|
|
I recently setup ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 for a client and I had some good lessons learned that I wanted to share.
RTFM Education's VI 3.5 - What Different Guide (This group has quickly become my favorite group of people - Great work!)
http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/Appendix_C_What's_New_and_Different_in_Vi3-5.pdf
-
ESX and VC
- Storage VMotion is only via the Remote CLI. Eventually will be in the Windows GUI for VC and the VIC, but not yet.
- Distributed Power Management – Experimental mode – Using DRS and Vmotion, move VMs to the least number of ESX Hosts needed (with some room), and then put any ESX Hosts into a Standby mode. The ESX Host can be returned from standby mode when needed. Might take upwards of a few minutes to come out of this mode. Must be tested for each piece of hardware.
- VCB can now support iSCSI officially.
- DRS Recommendation Tab for the Cluster
- Installing VMware tools in batch mode for multiple machines.
- VC comes with a Eval License option already built-in during the install.
- Set NTP and Time Configuration via VC GUI rather then service console.
- New web-based Datastore (VMFS Partition) brower
- VMs
- 64 GB of Memory
- Guest Customization for 64 bit OSes.
- Back to vmdk file only.
- Update Manager
- This is licensed from Shavlik. It only downloads the updates that it determines are needed after scanning you machines (no need to download SP1 if all your machines are on SP2).
http://vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_vum_10_sizing_estimator.xls - Calculator to determine the size of the Update Manager database (biggest impact is # of hosts and # of VMs) and the estimated size of the partition you will need to store all the updates (biggest factor is # of OSes X # of Locales X # of Editions X # of Service Pack levels).
Update Manager baselines are all the possible updates that can be needed for the ESX Host, the VM OS or the VM applications. These baselines can be custom built by administrators or by using the defaults listed here:
- Critical ESX Host
- Non-Critical ESX Host
- Critical VM - these contain windows, linux and application updates.
- Non-Critical VM - these contain windows, linux and application updates.
First you scan a VM, a host, a folder, a cluster or a data center, then you remediate a VM, a host, a folder, a cluster or a data center.
Be careful in how you assign baselines and perform remediation against a folder, cluster or data center since it will perform remediation against all servers under folder, cluster or data center,.
- Be careful, performing a remediation against Update Manager. Mine kinda hung.
- If you reboot Update Manager server or restarts its services, you will need to relaunch and possibly re-enable Update Manager in the plugins menu.
- Same goes for if restart the Virtual Center Services. May need to re-enable UM via the plugins menu.
Be careful when r the objects you were remiediating to identify the patch or KB article that it failed on. Then visit <selected Path>\VMware\VMware Update Manager\Data folder to look for the patch or KB Article (may require a google to match KB to patch). Then test the patch as it may be corrupted. You can simply replace it by downloading it from the correct site and overwriting the same file. No need to restart anything. Then attempt another Remediation of a server.
You can Scan and Remediate a Template which is pretty cool. Scanning changes nothing. Remediation will automatically convert to a VM, boot the server with no networking, perform the updates, shutdown the VM, and convert back to a template.
If you want to put VMware Update Manager on a separate server, you will not select Update Manager during the install of VirtualCenter. Then on the 2nd server, install VC Client & Update Manager, configure Update Manager and point it to the VC Server. Then from all VMware Infrastructure Clients that will use Update Manager from Virtual Center, you will need to click on Plugins to install the Update Manager plugin, relaunch VIC, and then enable Update Manager from the plugins -> Installed tab.
Consolidation
- Worked on some machines and not on others, but unknown why.
- Some Remote Perfmon tests worked and some did not.
- So this one may be buggy.
- Only do 1 conversion at any given time.
VMware Converter
- Integrated into Virtual Center. (don’t know if it was this way in VI 2.0 because I really don’t use Converter that often)
- VM to VM Migration across datacenters
- Cold migrations across datacenters.
Storage VMotion
- Only available via Remote CLI
- Download via vmware web site.
Anonymous comments are disabled
|
|
|