This evening I was awarded the 2007 VMware Virtual Vanguard Award for Best Disaster Recovery Solution. The solution I designed used a consecutive scripting engine (DSH) for the Linux environment as the base work for my solution. Once this environment was configured, I put a pool of scripts together to recover from server failure, storage array failure and site failure.

There are a few things I've already been impressed with here at VMWorld 2007:

Well I have arrived in the beautiful city of San Francisco. This year the conference is at the Moscone Center which is far more convenient than last year in L.A., a city that I did not particularly care for. So far SF has welcome me into her warm embrace.

I have some interesting things scheduled for tomorrow but it's all hush hush until then.

- Jason Langone

Below are some of the public sessions, meetings and events I will be attending. Feel free to come out.

• Monday, September 10th
  6:00 PM - 8:00 PM VMTN Community Happy Hour - Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, 661 Howard St.Ask for the VMware reception in the Billiard Room.
• Tuesday, September 11th
  5:30 PM - 7:30 PM Solutions Exchange & Ceremony
• Wednesday, September 12th
  

I will be flying out on Monday to VMWorld 2007 in San Francisco. I will be bringing a laptop so that I can post daily updates from the hotel at night. Look for review of booth solutions, sessions, et al.

During an attempted VMware Converter 3.01 (Build 44840) P2V conversion of a physical Windows 2003 SP2 server running on an IBM blade, I encountered an error early in the process, "Unable to determine Guest OS."

The quick fix for this was to login to the IBM BladeCenter console and change the KVM and Media Tray owner to a different blade.

- Jason Langone

This is a great idea for consultants who want their company's logo to be plastered during a scripted boot sequence. It takes a bit of work but I think it's definitely worth it.

Follow these instructions for creating your custom CD. The location of the image file is in /isolinux, filename = splash.lss.

In my hunt for a solid monitoring solution for my ever-growing VMware environment, I came across UNNOC. It uses rrdtool for the lovely graphs and you can even download it as a Virtual Appliance from their website or from VMware.com/appliances. It uses the Virtual Center SDK to tie into metrics for virtual machines and VI3 servers and is also capable of using SNMP to monitor your other servers. I have mine currently configured to also monitor my Virtual Center server for things such as

• Right click on the Virtual Machine and select "Install VMware Tools."
• cp /media/dvdVMwareTools-3.0.2-52542.tar.gz /tmp
• cd /tmp
• tar xzf VMwareTools-3.0.2-52542.tar.gz
• /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Then just select defaults for all the questions.

- Jason Langone

Here’s my VMWorld 2006 Presentation, hosted by VMWare. “Leveraging VMWare ESX in Disaster Recovery Solutions” discussed home-grown HA for ESX, the art of en masse HBA rescans and backing up necessary configuration files.

Presentation.

Podcast.

- Jason Langone

For my next trick, I’m working on a script that will send out an email (on a set interval) when old .vmx files are on an ESX server. This can cause issues when recovering from a disaster scenario, so the basic logic of my script will be:
Check registered Virtual Machines.
Check .vmx’s in \home\vmware
IF discrepancies = TRUE
THEN send email with list of discrepancies.

Well I have successfully applied the Virtual Center 2.0.2 upgrade (from 2.0.1) and VI3 3.0.2 upgrade (from 3.0.1) with no ill side effects. Definitely looking forward to the 2003 SP2 and SQL2005 resolutions.

bq. Upgrading VI3.0.1 to VI3.0.2

# Copy tarball to /tmp
# tar -zxvf
# cd /
# esxupdate -n update

...
INFO: | Transaction(s) Complete
INFO: Shutting down hostd...
INFO: Running esxcfg-boot to regenerate initrds...
INFO: Restarting hostd...
INFO: --- TOTALS: 222 packages installed, 0 pending or failed, 1 removed, 0 excluded ---

I’ve been receiving several requests per month for the last 4-5 months regarding my announced rFactor Online Dedicated Server Manager. Well in that time I’ve moved from RI to VA and am in the process of house hunting and likely moving again. I’ve changed jobs and adopted two kittens. Feel free to take your choice from that list of excuses.

It was confirmed yesterday. I will have some exciting news upon return.

- Jason Langone

I was currently plagued with the responsibility of designing a robust VI3 environment on a blade platform. The biggest hurdle was that the blade chassis only supported two in-chassis switches (resulting in two vmnic's). Those switches could have a max aggregate bandwidth of 4GB or 10GB, depending on the cabling used, so bandwidth wasn't the problem.

The biggest problem was, how do you provide a robust ethernet connection while still offering some segmentation of Virtual Machine, Service Console and VMotion traffic (assuming these were already on separate VLANs).