Bist's Virtualization Blog

VMware tools upgrade problem. Cannot END installation

May 17th, 2011 1 Comment

I know a lot of you probably also had this problem before. I never experienced this problem. Sometimes when you do an automatic update of the vmware tools on a vm the installation just doesn’t start. Rebooting vms or trying to cancel the installation didn’t work. The usual “this operation cannot be performed in the current state” error came up. The real issue here is that DRS fails because it cannot move the vms around.

After reading some KB articles on the VMware site the solution would be the following.

Restart the management agents on the ESX host.

The server disconnects for a brief minute and after it reconnects you can just cancel the vmware tools installation. Then I did an interactive install. Problem solved.

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HP VC disconnects from OAdmin

Today we had issues with one of our HP C7000 Chassis. I pulled out a blade and after 30 minutes later all Flex and VC modules were unable to communicate with the onboard administrator. There was no way to get these reconnected. Then I found this article. I know. Always update to the latest firmware. Unfortunately that’s not always possible.

The reason for this outage is that with older firmware the following could happen:

If you have configured your interconnect bays with DNS servers (which you should) and the ip starts with 10. then you can be affected with disconnects between OA and the VC modules. The workaround for this issue is either update to the latest firmware or remove the DNS servers from the interconnect bays. When you do this make sure you don’t refer any FQDN in the rest of the config (like LDAP servers). So that’s what i did. I changed all FQDNs to IP address and removed the DNS server settings from the interconnect bays. I waited 5 minutes and suddenly everything was ok again.

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CentOS customization after import

March 16th, 2011 2 Comments

Today we had to get a VM from a datacenter in Australia and make it work in our datacenter in Belgium. The actual import of the VM was no issue. The only thing we had to adjust was the OS version. After the import we needed to change the hostname and IP address. The OS is centos, which…..well…..Let’s say it has been a while.

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How to create ESXi installer on USB

February 10th, 2011 Comments Off

Recently I got completely mad with the iLo on our blades. Installation was a bit slow so back to USB installs. I nice tool who has been around for a while is UNetbootin to create a bootable USB stick. You can download it here .

After creating the stick make sure you create a ks=usb entry in syslinux.conf

default menu.c32

prompt 0

menu title UNetbootin

timeout 100

label unetbootindefault

menu label Default

kernel /ubnkern

append initrd=/ubninit vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.vgz — install.vgz

label ubnentry0

menu label ^ESXi Installer

kernel /MBOOT.C32

append initrd=/ubninit ks=USB vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.vgz — install.vgz

label ubnentry1

menu label ^Boot from local disk

kernel /ubnkern

append initrd=/ubninit

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Change the default mpio policy to RoundRobin

January 24th, 2011 Comments Off

Great, in the previous post we change all luns to the round robin policy via PowerShell. Now we are going to set the default policy to Round Robin. We will use the vMa to change this on every host.

esxcli –server=esxhostname –username=root nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT-AA –psp VMW_PSP_RR

Enter password:

Default PSP for VMW_SATP_DEFAULT-AA is now VMW_PSP_RR

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