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I'm thinking about moving to the vCenter Server Appliance as part of my 5.1 upgrade. We're not a big shop and I'd rather free up a Windows license for something else. I have another spot to host Update Manager so that's not really an issue. Am I crazy for considering this?
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Dec 7, 2012 20:37
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Corvettefisher posted:No, the Virtual Appliance 5.1 is pretty decent, minus the VUM, heartbeat, and IPv6. But it is pretty good if you aren't doing anything huge or special. We have a very small environment. I use an HP storage plugin which is already hosted where I'd host VUM. There's no View. It sounds like it might be worth trying out. I'd love to make the setup here simpler if I can.
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Dec 7, 2012 21:10
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Well so far just setting up the vCenter Server Appliance has been a total poo poo show. From it not wanting to join AD to SSO failing right out of the box it's been a gong show. I'm not sure how much more time I'm going to dedicate to this.
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Dec 7, 2012 22:53
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Well I got the VCSA up and running now. My last issue was getting an SSL certificate from our internal CA installed but VMware support helped with that. It's...not awful? The Web Client still needs some serious work but I can see where they're going with this and I think I'll stick with it.
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Dec 8, 2012 04:23
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Yeah same here. I'm not running into vRAM entitlement issues so maybe I'll just hold off for a while. 5.1 sort of seems like it was really rushed.
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Dec 11, 2012 22:34
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1000101 posted:I think the biggest joy I got from my customers about the 5.1 release was that vram entitlements were dead. Nothing else is really worth it unless you're building a new environment and intend to use vCloud suite features. When we do our server updates next year we'll run into the vRAM limits. I'll probably schedule it for the New Year sometime. I'm sad to hear that the Update Manager plugin doesn't work in the web client. That will be kind of annoying but I can probably live with it.
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Dec 11, 2012 23:53
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That's probably the biggest reason for me to upgrade now to be honest. Maybe I will do it over the holiday break after all...
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Dec 12, 2012 00:00
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luminalflux posted:Don't know which is the correct thread (until someone starts a "gently caress HP" thread), but the HP Insight Control for vCenter installer borked in some way when installing it on my vCenter server. Can't install it, can't uninstall it. Just wait until it starts leaking memory randomly and your vCenter grinds to a halt.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:40
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During our recent PKI certificate renewal I missed the HP vCenter plugin one. The plugin responded to having an expired certificate by leaking memory continuously until the server was unusable. Enterprise software 
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Dec 29, 2012 21:38
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luminalflux posted:I'm pretty sure that's the responsibility of the LeftHand management tool. Speaking of the Lefthand management tool: mine wont let me setup SNMP. It just gives some "can't set the SNMP agent" error. HP has elevated it to L3 support and they don't know how to fix it. It's so useless sometimes.
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Dec 30, 2012 06:52
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I have an interesting virutalization project coming up this year that I don't quite know how to implement. We're redoing our build system and we'd like to get as much of it running on VMs as possible. (Let's ignore the "is this a good idea or not" part for now...) Our big hurdle in the whole process revolves around CUDA. A part of one of our build tasks can take advantage of CUDA in a big way. It drops the task completion time down by a couple orders of magnitude so it is a requirement. I was hoping to find a way to present a CUDA GPU to a couple of VMs on this new cluster. I've read a lot of really terrifying things about using DirectPath and GPUs and it sounds like the Nvidia VIBs are going to be View only for the time being (and may not expose CUDA to the guest anyways). The GPUs will be either Telsa or Quadro cards, depending on the vendor and what they certify. Has anyone done anything like this before?
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Jan 22, 2013 21:00
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1:1 mapping would be fine. I don't need to split the GPU up since only one task out a dozen actually uses the GPU. Having one VM per host with the GPU directly attached would work well. This is more about logically splitting up the CPUs than the GPUs. I've always been pretty sure that this won't work or it's just a bad idea in general but it's worth a shot. I'll probably use something like rCUDA (assuming that works) and just push a full virtual solution off until the next generation.
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Jan 22, 2013 21:53
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Corvettefisher posted:View 5.2 is rumored to utilize Nvidia GPU's in a virtual environment, here is a sneak peak: I thought about using View for this. It only supports Windows 7 VMs but I could probably get away with that. I'm not sure if this method supports CUDA either though. The main reason behind all this is for disaster recovery. We need to deliver builds fairly often and being able to stand the whole build system up somwhere else reasonably quickly would be very useful. Obviously in the case of a full on disaster my recovery environment is unlikely to have CUDA available but in that case we'd live with the slow build times while I figured something out.
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Jan 22, 2013 21:58
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DevNull posted:I didn't realize that the vib has not been released yet. The 3D functionality in no way depends on View. It is a feature of ESX 5.1 that builds upon the software rendering that was released with ESX5. I guess someone decided to hold off with the vib since the View team is really the group asking for 3D support the most. Or really at all. That eliminates View for this which at least makes it clearer. To be honest, it feels (and always felt) like I'm trying to do something that's not going to work as well as I'd want it to. It'll have a lot of gotchas and other quirks. I'll just look into offloading the CUDA to a physical host for this generation.
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Jan 22, 2013 22:03
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It just feels like I'm giving up most of the benefits of a VM by doing this. I do realize that I'm ahead of the curve on some of this stuff and that it's probably not something that a lot of companies are wanting to try. The money's in VDI right now so it's going to see the lion's share of the work. Overall no big deal...I just wanted to see if someone had done it or had heard of it being done. I'll put it lower in my options pile for now and re-evaluate it later on. Thanks for the input.
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Jan 22, 2013 22:48
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Bleh both my remote options turned into dead ends. Looks like it'll be physical CUDA builders. I'll just spec them in a way that lets be convert to virtual if options open up down the road.
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Jan 23, 2013 04:11
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Mierdaan posted:Interested in any more feedback you have on AppAssure. We need to rethink our backup situation right now, as we got burned on Veeam a while back and fell back to agent-based DPM backups inside of VMs, and Dell is pitching AppAssure pretty hard. I'm in the same boat right now. Currently using Backup Exec and it's ok but I'd be open to making a change. I'm having an end-to-end Dell solution being pitched at me and of course it has AppAssure in it. I don't know much about hte product to be honest so I guess I'd better get to reading...
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Jan 25, 2013 19:46
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Oh hey I guess I should upgrade to 5.1 Somehow I forgot to do that
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Apr 30, 2013 21:33
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Corvettefisher posted:Research up SSO requirements PRIOR to doing, there are some GOTCHA's depending on the size, and complexity of your environment. It is very different from 4.0=>4.1 or 4.1=>5.0 The environment is small and I got the vCSA up and running when I was testing it so I should be fine.
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Apr 30, 2013 22:12
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Now I remember why I didn't upgrade...it's because Backup Exec doesn't support 5.1 yet. I checked before starting my upgrade and the latest update says they probably won't support it until July. 5.1 was released at the end of August 2012. I really didn't need any more reasons to toss Backup Exec out the door but this pretty much salts it. It's taking them almost a year to support for it. Great job guys 
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May 1, 2013 00:34
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:We're moving to AppAssure for our backups since it just replicates blocks directly from the OS and doesn't have the dependency/integration headaches. Plus some other cool stuff like its ability to stream the data to your DR site so stuff is already staged in their inventory. Nice for us since we aren't big enough to justify two production clusters with cross-replication. AppAssure is part of a Dell pitch that someone's making for us for later this year. I'm going to get a demo of it soon but I've heard terrible stories about their support. When are you putting it into place? It's also going to have Force10 switches in it which I don't know a lot about. I've heard some good stuff but not a lot in general. They will be replacing some mid-level Procurve switches which have been ok.
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May 1, 2013 21:09
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It goes on sale all the time so if you can wait for a bit you'll be able to get a deal.
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Jul 22, 2013 14:20
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So is the server appliance actually worth considering now?
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Aug 26, 2013 19:44
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El_Matarife posted:Java 7 Update 45 breaks the Cisco UCS control panel. http://tools.cisco.com/Support/BugToolKit/search/getBugDetails.do?method=fetchBugDetails&bugId=CSCuj84421 That Java update is breaking a lot of things. I've had to roll it back for a couple of different users due to it breaking their software.
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Oct 26, 2013 03:02
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My go to reply for cold callers is that we have no budget for IT expenditures the next three years and they usually just say "oh ok bye" and never call back. If they push me I ask them if they're volunteering to do free work for us and they hang up.
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Feb 14, 2014 22:06
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The vSphere Web Client is terribly slow and clunky. It's to the point now where I use the thick client for everything I can and use PowerShell for the rest I can't honestly believe anyone thought it was ready for production use.
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Jul 15, 2014 06:04
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I always use both unless there's a specific compatibility reason listed by a vendor. The only minor hassle is with PVSCSI and Windows and you can solve that by building your template with it and attaching the floppy during the template installation.
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Jul 15, 2014 19:09
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DevNull posted:Lots of engineers at VMware have been yelling about this for a few years. There was a thread about it in the VMware forums that finally got traction. With the VMware release cycle length, it should only take a few years to get it cleaned up. I'm a big fan of it randomly deciding to refresh the entire VM list and spend a long time "locating <vm>" which has nothing at all to do with what I was working on. Then when it's done it selects a completely different VM from the one I had selected and takes me to the Monitoring tab. I am using Chrome on a machine with lots of RAM and an SSD and it's still Real Bad.
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Jul 15, 2014 19:12
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Erwin posted:My favorite is that you can't open a console of a VM until it's powered on, and since powering on a VM causes a refresh of the whole list like you describe and makes the whole web client unusable for 10-15 seconds, there's no hope in seeing any errors that occur right at start up. Well...you should be setting a 5 second BIOS boot delay to make sure you have time to intervene. I think I use 10 now because it's a lot more annoying to have to reboot the machine again to catch the error and/or press buttons. Also, you can select a bunch of VMs and power them on easily enough but you can't do the same to power them off
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Jul 15, 2014 19:52
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I'm on 5.5 right now (waiting for NetApp to add 5.5 U1 to the compatibility matrix) so maybe it's a bit better on U1? Somehow I doubt it.
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Jul 15, 2014 21:00
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I'm pretty sure that if you svMotion it to a thin provisioned disk and then back to thick (if you care) it will reclaim all that space in the process.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:40
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NippleFloss posted:Sorry for the double post, but sVmotion won't help. The blocks are marked as unused within the guest block table, but the hypervisor still considers them in use because it doesn't have access to the guest block map. They need to be zeroed to be reclaimed during a sVmotion and the guest won't zero them when it releases them. Ah that's right. The one time I had to do something like this I used a tool to defrag and consolidate the data, zeroed out the rest of the disk and then svMotioned it to get it thin again. I can't even remember why I had to do that anymore but I'm sure I had a good reason
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Jul 22, 2014 02:20
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NippleFloss posted:The defrag improves file layout in the guest to resequentialize it, but if it's a thin vmdk it will still be fragmented at the vmfs level so they svmotion it to sequentialize the vmdk layout.
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Jul 22, 2014 05:55
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It could be related to this: http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsof...-2975331-248582 There were some bad Windows Updates that cause bluescreens that Microsoft had to pull. It seems unlikely that this would affect a server but 
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Aug 18, 2014 23:39
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In that case no, I haven't seen it but I also haven't started my server patches yet either.
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Aug 18, 2014 23:47
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I've been deploying it using the 2012 option for a while with no issues. E: I guess the OSes are similar enough that they didn't need to make a new profile.
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Aug 25, 2014 15:14
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I was considering it too but then I realized that all the config is done "in the cloud" and that if I ever decide not to renew my subscriptions I am stuck with the config as is until the end of time. That soured me enough on the concept to make me look elsewhere.
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Jan 7, 2015 22:37
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Would it be a bad idea to install centos 7? Yes, until 7.1 is released (at the very least).
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Jan 8, 2015 02:39
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TeMpLaR posted:Anyone ever heard of a place that uses NFS for all VM Guest OS's but uses software iscsi inside the guest for all additional drives? I use in-guest iSCSI when the storage vendor requires it. NetApp's SnapManager for Exchange is a good example. Otherwise it's either stored on an NFS or iSCSI datastore, depending on the guest application.
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Feb 11, 2015 00:55
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I've heard rumours that vSphere 5.5U3 was coming "soon" for a little while now. Does anyone know anything more about when it is coming out? The rumours state that U3 supposedly has the fix for Tools causing rare random Windows bluescreens when using quiesced snapshots and I'd really like to get that fixed. This fucker has been around for far too long: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2115997
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Aug 19, 2015 18:51
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