VMware vSphere Labs – Infrastructure – Setting Up Active Directory on Windows 2008 R2

This Tutorial runs through a quick overview of installing Active Directory 2008 R2 on a Windows Virtual Machines running in VMware Workstation 8. It has a Video and general instructions to help you out. Enjoy!

1. Deploy from the template
2. Configure NICS Static
3. Disable Extra NIC
4. Gateway and DNS are the Gateway list in “Virtual machine Editor”
5. Keep DNS as the secondary DNS of the Domain Controller
6. Rename machine to appropriate Computer Name to reflect your Domain Controller (sysprep gives silly names)
7. Reboot
8. Add Role from server manager
9. Select Active Directory Domain Services
10. Yes, Install the .Net Stuff….
11. Run DCPRomo.exe from powershell or within the server manager under AD role
12. Install DNS (if not you must be doing something a bit more advanced )
13. Reboot and validate you can log into AD with a Domain Account.
14. Join another Virtual Machine to the Domain

VMware vSphere Labs – Foundations – The Template on Workstation 7 and 8 – Windows 2008 R2

This videos covers the template we will be setting up for deploying windows server 2008 r2 from. On this template we will be installing Active Directory, DNS, vCenter Server, and a lot more stuff. At the bottom of the blog will be references for ensuring your template is supremely prepped for space and performance!

Here are both the videos one for doing it:
VMware workstation 7:

On this video I made a few mistakes… but this wouldn’t be VirtualNoob if I didn’t make a few of those.
VMware workstation 8:

Really great resource:

http://www.happysysadm.com/2010/11/vmware-windows-2008-r2-template.html

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

VMware vSphere Labs – Foundations – Networking Considerations and Design

This how to will go into some detail of the Networking consideration for your VMware Lab. It’s all in what you want to do.

This video addresses those considerations and provides some details on how you may want to do that. If you want some resources for particular lab setup head on to the bottom.

Another Lovely Video

Networking (As seen in the video if you want to reproduce

1. Management Stack for vCloud :
2. Production stack for tenants:
3. VMnet1  192.168.240.xxx – ESXi Management Host-Only (isolated for security )
4. VMNET2 192.168.238.xxx – iSCSI (vmkernal port group and NFS will be shared)
5. VMNET3 192.168.237.xxx – vMotion
6. VMNET4 192.168.5.xxx – VM Networks for ESXi host
7. VMnet8 192.168.4.xxx – Production-MGMT

   .10 = Domain Controllers

   .20 = vCenter Servers (2 interfaces one for ESXi MGMT and Production)

   .30 = All Other systems

8. VMNET5 192.168.120.xxx – vCloud Mgmt

Other Wonderful Links on vSphere Labs and Networking Design included are SRM and vCloud Director Setups:
http://nickapedia.com/2010/10/07/lights-camera-replication-uber-srm-video-guide/
http://www.hypervizor.com/2010/09/video-guide-taking-vmware-vcloud-director-for-a-spin-and-on-the-go/
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/09/13/creating-a-vcd-lab-on-your-maclaptop/
http://blog.tsugliani.fr/featured/create-your-own-virtual-vcloud-lab-part-1/
http://www.chriscolotti.us/vmware/vsphere/vmware-vcloud-in-a-box-for-your-home-lab/

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

VMware vSphere Labs – Foundations – Downloads and knowing what you need

This video just covers the basics of what you need to download to get your vSphere Lab up and going. For more this video isn’t useful but it does address understanding Trials, how to access to products, and etc. This is covering a VMware Workstation 8 Lab set up.

Basically here is an overview of what the video covers:

1. 60 Day Trials
2. The Value of Partnerships
3. Understanding the foundation and products for building your lab
4. What to consider from a product stand point
5. #VMTNSubscription Movement

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

Cisco UCS Journey – When to update firmware

Don’t update if its not broke. If it breaks then update it. If you have issues with false alerts you may want to update firmware. I saw this with 1.4j.

The issue is not with the IOM but with the chassis communication bus(i2c bus) and hence the IOM is not getting detected and backplane ports never come up. If you seeing alerts related to PSU and those types of things then you may want to pay attention.

I2C is a bus that provides connectivity between different components in the chassis.

The PCA9541 is an I2C part that helps us control access to the shared devices in a chassis; the chassis serial eeproms, power supplies, and fan modules.

The 9541 I2C mux has known hardware/hang issues that can cause failures to access hardware components on the chassis. This can result in failures to read fan and PSU sensor data (such as fan speed and temp), triggering faults to be raised for the component (such as fan inoperable).

Some early PCA9541s that were used have a bug that if they are switched back and forth between IOM1 access and IOM2 access too quickly, they will get stuck and not allow any connection to the devices behind them.

Action Required:

Required to upgrade firmware version to 1.4(3q) or above.

Workaround to be followed before going for firmware upgrade:

• Reseat all the PSUs one by one in the chassis. Wait for 10min after inserting one unit ,so that it could stabilize.

• Reseat all the Fan Units on the backside of the chassis. Wait for 3min before going for the next one.

• Reseat both the IO modules. Wait for 20min before going for the next one.

• Verifying the i2c counter for the chassis.

• (Requires Down Time)Power cycle to reset all counters to fix issues in the running version.

• (Requires Down Time)Upgrading to firmware version 1.4(3q) or above (2.0 release) for a permanent fix.

Please follow the link to download the 1.4(3q) bundle:

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/software/release.html?mdfid=283612660&release=1.4%283q%29&relind=AVAILABLE&softwareid=283655658&rellifecycle=&reltype=all

Related Issue with firmware version used:

Incorrect behavior of I2C bus or CMC software interpreting I2C transactions?

1. Fans (count 8 or less), PSU (count 4 or less) can be reported as inoperable. State never cleared.
2. Fans are running at 100% rotation rate.
3. UCSM cannot retrieve the PSU/Fan part detailed information
4. Transient errors indicating Fan inoperable, cleared in one minute time interval.
5. LED state does not match faults reported in UCSM and actual health of the system.
6. Incorrectly reported thermal errors on blades and chassis .

Fixes that are promised for 1.4(3q):

1. CSCtl74710 I2C bus access improvements for 9541

PCA9541 (NXP I2C bus multiplexor) workaround to improve bus access for parts built prior of mid 2009. The workaround assures that if internal clock fails to #:start it gets retried. The change designed and works as expected for both PCA9541 and PCA9541A parts from NXP. PCA9541 parts due to the internal clocking bug #:had a high number of bus_lost events.

1. CSCtn87821 Minor I2C driver fixes and instrumentation

New Linux I2C driver has optimization to handle I2C controller and slave devices synchronization. With older driver simple synchronization error could appear as uncorrectable device errors.

1. CSCtl77244 Transient FAN inoperable transition

During UCS (CMC) firmware upgrade and switching to new master/slave mode CMC erroneously takes information from the slave IOM and evaluates fans as inoperable based on stale data.

1. CSCtl43716 9541 device error. Fan Modules reported inoperable, running 100%

Software code routine bug where single bus_lost event followed by successful retry will result in an infinite loop. As result Fans are reported as inoperable and are not controlled by CMC.

1. ??

Removed an artificial cumulative threshold to enable amber color LED upon reaching 1000 bus_lost events. This was implemented as a monitoring mechanism to simplify identification of the PCA9541 devices. This is no longer needed since a proper software workaround is implemented.

Since this email we have started the update to firmware 2.0. This is a separate blog I am going to write because that too was pretty intense. I will provide some additional steps that we performed to lessen the impact. One thing is for certain don’t expect it to NOT be impacting….

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.com  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~

VMware 101 – Using PowerGUI VMware Powerpacks for remediation

Well, as anyone knows starting a new job you almost always hit that point to where things get a little slow and you have to find things to do. If your VMware environments are anything like the majoirity of them out there chances are you can do some remediation. Now, First off you have to give credit where it’s due and I can honestly say that Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens both do a fabulous job of bringing all kinds of cool scripts to the table. Anyways lets get on with it.

First thing is first run over to Quest and grab PowerGUI Free and then you want to get the VMware Quest Powerpack and then the VMware Community Powerpack. You also want to pick Alan’s vCheck which is one of the most excellent tool ever!!

1.http://powergui.org/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=21&externalID=1802
2. http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vmware-powerpack/
3. http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vcheck/
(Note: props to Alan and Kirk who spent majority of there time working on these excellent tools!)

Remediate Away!
Here is usually where I start:

1. Modify the vCheck to your liking (refer to the link on Alan’s log for any questions) the things I usually end up modifying on this script are:

•  Snapshot age ( I change to 3 days 72 hours is long enough)
• Update NTP to your NTP server
•  Change Datastore free space remaining
• Disable detecting dead path to LUN (seems to hang for me at times)
• Can adjust the VM free space (though personally it needs to be % based not MB Free
• Change vCenter alerts to something appropriate (I use 7 days)
• Change VM removal time frame (I also use 7 days)

2. Now run the script and check out your remediation items, pay attention to certain issues like:

• vMotion restraints because of CD-Roms attached
• Datastores low on space (powerpack can help with this)
• VMware tools out of date, issues, or not installed at all
•  Snapshots
•  The above appear to be the more common ones I run this script weekly.

3. From the Powerpacks I usually run the following scripts.

• Best Practice Queries >Disk Queries > Orphaned VMDKs
• Best Practice Queries > Disk Queries > RDM’s
• Best Practice Queries > Disk Queries > Thin Disk
• Community PowerPack > Resource Pools > Ballooning Script
• Virtual Machine > VM with over X number CPU’s
• CD-ROMs mounted to VM

4. On an interim basis I will rerun a vCheck or I will run single scripts on an as needed basis:

•  Snapshots > All Snapsots
• Virtual Machines > HAL Information (Not really an issue with win2k8
• Virtual Machines > CPU Ready %
• Virtual Machines > VM with active memory ballooning
• Waste Finder > If I feel like doing some deeper Datastore Cleanup
• Powered off VM

5. Things not covered by the other scripts but also should be remediated or changed:

• Scan VM’s for NIC Drivers (Update install vmxnet3 if using e1000)
• Check Disk Alignment of all your VMs both Linux and Windows and each drive then update templates
• Enable LPS for certain VM if needed – windows doesnt enable by defualt but ESX 3.5 and up does. Yields memory savings based on app.
• Check to ensure windows 2008 templates and VMs have the WDDM display driver

At first glance some of these items may not makes sense, but you have consider your own environment.   HAL is a good one to run really more so the first time around just to make sure your older stuff windows 2k3 and 2k are using the right HAL for the vCPU.  I also like to run and dismount all ISO’s from the VMs. Now, you may want to make sure its not a VMware tools ISO mounted to the VM.  If it is then you can possibly get a pop-up for a linux VM and its will appear to be unresponsive until someone answers the pop-up with a yes or no.  Keep in mind remediation is about starting with the quick and easy and then working your way down.  It takes time and creativity.

Now you will have challenges when remediating some things like snapshots when they are really big and I will add a secondary part describing what I normally do, in most cases a clone fixes the issue.

(NOTE: I will be adding additional links later on)

***Disclaimer: The thoughts and views expressed on VirtualNoob.wordpress.org  and Chad King in no way reflect the views or thoughts of his employer or any other views of a company. These are his personal opinions which are formed on his own. Also, products improve over time and some things maybe out of date. Please feel free to contact us and request an update and we will be happy to assist. Thanks!~