A new Dutch blogger arrives!

Christiaan Roeleveld, a VMware specialist from the Netherlands has started (finally ) his own blog. Christiaan, also known as ChrisR at the dutch VMware user group is a great contributer to this dutch forum (+800 posts) and has great knowledge about VMware in the field. I don’t want to set the expectation to high, but i think you should bookmark this one. His blog is called vmworld.nl and is starting just at the beginning of the VMworld conference in Cannes. Do not mix up this name because it will only start from there and is going to provide all kind of VMware related material, even after this conference! Good luck Christiaan and welcome to the club!

Dutch bloggers list

Today i changed my links page to “Dutch bloggers list”. In the Netherlands we have a lot of VMware fans and also a lot of good virtualization bloggers. Since there is no such list for Dutch bloggers, i decided to create one.

Check it out on the menu above. If i forgot someone or you are starting a Dutch blog about VMware virtualization, please let me know and i will add your site!

Netapp SnapManager 1.0 for Virtual Infrastructure Best Practices

Netapp released a document about Snapmanager for Virtual Infrastructure.

SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure provides local backup and recovery capability with the option to replicate backups to a remote storage system via SnapMirror relationships.
Backups can be performed on individual virtual machines or on datastores with the option of updating the SnapMirror relationship as part of the backup on a per job basis. Similarly, restores can be performed at a datastore or individual virtual machine level.

You can find it here:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3737.pdf

Change your service console memory

When you install an ESX server, the default memory which is allocated for the service console is 272 MB. When you have a few agents running like the HP or APC agents you need to adjust this memory.

Today on one host i got some Memory checker warnings. This indicates that the console memory is too low. By increasing this memory the errors are gone. You can check this by finding memory checker errors in your hostd.log file like these:

2008-04-18 09:43:24.241 ‘Memory checker’ 78818224 warning] Current value 164768 exceeds soft limit 122880.
[2008-04-18 09:43:54.252 'Memory checker' 19962800 warning] Current value 164768 exceeds soft limit 122880.
[2008-04-18 09:44:24.263 'Memory checker' 78818224 warning] Current value 164768 exceeds soft limit 122880.

To adjust the memory, you need to reboot before changes take effect. You can see on the picture where you can change the setting on the esx host on the configuration tab:

Update SRM links page

I added a few links to SRM articles on my SRM links page. You can see them by clicking the SRM links button on the top of this blog.

 

Site Recovery Manager: the other site

Duncan Epping just posted a good article about the other site of Site Recovery manager, and that is good planning and analyzing. click on the picture to read it:

Site Recovery Manager is not about installing… Part II

I think the big problem relays on the fact that Site Recovery software installation are initiated from technical perspective. System administrators know the technology very well, but recovery scenarios needs to be considered from business perspective.

This includes a lot of planning, but also a good change management procedure. And those things are not seen in the vocabulary of the system administrator.

The biggest challenge is to let system administrators cooperate with people who understand business needs and can maintain good procedures! The good thing about Site recovery manager is the fact that there is an easy test procedure which can help you analyze if things work as they should be.

Falconstor SRM in a box

For a while ago i had plans to develop a Falconstor SRM in a box document. Now I am going to cancel this.

Cormac a product engineer from VMware posted an excellent document yesterday on how to configure the Falconstor Virtual Appliance with SRM. Writing such documents demand a great time from the writer. Now there is a complete setup document i am going to put my time in the second version of SRM in a box with the Netapp simulator.

You can download it here.

http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1252

How to recover your VMware ESX root password

I just came across a blog which linked my SRM in a box document. It was started a few days ago and is called:

Lewan-Ent Sytems and storage blog

Browsing around i found an excelent post about how to recover your root account in ESX.
Some times i come around customers and they installed ESX a long time ago and can’t remember the password. Or they only manage esx with vCenter with the administrator password so they forget the root password.

I suggest you print this one in pdf format and carry it along with you, just in case you might need this!

You can find this post here: http://lewaness.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/esx-35-server-lost-root-password-reset/

Is VMware Site Recovery Manager worth the money?

I think it is more than that!

Not only this is insurance for productivity when a disaster strikes your server room. You could use this as a “test and development” site. For example with the Netapp SRA there is a flex clone license involved. This will let you create writable snapshots of the mirrored VM’s. Or why not run a test recovery plan which setup a complete running mirror of your protected network by just pushing 1 button. After that you can install and test updates. I think this is really the exiting part of SRM. When you are ready with testing, just click continue and it will be all cleaned up without a trace! And you can do this over and over again! You could even setup recovery plans according to test en develope a few VM’s with specific services. The only thing you need is to create a vm which has a connection to the test network and you are able to connect to with RDP or something like that. As long as the networks do not see each other.

Consider this approach when convincing the management about SRM. Like we say in Dutch: You catch 2 flies in one hit!