I am doing a project involving a Citrix Xenapp environment running on VMWare vSphere.

The physical machines are powered by two Eaton Uninterruptable Power Supplies that both a network card.

I received some documentation that describes how to implement automatic shutdown in a VMWare vSphere environment.

This documentation describes that a vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) must be deployed in which we need to install some software from Eaton.

I followed the documentation that even described the needed iptables rules needed for their software.

In the last step a discovery is done and the UPS is supposed to be found. And you have probably guessed by now: it didn’t!

At first I figured that maybe the iptables configuration was still too tight so I stopped the iptables service but that didn’t help.

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I was trying to install a checked build of Windows 7 under VMWare Workstation but after the first reboot during the install (the completing installation step) the system came up with a BSOD.

It can be fixed by adding a line to the VMX configuration file:

piix4pm.smooth_acpi_timer = TRUE

VMware has released an updated Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere document for 4.1.

The document provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware vSphere 4.1.

Chapter 1 – “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Chapter 2 – “ESX and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESX™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.

Chapter 3 – “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.

Chapter 4 – “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding resource management best practices.

Links: Technical Resource Center (direct link to the Document).

Earlier versions:

Performance Best Practices for VMWare vSphere 4.0

Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3

After deploying Virtual Machines from a template and adding disks the next Task was to create and format the partitions.

In a VMWare environment it is very important to assure that the partitions are aligned. VMWare has a nice document that explains the details called Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

Basically the recommendation is to align partition on a 64 KB boundary, not only for VMWare itsself but also for the guests.

Of course we could do this manually but I wanted to run this task of from my Deployment Server to automate the following:

• Create aligned partitions on all extra disks of the maximum size
• Format, assign drive letter and assign a label
• A safeguard to prevent overwriting existing Data

Well enough talk let’s go the scripts! They are written as bat files that can be executed directly in Altiris as an embedded script but of course you don’t need Altiris to use them. (more…)

As I wrote earlier today I am provisioning Virtual Machines with PowerCLI. I don’t know if this is intentional behaviour but after Deploying (Cloning) a Virtual Machine from a template the Network Adapter is not automatically connected at power on.

This made the Join Domain operation which is party of the Customization Specification to fail. I noticed this in the log file which can be found in %WINDIR%\Temp\vmware-imc\guestcust.log:

Joining domain mydomain using account mydomain\myaccount and password ‘*****’
The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.

So I wrote a small fix script in PowerCLI:

And of course I changed the Provisioning script to do this as well

I am currently provisioning a lot of Virtual Machines in VMWare vSphere 4.1. Because I had already sized the Virtual Machines I am doing this from PowerCLI based on my Excel Sheet.

I will probably blog later about the details of how I am doing this in PowerCLI (would you be interested in that?) but after successfully deploying some Windows 2008 VM’s I got this error in PowerShell:

New-VM : 3-11-2010 10:00:50 New-VM The operation for the entity VirtualMachine-vm-150 failed with the following message: “Cannot complete customization.”

At C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\NewVm.ps1:64 char:14

+ $VM = New-VM <<<< -Name $Name -VMHost $VMHost -Template $Template -OSCustomizationSpec $Spec -DiskStorageFormat $DiskFormat -Datastore $LargestDataStore

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [New-VM], CustomizationFault

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Client20_TaskServiceImpl_CheckServerSideTaskUpdates_OperationFailed,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.NewVM

In the vCenter console the following error was logged:

Cannot deploy template: Cannot complete customization.

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Today I connected with my laptop to VMWare Virtual Center using vSphere client. Because I had an older version of the client I needed to update and the installer failed with this message:

I remembered this error from the last install of this client (about a year ago), it happens because Microsoft Visual J# was already installed (in my case it was previously installed by Embarcadero’s Rad Studio).

Last year I “fixed” it by modifying the msi file but I remembered that Assarbad posted an easier solution on his Blog a while ago.

His solution was to set a public property in the MSI (USING_VIM_INSTALLER) but it means we need to unpack the installer exe first to obtain the MSI file.
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Some time ago (2008 actually) I wrote a tool that can assign driveletters given a volumename. I use it myself after SysPrep operations to assign the desired drive letters. For instance after cloning a Virtual Machine from a template.

I noticed that I updated this tool sometime after the original post but never uploaded it here. The most important changes are:

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I was trying to create a (very) large Datastore on VMWare vSphere 4.1 but although VMWare correctly identifies the LUN on my SAN it refuses to create the Datastore and gives me this error:

The complete error text is

Call “HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions” for object “ha-datastoresystem” on ESX “<IP of ESX>” failed.

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As you may have read I am currently implementing VMWare vSphere 4 on several HP Proliant DL380 G7 machines.

I ran across an interesting knowledge base article from VMWare that describes a possible issue that is summarized as “Power on and storage operations are slow with the HP Smart Array P410i controller“.

Essentially this just means a performance issue and the resolution is to install an extra (256 MB) cache module on the RAID controller.

The Cache Module has HP article # 462968-B21 (not to be confused with 462969-B21 which is the Battery Kit).

Google search on 462968-B21.