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Anyone testing vCenter 5 Update 1? I just did an upgrade, and it says it updated everything, but the build number in the About screen does not match what's in the release notes. Even rebooted Windows to see if that helped, which it didn't. There were no errors at all during the install.
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Mar 20, 2012 17:59
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Granted I have a very simple environment (3 hosts, NAS providing shared storage over iSCSI), but I did an in-place upgrade from 4.1 to 5 and had no issues at all.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:52
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Corvettefisher posted:power down the VM=>rightclick=>upgrade virtual hardware, I believe the binarys for the virtual hardware are kept on the ESXi host not vCenter or VUM. Yeah IIRC that's how I upgraded my vCenter VM. You connect directly to the ESXi host where vCenter lives.
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Mar 27, 2012 21:47
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sanchez posted:VMWare essentials plus is what, 5k for 3 hosts? That's nothing compared to what storage, servers and especially application licensing and staff cost. Essentials Plus is a really, really good deal for small-medium business (aka, me). And an awesome marketing move by VMware. I'm now pretty well hooked on their impressive feature set.
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Mar 29, 2012 05:57
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Probably. I know we used to have a terrible app that was really really memory hungry, but the vendor only offered support when running on a 32-bit OS, JVM and database engine  It worked fine in 64-bit, but they hadn't done QA and training on it I guess. We ended up running it in an unsupported 64-bit OS because in the "supported" environment the piece of crap would go OOM and crash several times a week.
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Mar 30, 2012 22:52
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Maggot Monster posted:This is probably the laziest thing I'll ever post but does anyone have a decent "business case" they've used that successfully laid out the pricing for machines, storage, cabling, 10G infrastructure, the full works.emergencies. VMware's ROI Calculator is probably a good place to start.
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Apr 11, 2012 19:18
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Rhymenoserous posted:I always say my budget is a lot lower than it is and get competing bids so I can get better prices. My vendors probably think I am doing this, but in reality I just have a poo poo budget! Don't be afraid to counter offer; I've gotten some insane deals from sales guys who are eager to get in the door for whatever reason. For example, I'm working on a project to shore up our crappy backup/DR situation. We're not a huge company so there isn't a lot involved in this, but I want it to scale for the future. Asked a vendor for a quote on some VM-aware backup software, he sent me a figure greater than my budget for the entire project. I told him as much and said no thanks. He came back again with a figure with poo poo I didn't want anyway trimmed off and priced less than half the original quote 
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Apr 12, 2012 16:30
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I'm in the process of upgrading to something else, but I've been using a Thecus N8800+ for the last year and a half and it's been decent. Seems like the N8900 is the next generation of that? The bang for the buck is definitely there, you can have acceptable shared storage for a small environment for a couple grand. It's not super feature rich, and the interface is pretty bad and littered with "Engrish", but it's been rock solid stability wise. Performance has been poor, but I only have 7200 RPM SATA drives in there so I don't expect it to scream. By which I mean day-to-day usage is totally fine, but something like shuffling VMDK files between LUNs takes many hours even though they are on the same drat physical device. I've never had something nicer so I don't know how typical that is.
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Apr 16, 2012 23:14
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I should add that most everything I've virtualized so far has been Linux boxes whose physical hardware sat at like 0.05 load average. I run vCenter in a VM and ironically it's probably the most demanding thing on there. I'm virtualizing for VMware's HA features more than anything; running a couple newer ESXi hosts in a cluster has proven infinitely better than having old garbage homebuilt boxes go down monthly because a CPU fan died or whatever. The Thecus was a champ for what I needed (proving virtualization to management) and now I can work on getting better storage in there and virtualizing apps that couldn't easily be running in the background on a laptop. And I admit to knowing little about "serious" storage, though I'm reading and testing in the lab every single day. As the only sysadmin in the company and not having major storage needs, it just hasn't been top priority.
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Apr 17, 2012 02:13
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VMware Essentials Plus is the bees knees. It seems expensive up front if you're a typical "lol our desktops are P3's running Win XP and WE LIKE IT" small business, but you are really getting a lot for your money especially compared to the pricing for Standard or Enterprise once you go beyond 3 hosts. For ~$5k you are getting some pretty amazing features like vMotion, High Availability, vCenter (and Update Manager!) and decent backup software in Disaster Recovery. Enjoy never having to do maintenance at 3AM again because you can just vMotion poo poo to another host while you apply security updates or do hardware upgrades or whatever.
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Apr 27, 2012 20:19
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Is it Essentials or Essentials Plus? If you sprang for Plus, you get Data Recovery included which is perfectly fine for simpler environments.
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Apr 28, 2012 21:52
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2.0 (which came out a while ago) seems fine, I've been using it with no issues. The main problem I had was entirely my fault for backing up to a lovely NAS with few and slow spindles. The initial backup would take longer than 24 hours to complete and would therefore abort when the next backup job started, and never actually finished. I worked around this by adding one or two VM's per day to the backup job until everything was being backed up properly. Once the first full backup completes, subsequent jobs are just the incremental changes so they run very fast. Caveat being that I have a small and simple environment, I don't claim to speak for a situation involving dozens of hosts and hundreds of VM's.
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Apr 28, 2012 23:43
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If they are truly "mission critical", push as hard as you can to get the paltry $4k one-time fee to upgrade to Plus. That buys you vMotion, HA and Data Recovery among other niceties. You do need shared storage for this, but you don't need a 5-6 figure SAN, an OK NAS like a Thecus 8900 will work for a very small environment which I assume you have if you are running straight Essentials. That will run you less than $3k fully loaded. This should not be a hard sell to management. If the server running your "mission critical" CRM tool takes a dump, it will be back online on another member of the VMware HA cluster before Nagios even alerts you that it was down. If some genius runs DROP DATABASE AllOfOurShit; you can use Data Recovery to restore a recent backup in minutes. If a VMware exploit comes out, you can easily patch with no downtime using vMotion. How much is never seeing "Intertrode Hacked, Customer Credit Cards Leaked" in the news worth?
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Apr 29, 2012 07:47
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Gilg posted:I have a machine that's a few years old that I was about to install Linux on to mess around with, but I also wanted to try out using it as a VM host, to get some experience using VMs. Even if I don't use it for much, there's no down-side to installing the free VMware ESXi on my server first, is there? Thanks. As long as all of your hardware is on the VMware hardware compatibility list, nope! And in fact it would probably be very helpful if you plan to get down and dirty with Linux, since you can take a snapshot before you dive in and break everything 
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May 3, 2012 01:48
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Corvettefisher posted:E: hmm that wouldn't be a bad thread idea, "Systems Admin guide to automating/optimizing your environment" There's been a few Puppet/Chef configuration management threads, which I consider a major part of that process if you run *NIX, but they always die off. Not that I think it's a bad idea, maybe they just didn't have a strong OP or something.
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May 9, 2012 02:13
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skipdogg posted:We do have some larger EMC SAN's so EMC isn't out of the question but I'm not familiar with their smaller offerings. We recently bought their very-low-end VNXe which seems like pretty good bang for the buck. I'm very happy with it but I admit to not having extensive experience (or needs) with storage. I know others in SH/SC kind of hate EMC. But if you want a speedy box with a lot of built in redundancy, a support contract and standard features like snapshots and replication, you could do worse IMO. Can't disclose our pricing obviously but you're looking at very low 5 figures depending on the exact drive loadout.
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May 9, 2012 19:00
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FISHMANPET posted:tweeting back and forth among some insular group of people, so I never know what he's talking about. This is what I find pretty much any time someone recommends an IT twitter to follow. 99% retweets of poo poo about whatever conference they just went to/are at/are going to and 1% political commentary I don't care to have shoved at me. Apparently it's possible to get sysadmin gigs where you do literally nothing but attend conferences, must be sweet. Yellow Bricks is a good VMware blog.
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May 18, 2012 15:38
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Corvettefisher posted:NAS_1 10 600GB drives @ 15k 6 w/ 1024MB write cache, Customer servers, high I/O DB servers run here My very nitpicky 2 cents is why are you putting IO intensive servers on a RAID level with the worst IO penalty. Assuming the 6 after 15k means RAID 6.
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May 18, 2012 18:08
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Something in this lab needs to be named doggiestyle before I get the reference
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May 22, 2012 06:39
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For your reading pleasure, VMware has put out an updated vSphere Hardening Guide for 5.0.
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Jun 4, 2012 17:52
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Bob Morales posted:hilarity This right here is why (good) tech companies are still desperate to hire despite the overall unemployment rate. They keep getting interview candidates like this genius who thinks throwing cores at/removing disks from a system that's almost certainly I/O bound will help performance. Out of curiosity, what version of MySQL are you running? I've stopped paying attention since my new company doesn't use it, but the 5.1 line was pretty abysmal at scaling to bigger hardware. They've made major strides in 5.5, especially if you use the patched Percona version, but there's still a lot of my.cnf options you can tune to take advantage of more cores/higher IOPS than the stock config assumes.
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Jun 6, 2012 17:02
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Moey posted:Downfall is when we do a hardware refresh next, my boss cannot wrap his head around the idea of scaling out vs up. He keeps mentioning quad socket Dell servers and tons of local storage. It has been a 1 year battle of trying to convince him what a more ideal setup is. I even proved a point when I rebuilt our vSphere setup to yank all of the current local disks and have ESXi boot from a thumb drive, I just don't think he understands. I'm gearing up for this... my boss feels vehemently that shared storage introduces a single point of failure, and would prefer to buy boxes jammed full of 15k SAS drives mirroring each other with DRBD. Nevermind that we already pay for a DR site that we can fail over to at a moment's notice in the unlikely event that both controllers in the SAN go unreachable (across diverse paths) at the exact same instant. I don't think he's so set against it that I can't make a good case, it's just not an argument I expected to have in 2012.
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Jul 27, 2012 20:57
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That reminds me, I have a "why won't you assholes take my money" question, too. Emailed this to VMware presales and just never heard a peep. I'm at a new job trying to figure out our VMware licenses. As best I can tell, we bought a vSphere 4 Standard Acceleration Kit, giving us a license for 6 CPU sockets and an instance of vCenter Server Standard. I'm interested in upgrading to version 5 (whether I'll get budget to do so is another story, but...). Is there an upgrade path from the version 5 Acceleration Kit to the version 5? The v5 kit actually appears to grant you licenses for 8 sockets, not 6, so it would be pretty sweet to get a fourth host "for free". Or is the kit a one time thing, and we now just basically have 6 CPU's worth of vSphere Standard and need to order additional ones a la carte? The hosts have 64GB of RAM total each so we are within the vRAM entitlement.
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Jul 31, 2012 17:21
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KS posted:Kit is a one-time purchase -- if you kept the kit under support you're entitled to upgrade to 5 for those 6 CPUs as part of your support agreement. You will not get additional licenses, and will have to buy those a la carte. Thanks for clarifying, I was afraid of that . They made the decision to let support lapse before I got here, so I already knew we'd have to at least renew that before we can upgrade.
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Jul 31, 2012 17:49
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I noticed today that some of our Linux guests have zero swap space provisioned within the OS. That's...not good, right? Or does the hypervisor completely take over swapping duties? Running under vSphere 4.0 (yeah I know) if it matters.
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Aug 9, 2012 21:24
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Thanks for the info. The good news is, if I'm reading the perf charts in vCenter right, it's not swapping at all. Swap used, swap in and swap out are all 0. But it doesn't give me the warm fuzzies that at any moment performance could go to poo poo due to something as dumb as not setting up a swap file. We do appear to at least be using VMware tools, which I wasn't taking for granted at first.
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Aug 9, 2012 22:47
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Bob Morales posted:on dhcp, it will change addresses on me Isn't that kind of inherent in DHCP? Unless you set up a reservation you aren't guaranteed to get the same address when your lease expires even if it's available.
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Aug 22, 2012 22:20
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FISHMANPET posted:Just one more thing... Also you must submit every VM you run to the VMware App Store for approval before it can boot. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Aug 23, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 15:24
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Hopefully the web client won't be a crippled piece of poo poo like the iPad app. It'll be nice to be able to actually manage things without installing the vSphere client or do anything at all from a Mac. vvv FFFFFFFFF Docjowles fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Aug 27, 2012 |
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Aug 27, 2012 19:59
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If I'm reading the new pricing brochure correctly, they've changed the vSphere Standard SKU to include Storage vMotion. Which suggests to me that you get the "shared nothing" vMotion with Standard, too. If so that kind of rules. Edit: Standard gets you the new backup tool to play with, too, it seems. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Aug 27, 2012 |
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Aug 27, 2012 23:12
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And here I thought I was behind the times running 4.0!
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Aug 29, 2012 23:25
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evil_bunnY posted:And then not getting updates? Sounds good mate. Yeah this is the real gotcha. I've never had to actually call VMware for help. I want to get us onto 5.x but my current company let their support lapse years ago and the cost to renew with back payments is hilarious. A sales rep did the numbers both ways and it's literally cheaper to buy new licenses and support contracts than to renew the ones we have. That probably changes once you have a good enough relationship with VMware, but we don't, so welp.
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Aug 30, 2012 22:52
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FISHMANPET posted:That's kind of what I thought about going the no support route, but any thoughts on Production vs Basic? How OK is management with having to wait 3 days for VMware to even start looking at an issue that crops up on Friday afternoon? The marginal price increase is so negligible that I wouldn't bother downgrading.
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Aug 30, 2012 23:36
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FISHMANPET posted:I'm currently installing a vCenter server for my 2 node Enterprise cluster and I'm loving terrified/in awe that I'm actually installing it on a real thing, not just reading about it. Today for grins I started looking at what it would take to get us from ESXi 4.0 to at least 4.1U3. Systems are all firewalled off and on private IP's so I'm not SUPER concerned about drive by hackings, but still, we're behind as gently caress. vCenter is installed on Win Server 2k3 32-bit, and vCenter 4.1 requires a 64-bit OS  And a bunch of VM's use local storage so I can't do a nice no-downtime vMotion to reboot hosts anyway. That's a lot of work to upgrade to a still-obsolete version.I pitched a proposal to renew our support contracts so we can get to vSphere 5.1 and buy a modern SAN that actually has the capacity and reliability to get poo poo entirely off local storage. Have a feeling it's going to be shot down for budgetary reasons, though. My boss is also very high on moving operations to the cloud which is another strike against it (not for stupid buzzword reasons, he's a smart and technical guy).
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Sep 4, 2012 23:59
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Came across a nice blog post today answering some common questions about the new "shared nothing" vMotion coming in 5.1.
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Sep 7, 2012 18:11
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Corvettefisher posted:Thanks either way! I hope some other goons have experiences or know some good reviews that would be awesome. Not sure about production but maybe a fat twin 2u with 4 servers for a demo/dev lab environment, or PoC for some clients. Seems like they'd be really sweet for any application where you don't need a "you fuckers better have a replacement part in my hands within 4 hours" support contract, or tons of direct-attached storage. A big farm of totally interchangeable stateless web servers like Etsy runs is pretty much an ideal use case for commodity parts. It would be pretty funny to plunk down a 2U fat twin on a client's desk and say "this vSphere cluster will replace your 2 racks full of ancient underutilized machines" v  v
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Sep 12, 2012 19:13
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Bob Morales posted:So apparently Apple's 10.8.2 update breaks VirtualBox on Mac laptops. Apparently a working hotfix is out for VirtualBox (link stolen from HackerNews). e: Explanation of the bug from Vagrant author if you really want to geek out. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Sep 21, 2012 |
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Sep 21, 2012 23:19
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gnarkillx3 posted:Which one contains the VM? Is it a certain type of file? .vmx is configuration info, .vmdk is a disk image.
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Sep 28, 2012 22:44
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Something similar happened to me long ago, racking my brain trying to remember what ended up fixing it (the "host will connect for like 30 seconds then drop" thing). Verify that all your vSphere hosts and the vCenter have correct forward AND reverse DNS entries and that forward and reverse match up exactly. Also log into the hosts directly and make sure they aren't having issues connecting to their datastores. It was an older version so may not apply, but I'm pretty sure one of those 2 things was my issue.
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Sep 30, 2012 17:35
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 18:39 |
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I find that many people in IT have a terrible understanding of DNS as soon as you get beyond "uh it turns names into IP's". And even the how of that process isn't often well understood. Hell I worked at an ISP and literally none of the call center techs--who troubleshot DNS issues on a daily basis*--knew much about it. Reverse DNS in particular. Which is surprising to me since if you gently caress up DNS, your entire infrastructure will crumble to the ground. *by troubleshooting DNS I mean that they just escalated anything they remotely suspected as being DNS related to the sysadmin queue 
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Oct 11, 2012 18:27
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