Central MN IT User Group , presents a VMware vSphere & SharePoint 101 User Group Meeting.

Central MN IT User Group , presents a VMware vSphere & SharePoint 101 User Group Meeting.

Brought to you by http://www.educait.net

8/13/2009

Central MN IT User Group Meeting agenda

1:30 - 2:30 VMware 4.0 overview, new features.
2:30 - 2:40 break
2:40 - 3:10 Case Study
3:10 - 3:20 break
3:20 - 4:10 SharePoint overview
4:10 - 4:30 Open Discussion

Registration:

http://centralmnit2-emailinvite.eventbrite.com/

We have the Mississippi room, which fits well over 100 people.

Please pass this on. Remember, this is a free event.

VI / vCenter cannot connect to Host, Service mgmt-vmware restart may not restart hostd

Yesterday, I had a problem after I shutdown a lagcy San, that after I rescaned my HBA’s, ( which timed out), I lost connection to the host.

I tried restarting the normal services, in console,

# service vmware-vpxa restart

#service mgmt-vmware restart

but I would get,

Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services:
   VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog                   [FAILED]

 

I found the following post , http://communities.vmware.com/message/1157237 and KB article, http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005566

 

Both which have you kill the hostd, process, then rename the pid, file. Here is the contents of the KB.

"

Service mgmt-vmware restart may not restart hostd

Symptoms

• You are using the command  service mgmt-vmware restart but it does not finish restarting hostd.
• The script gets stuck when stopping the service.

• The SSH session to the ESX host becomes unresponsive.

• hostd does not restart

Resolution

You must manually stop the stuck service and restart it.

To stop the service and restart it:

1. Log in as root to the ESX host command-line via the physical console or via KVM connection.

2. Navigate to the /var/run/vmware directory:
   # cd /var/run/vmware

3. Run the following command to list the files vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID:
   # ls -l vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID

4. Determine the Process ID (PID) management service. View the contents of the vmware-hostd.PID file: 
   # cat vmware-hostd.PID
   For example:
   [root@vmware]# cat vmware-hostd.PID
   1191[root@vmware]#

5. Use the resulting PID to kill the process.
   Caution: Use the kill -9 command with care. It kills the process of the supplied PID without exception or confirmation.
   # kill -9 <PID>
   In this example you run kill -9 1191.

6. Delete the vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID files:
   # rm vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID
7. Restart the management service.
   # service mgmt-vmware restart”

This seemed to fix it, and without any downtime.

 

Roger L

VMFS/LUN size?

I get this question often, in fact I had this question at our first local user group.

My Answer was 500 GB, or very close to it,  here is a post by http://www.yellow-bricks.com titled : VMFS/LUN size?

 

“A question that pops up on the VMTN Community once every day is what size VMFS datastore should I create? The answer always varies,  one says “500Gb” the other says “1TB”. Now the real answer should be, it depends.

Most companies can use a simple formula in my opinion. First you should answer these questions:

• What’s the maximum amount of VMs you’ve set for a VMFS volume?
• What’s the average size of a VM in your environment? (First remove the really large VM’s that typically get an RDM.)

If you don’t know what the maximum amount of VMs should be just use a safe number, anywhere between 10 and 15. Here’s the formula I always use:

round((maxVMs * avgSize) + 20% )

I usually use increments of 25GB. This is where the round comes in to play. If you end up with 380GB round it up to 400GB and if you end up with 321GB round it up to 325GB. Let’s assume your average VM size is 30GB and your max amount of VMs per VMFS volume is 10:

(10*30) + 60 =360
360 rounded up –> 375GB”

Source Post http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/06/23/vmfslun-size/

Seems to me a good method of scaling your datastore sizes.

 

I also saw this NetApp Article, referring to the above post.

What’s the right LUN size for a VMFS datastore?

“

I can’t tell you how often we are asked this question and the answer has many variables including the amount of aggregated I/O of the servers being virtualized onto the datastore, the storage protocol used in connecting to the datastore, etc.

I believe Duncan Epping at Yellow Bricks has provided us with a simple answer to this traditionally difficult question. Hopefully you’re very familiar with Duncan, he’s an active contributor to the VMTN and his site is one of the top VMware blog sites that is always brimming with the type of information that can significantly improve your VMware deployment.
I compliment Duncan on the way he phrased his guidance. I believe we may want to consider rewording the recommendations currently in TR-3428 (VI3) and the upcoming TR-3749 (vSphere). BTW – the current guidance in both of these documents is a LUN ranging in size from 300 GB – 700 GB.
Go check out Duncan's post, it contains very solid guidance to this long running question, and may I suggest you drop him a note for his thoughts on sizing a NFS datastore. “

Source Post http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2009/06/whats-the-right-lun-size-for-a-vmfs-datastore.html

Both Good Reads, enjoy.