Passwords are like underwear....

You shouldn't leave them out where people can see them.
You should change them regularly.
And you shouldn't loan them out to strangers.

it just makes nonsense

Tag: VI

Updating ESX 3.5

I was doing some regular maintenance today in Virtual Center 2.5 today and realized Its been a couple months since I’ve installed any updates on my 3.5 hosts.  I don’t think I’ve installed any updates since way back before August before the bugged Update 2 was release. Back then I had reinstalled 2.5 and forgot to reinstall Update Manager in .  Funny how you forget about things when they aren’t right in front of you.

 

When I first attempted to Scan for Updates I received the following error in :
 

metadata for patch missing

 

Searching through the forums suggested the host FW wasn’t properly listening for connections and suggested I run:

esxcfg- --openport 80,tcp,out,dynamicupdates 
(port 80 was specific to my environment and may vary for your setup)

 

Once I did this the Scan for Updates ran just fine

 

Onto the upgrade….

 

Before the upgrade

[root@-03 root]# vimsh -n -e ‘hostsvc/hostsummary’ | grep fullName
File not found.
         fullName = " Server 3.5.0 build-82663",

1.Reinstalled Update Manager and attached the Critical and Non-critical Baselines to the hosts

2.Put my first host into Maintenance Mode and agreed to all the informational messages that come with that

3.Selected all Guest VMs and migrated them to another host (I’m still not absolutely sure if entering Maintenance Mode actually evacuates all the running VMs.  I just migrate them manually because I can see it working)

4.Right clicked on the host and chose Remediate, chose both Baselines and Next’ed through the wizard.

5.30 minutes later the host was back up and running with the newest and updates. Repeat steps on all other Hosts.

After the upgrade

[root@-03 root]# vimsh -n -e ‘hostsvc/hostsummary’ | grep fullName
File not found.
         fullName = " Server 3.5.0 build-123630",

 

One thing I noticed after the upgrade was that the SSH server didn’t automatically start even though it was set to

image

I clicked START and all was well.  I will do more troubleshooting on this the next time I need to reboot the Hosts.  I’d rather not evacuate all my Guest VMs for this reason alone. For now I’m happy being up to date.

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My approach to backing up guest VM’s from ESX3.5 is two-headed:

  • Backup the data like you would a normal machine by attaching via SMB, NFS, SQL, etc.  Just get the data
  • Backup the Guest VM via the host (pull a bare metal of the entire system)

Why backup everything twice you ask?

Well fortunately for you and unfortunately for me I have a real world experience that will help answer this question. I had a vm guest failure and had to rebuilt a vm then restore data and settings.  Suffice to say this took forever. So here’s why you can do both…

  • If data is deleted you have backup sets that have just pure data - files that are used by applications and users. If a single file gets deleted, corrupted, or anything else _bad_ the restore for this file(s) is quick and easy.  Restoration of this file(s) doesn’t need to affect every other user connected to the system in question.
  • If the OS becomes unusable, system files fail, (virtual disk) files on the host get corrupted then you now have the full machine backup to simply turn back on from date X/Y/Z. Asigra actually takes a native at the time of backup.

Using Asigra Televaulting (or a small handful of other backup systems) allows us to perform backups that are compressed and bit level.  So, if I have a VM that has a 20GB disk, but really only has 8GB of data in the guest system, then the backups will actually be less than 8 because all that free space will be compressed down to nothing and then the 8GB of real data will further be compressed down.

My schedules are now setup to backup real data each night, but backup the OS (again using the native ) once a week.  For the most part, system settings and configurations aren’t happening each day. So, if the guest VM dies, I can simply restore the VM to the last weekly backup (as of at the most 6 days) then restore the real data to to that machine (as of at the most the night before).

 

A note for Asigra users - I’ve had a lot of problems backing up via .  So far attaching directly to the hosts seems to be working great.  The one fallback for this is you need to setup rules to ensure that VM’s stay on the same host.  Asigra only knows that a guest VM is on the host you originally configured it to be backed up from.

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32 vmware snapshots debacle

So I was having some pretty significant performance problems with a vm running Windows Server 2003.  I thought it might be due to the fact that I had so many snapshots.  Fellow admins over at the communities confirmed this to be the case.

So my next step would be to combine all the snapshots and get rid of my delta’s by committing them all. I was going to run some guest updates first, so I again as always, made a . Something either guest or host related happened and the guest powered off.  When I went to turn it back on complained:

too many levels of redo logs

uh oh! the guest wouldn’t turn on!  it turns out that this was in fact the 35th taken for this machine. This 35th didn’t complete correctly and was corrupted. it also turns out there is a 32 limit for VM guests.  Good to know tells you about this! <sarcasm included>

After frantically searching the web and forums for a solutions someone pointed me in the direction of a post here: http://zealkabi.blogspot.com/2008/10/virtualcenter-shows-no-snapshot-but-it.html which clearly shows the process i need to use to commit my snapshots, specifically Solution B:

If solution A did not work then next step to follow is: use vmkfstools -i to consolidate snapshots.
1. You can export the disk with vmkfstools to recreate the virtual machine:
2. Execute the following command to create a directory for the new disk:\
# mkdir /vmfs/volumes/UUID/new_RHEL5
3. Execute the following command to point vmkfstools at the last file:
# vmkfstools -i RHEL5-000001. /vmfs/volumes/UUID/new_RHEL5/new_RHEL5.

Three hours later, snapshots 32 through 1 committed and a single .  While this commit process was running I realized i could have simply told to run vmdisk00032. instead of the final (and corrupt) vmdisk00035..  this would have been the quick resolution to get me back up and running, and I could have don the committal at a better time.

Huge thanks to patrickds from the communities and SANJAT KABI (http://zealkabi.blogspot.com) for their knowledge!

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