. The company has many other products that provide more advanced features, and I would recommend looking at them as possible solutions to some common VMware tasks.
As a prerequisite for this I would recommend creating a Veeam service account on your domain, if your machine is part of a domain, or a local account on your PC if it is not. I would highly recommend when creating this account you set it up with the password never expiring. If the password does expire you will need to go to each place that this is installed and change the password. Unless you have something along the lines of script logic which can automate this task. In our example we will be installing Veeam on a 32 bit version of Windows XP.
The first thing that we will need is to download Veeam Fast SCP 3.0 in order to transfer files to and from storage on our ESXi host. The good people at Veeam provide this software for free here. They do require that you sign in before you download it. Once you have it downloaded Double click on the Veeam Fast SCP installer
You may be prompted with an open file Security Warning depending upon your system. If you are click on Run. This will cause the files to extract and eventually you will get to the Veeam Backup and FastSCP Welcome screen. Click on Next.
The EULA comes next. Read through it all and then select the radio button for I agree and Click Next.
The Program Features Screen is next. Accept the defaults and Click on Next.
This brings us to the Select Installation Folder You can change the default install directory or keep the standard. There is also an option if you want this program to be available for everyone or Just the person who is currently logged in. The default is Everyone. Make your adjustments accordingly and click Next.
Now we are at the Service Credentials screen. Warning, by default it tries to install this as your account. You do not want to do this, especially if you are part of a domain or have a password expiration policy. If you do you will have to go in and update the service each time and change the password. It is a real PITA. This is why one of the prerequisites was to have a service account created.
Click on Browse and Search for the service account
This will take you to the standard Windows Select User Dialogue Box. You many need to change the location that you system is looking for the account by clicking on the Locations... button. Make sure that in the From this location field has the proper location where your account it. Ex. If you are in a domain that it has your domain. If you are using a local account that it has the computer name. We are using a domain so the example shows internal.orinoco-sysetms.com.
In the enter the object name to select, type in the name of the account. Click on Check Names. You will notice that windows looks up the account and changes the display. This is a verified account. Click on OK
This will take you back to the Service Credentials Screen, now the user name is filled in for you. Type in the password. Click Next.
Finally you are at the Confirm Installation Screen. There is really not much here, so just click on the Install button.
You will see several screens pop by. The first one is checking for .net2.0 or greater. After that the install is running to completion. That is all there is to it. I hope you found this blog interesting and useful.
Aloha, in this article we are going to go over working with Veeam FastSCP and VMware ESXi. We will add a vCenter Server to the inventory of a Veeam console. We will also transfer files from the workstation onto storage that the ESXi host can access.
The first thing we need to do is open up the Veeam FastSCP client on our workstation. In this article we are using Windows XP, but the steps are the same for any version of windows that I have used.
Once it is open we will need to add our vCenter Server. You could also add ESXi hosts individually. The benefit of adding the vCenter server is that it will automatically add all of the hosts that the vCenter server that you are adding is responsible for. You add the server simply by click on the Add Server Icon.
Once this is done the Add Server dialogue box will be opened. Here you have the option of typing in the DNS name or ip address of the server or host you want to add. There are also radio buttons to allow you to advice if it is a Virtual Center Server, ESXi host, or Linux machine. I will be putting in the DNS name of our test ESXi host PIL-ESXi1. Click Next once this is filled out.
Since we are adding an ESXi host the username filed on the Connection Settings screen is already filled out with root. You can create another account for this service to be more secure. Since this is just a demo we are going to use the root account and password. Make sure that the save password box is checked otherwise you will be prompted every time you connect. Click on Next.
This will take you to the Completing screen. Make sure to check the box to Connect when I click finish. Then Click Finish.
That covers adding an ESXi host. Now when you look at your interface in the left panel you will see My Computer and the ESXi host that you just added under the servers section.
Now click on the + in front of the Host. This will show you the DataStores that the ESXi Host can see. Click on the + in front of each data store to show the folder structure within the data store. You can also right click on a data store and select New Folder to create a new folder to put data into.
In order to move a file from your PC to the ESXi server you need to expand out the Servers Tree / My Computer section until you can see the folder that you want to move in the right panel. Then you want to drag it over to the folder under the DataStore in which you want to copy the data.
That is about all there is to it. There is also functionality that you can schedule copies and some other advanced features that I may update this blog with at a later date. Play around with this tool, it is free and very useful.
Goededag, welcome to a blog about Installing Windows Server 2008 R2. This is a side reference for a main series that I am doing on building an ESXi5 lab. There is a lot to do in a project such as that and this is a topic that can clearly stand alone.
For reference I will be installing Server 2008 R2 on a VMware virtual machine and performing the associated windows updates. In my other blog, located here, I went through and configured everything needed. I am now starting this blog at the first screen of the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation. So lets go...
You will get the standard Install Windows screen for Windows Server 2008 R2. You can select your language, time and currency format and keyboard of input method. Click on Next.
You will then get the Install Now option. Click on this.
As windows starts installing depending upon you ISO you will be able to select the version you want. We will be using Standard Click Next.
You will next get the EULA screen. Read it, then click on the check box to accept the terms and Click Next.
At the Which type of installation do you want? screen since this is a new install we will click on Custom.
At the Where do you want to install Windows? You will see the drive that is available. Click on Next.
Now sit back and relax while windows does its install. This is so much faster on a VM it is shocking.
Once this get to the installing updates screen the system will reboot. You may see a black screen for a second or two before you see the windows loading screen. Then you will see the setup resume at Completing Installation...
Once this is done the system will reboot yet again. Upon this reboot you will get the Setup is preparing your computer for first use. Exciting!
At the first boot you will get a notification that The user's password must be changed before logging on the first time. Click on OK.
You will then be able to put in a Password for the Administrator account, and confirm the password for the Administrator account. Then click on the -->
You will then get notified that you password has changed. Click on OK.
This will log you in, and the Initial Configurations Task Screen will be open. At this point we will want to install VMware tools, so that we have all of the drivers that we need for this machine.
From the top tool bar go to VM / Guest / Install VMware Tools
You will get an Install VMware Tools dialogue box, that tells you how awesome VMware tools are. Click on OK.
This will cause the system to mount an DVD image and you may be prompted to run setup64.exe. Click on this icon.
Eventually you will get the VMware Tools Welcome screen. Click on Next.
At the setup type screen keep the radio button set to Typcial and Click Next.
At the ready to Install the Program screen, Click Install.
At the Installation Wizard Complete screen. Click Finished. You will notice that now that your nic drivers are loaded you can get an ip address and presumably online.
You will now notice that you should be able to move your mouse into and out of the VMware frame without having to click on CTRL + ALT, this is another driver that was installed.
You will be prompted to reboot. Click YES. Once the reboot completes, log back into the computer. This will take you back to the initial Configuration tasks screen. In the 2nd section Update this server you will see an icon to download and install updates. Click on this.
This will take you to the Windows Update section. Click on Turn on automatic updates.
Windows will then check the system for updates. Once it has found all of the updates review them and install them. This will cause your system to reboot again. I always run the updates a second time to make sure that there were no updates that were pending previous updates being installed. This happens a lot with .NET updates.
Once this is done you can active your copy of windows if this is going to be a permanent VM and you are on your way. I hope you found this informative. Please check back for more posts and feel free to leave a comment.
Hej ... and welcome to my ongoing series on configuring an ESXi 5 lab. In this installment we will go over the Licensing portion of the vCenter Server. We will go in and install some keys and license out some ESXi hosts as well as the vCenter Server.
To start off with you will need to log into the newly created vCenter Server through the vSphere Client. You can do this by DNS name or by IP address. In this example we will be using IP address.
Type in the IP address of the vCenter Server, the user name of the account that has rights to this server and the password for that account.
You will probably get a Certificate warning, unless you have installed a new certificate. We will go over how to do this in a latter blog. For now if you do not want to see this, you can check the box to Install this certificate and do not display any security warnings. Also click on Ignore.
Once you log in, you will also get a message that you are using an Evaluation version of the software. It will tell you how many days you have left. Click on OK.
Then you will see the vSphere interface. From the location bar click on Home.
This will take you to the lowest level of the location bar. In the main panel you will see 3 sections; inventory, administration, and management. We are interested in the Licensing icon under Administration. Click on it.
Next you will see the Licensing module of vCenter. There are two places you can click on to Manage vSphere Licensing. There is a button in the upper left, or a link in the upper right. Both take you to the same place. Choose one and click on it.
This will take you to the Manage vSphere Licenses Screen. In the Enter new vSphere license key box, copy and paste your VMware license, one per row.
Once all of your keys are in Click on Add License Keys
This will validate the keys. Now in the lower panel you will see a section to review the details for your new license keys. Click on Next.
Note that until you click on Next the keys have not be added into the server.
Now you will have the option to Assign Licenses to unlicensed assets. In our example you will click on the vCenter Server Tab to show the only unlicensed asset listed.
From the vCenter Server Tab you will see your asset, as well as a new right most panel that allows you to Choose a license for the selected assets. Click on the Radio button to select vCenter Server 5 Standard. Click Next.
This will bring you to the Remove License Keys section of the Wizard. Keep all of the defaults. Click Next
If we wanted to remove a license here is where you would select it.
Finally we get to the Confirm Changes Screen. Here we can review what was done and click on Finished.
That wraps up this blog. The next time you log into you vCenter server you should no longer get a warning that you are using an evaluation version. No reboot necessary.
At the vCenter Server Service screen, you have the option of changing the way the service runs. For some reason there is a limitation on if you try and change it from using the system account. If you do it will only let you use the account that you are logging in under to do the install.
We will keep the Use System Account for now. We will go into Windows Services latter to change the account info to a service account. We will also do this for the SQL installation that starts up.
For now Click Next.
You may see a popup stating that the Fully Qualified Domain Name cannot be resolved. This is a problem with the DNS entry. You need to make sure that there is a forward and reverse lookup entry created otherwise you will see this error. It is very important that this is working properly before you continue.
At the Destination Folder screen, you will have the option to change the default install directory. I like to typically install all applications on the D drive to keep the OS separate. To do this Click on the Change... button on each of the Install folders.
When the Change Current Destination Folder pops up under the Folder name: section change the C the drive letter you want to install this on, say D:\ and click on OK.
Repeat this step for the other directory if desired. and Click on OK.
This will take you back to the Destination Folders. They now should be updated with the paths that you want. Click on Next.
The vCenter Server Linked Mode Options screen will allow you to add this vCenter Server into a Linked Mode. This is typically used with large environments or environments that are spread out. It allows a scalable architecture and visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances. The roles, permissions and licenses are replicated across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers.
Definitely not needed in a small lab, but if we wanted 5 labs to regionally be aware of each other this is useful. Either way it is not for us right now. Keep the default radio button of Create a standalone VMware vCenter Server instance and Click Next.
On the Configure Ports Screen we will accept the defaults. Pleases take a moment to review the ports that are used. You can also customize the ports if there is a conflict with other ports on the system. I do not recommend running nonVMware applications on your vCenter server so you should not have any conflicts if you do this.
Click Next.
On the Configure Ports for Inventory Service screen, you have the option of changing the default ports for the inventory service.
Keep the defaults and Click Next.
On the vCenter Server JVM Memory screen, you have the option for setting up how large of an install size you will be growing to. We can keep the default of Small, and Click Next.
At the Ready to Install screen, there is a check box that is unchecked by default. This is the option to increase the number of ephemeral ports. This is in my opinion a weird place to put this. It is an option if you have a high number of VMs on at the same time.
We can keep this unchecked and click on Install.
As you can probably guess now we will see a lot of status bars blow by.
SQL Server 2008 R2 screens will pop past us. The nice part is that this is all automated. The SQL stuff takes less than 5 minutes to install.
Once this is done it will go back to the Installing VMware vCenter Server status bar. Once this is done you will see the vCenter Inventory Service Status bar pop up.
The whole process took less than 10 minutes in my lab. Once everything is done click on Finished.
This will take you back to the VMware vCenter Installer screen. If you do not already have the vSphere Client installed you can install this from here. The installation is the same process that I blogged about here. If you do not need to do this you can click on Exit.
That finishes this up. I hope you found this informative. Next up will be configuring the vCenter Server to do something.
Ciao.... welcome to part 7a of my ongoing series VMware ESXi5 Lab Setup. This post will be split up due to its length. The first part will be links to a lot of Windows administration that should be done prior to installing vCenter. Part b will be the actual install.
So far we have setup an ESXi host and we now have a virtual machine setup. The next part is to turn that virtual machine into something useful. We are going to install Virtual Center Server 5 on this machine.
The vCenter Server is the cornerstone of your virtual environment. This is a licensed product, so it takes you out from the realm of casual VMware tinker, into a paid customer. I have to say that it is worth the money. Just having the one place to manage your VM's from, and being able to clone your VM's makes a huge difference.
VMware has a best practices guide that is good to review, it is located here.
So as a prerequisite to this you will need to Create a physical or virtual server running windows server 2008 R2. I have gone over how to build a VM with this spec here, and how to install the OS here.
I have also create a side blog with how to logically add a hard disk to 2008 R2 Server here.
Now that we have the drive, we will need to rename the computer so that it follows some standard naming convention. Directions to do so can be found here.
You will find out that your life is easier if you have standards setup for your environment and you make sure everyone adheres to them. This can be difficult to start, but once you are in an outage and having to troubleshoot stuff, you will be glad that it was done.
Next we are going to give this a static IP address. This will be done in another side blog here. The nice thing with the side blogs are if you are familiar with the steps you can just do them and it speeds up the reading.
After this you will want to add the vCenter service account to the local admins group of the server. This was also done in a side blog here.
The other prerequisite is that you have the ISO file uploaded to storage that can be seen by the VM. This is covered in my blog about working with veeam FastSCP here.
You should be logged into the server a the vCenter-svc serivice account, or what-ever service account you would like to install vCenter under.
So we are going to start off by mounting the iso onto the virtual CD/DVD Rom Drive. You can click on the Icon CD/DVD drive / Connect to ISO image on a datastore...
The Browse Datastores window will open up. Find the file that you want to load and click on ok.
Once the ISO is loaded depending upon your auto run configurations, you will either see a run autorun.exe pop up or you will have to go to the CD/DVD drive and run the auto run manually.
Once this is run you will get the VMware vCenter Installer main screen. In the left hand panel there are 3 headings. Under the top heading VMware Product Installers you will see the vCenter Server option highlighted.
In the right hand panel there is the details for the selection that you are on in the left panel, as well as an install button. Click on Install.
This will kick off the UAC to prompt you if you want the following program to make changes to the computer. Click on YES
You will then start the installation Wizard. At the InstallShield Wizard screen, click on OK.
If you do not have MS C++ installed you will see an installer for this flash by. No user interaction is required for this.
Once it is done unpacking stuff you will get the VMware vCenter Server Welcome Screen. Click Next.
You will then see the End User Patent Agreement Read them all and look up each patent so you know exactly what VMware owns and then click next in 3 weeks.
The EULA screen, is next. Read through this and check the radio button if you agree to the terms and then Click Next.
At the Customer Information screen Fill out name and organization, if you have a License key put it in here, or this can be put in after the server is up and running. Click Next.
On the Database Options screen we are going to keep the default of Install MSSQL express instance. This is good for small scale installations up to 5 hosts and 50 VMs. The limit has to do with the 10Gb database limit of SQL 08 express.
You also have the option of pointing to an existing supported database. This must be a 64 bit DSN. Currently SQL08, SQL05, IBM DB2 and Oracle 10g and 11g are supported. There is a nice compatibility guide here. Always check with VMware when you are not sure.
Continued in part b.