VMWare

Matt Oswalt has an article called ESXi vSwitch Load Balancing Woes where he deep dives into VMware's ESXi virtual switch and, based upon personal experience, discusses port channels, hash algorithm selection, and path selection. I need to refer back to this to see if networks I've seen conform to what he discusses.

• Problems connecting to VI SDK using C++/gsoap-2.7
• gSOAP Toolkit Software Download Instructions
• Need start up with VMWare API in c++
• Issues compiling vmware web api client code into useable objects
• non-proprietary Web services specifications
• vsphere api to change ip address of VirtualMachine
• vSphere Web Services SDK Documentation
• geeklee's notes on pyVmomi
• pyvmomi login to guest example
• VMware Infrastructure Object Model Overview
• Comparison of Python VMware vSphere client libraries
• vSphere Web Services SDK Programming Guide
• pyVmomi, finally ! (vSphere python SDK)
• pyvmomi/sample/getvmstree.py

• vCPU: one or more CPUs assigned to a virtual machine
• pCPU: one or more physical CPUs in a host, with a physical slot containing one or more physical cores

• Run: actually performing work. Compare load of one vCPU with others to ensure load is balanced. If all are heavily used, then may additional vCPU resources.
• Wait: two sub-states: idle-wait - nothing to do, io-wait - waiting for to read/write storage. A high io-wait may indicate performance issues on the underlying storage
• Ready: the vCPU is ready to work, but a pCPU has not yet been allocated. <10% may be good. >20% may be bad as allocation process is not being efficient or process resources are scarce. Check for CPU affinity if things seem unbalanced across pCPUs.

I was having problems with getting a VMWare ESXi 5.1 Host to register properly with vSphere 5.0 (probably something seriously wrong with that whole concept all by itself). During the install of ESXi 5.1, the local drives were attached and formatted for vmfs capability.

Since I couldn't fix the registration problem, I rolled the host back to ESXi 4.1. When it came time to reformat and make the drives useful for vmfs, I encountered an error along the lines of:

VMware: Call "HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions" 
  for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "SERVERNAME" failed

I recently found out that ISPs and Managed Service Providers are able to obtain a different licensing schedule from VMWare for hosted services. For some facilities, just starting up, this may be an attractive alternative to VMWare's mainstream licensing policy. Expecting that growth will be a primary driving factor, licensing is based upon a monthly useage fee. One has to become a partner with VMWare in order to take advantage of this program. Continue reading "Migrating a QEMU/KVM Image to VMWare" »

A simple message to myself. When installing a Debian Lenny 5.0.1 KDE guest in VMWare Workstation hosted on Windows XP, a few steps are required in order to move into and out of the guest without the ctrl-alt mouse release sequence:

• apt-get install build-essential on the guest
• apt-get install linux-headers-...
• build and install the VMWare toolkit in the guest
• add 'Option "CorePointer"' to the mouse section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• add 'Option "CoreKeyBoard"' to the keyboard section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• restart KDE

A visit to a VMWare Community describes a couple of additional steps for getting the VMWare Shared Folders (HGFS) Share to work inside of Lenny 5.0.1 as well. Basically, in the /etc/fstab file, which VMWare updates when you perform a tool install, append ',uid=1000,gid=1000' to the 'ttl=5' portion of the .host line, so it looks something like:

.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

The actual value to be used in place of 1000 is what ever your uid,gid are for your current window session. This an be determined at the command line by:

echo ${UID}

Without the uid/gid values in the fstab file, the share is made available for the root user. Anyway, after the restart, by using the file explorer, go to /mnt/hgfs to see the volumes.

This build process creates a basic VMWare session with Debian Etch 2 Network Boot CD. Familiarity with VMWare is assumed. A similar configuration can be used when installing on physical hardware.