Jase's Place

VMware Workstation was updated to version 7.1.1 on 8/13/2010. As a Windows user (for the most part), I quickly logged into the download site, and downloaded an updated build.

I’m also a Mac user, and yesterday I decided to see if Fusion had also been updated. Low and behold, it had been.

Here are the release notes:

VMware Fusion 3.1.1 is a maintenance release that resolves the following issues and adds new support. It is a free upgrade for all VMware Fusion 3.x users.

• VMware vSphere 4.1 is now supported as a guest operating system. VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and virtualization experts can use VMware vSphere 4.1 to install the latest server virtualization software and experiment with server setup, conduct training, show demos, and test production configurations. Running ESX as a guest eliminates the need to have spare hardware available to run ESX natively and enables ESX to run on systems that are not listed on the ESX hardware compatibility list (HCL). For more information on the supported processors and host operating systems, see see Considerations for Running an ESX Guest.This feature is intended for educational and demonstration purposes only and should not be used in production environments. To use this feature, you must download vSphere 4.1 from the VMware Web site and follow the installation documentation provided with VMware vSphere to install ESX.For more information on VMware vSphere, see http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/.
• Resolves an issue around accessing some iSight cameras.
• Resolves an issue where an incorrect disk error message appeared after a host crash occurs while working in a virtual machine.
• Resolves an issue where audio recording failed when the recording device output was not 44.1 kHz.

For more details, see Resolved Issues.

So like Workstation, Fusion has been updated to support running VMware vSphere 4.1 as a guest.

Both of these applications, along with appropriate hardware, work well for training, testing, and demonstration purposes.

Thanks for the update VMware.

Click here to download it.

I was working on a specialized project that included the use of vmrun (part of VMware VIX).

The Project
This project required the ability to restore a VM to a baseline Snapshot.

The challenge is that the user is not a tech person, and the requirement was that it was very easy to restore the baseline Snapshot using a simple batch file.

The Problem
So I ran vmrun (located in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VIX) to see the necessary syntax to revert to a Snapshot.

The syntax is:
vmrun -T ws revertToSnapShot “C:\path\vmname\vmname.vmx” SnapShotName

The error I received “was: The specified version was not found”

After some looking around, it appeared that one of two things happened:

1. The updated VMware VIX package was not updated from my 7.0.1 installation of VMware Workstation
2. The updated VMware VIX package was not included in the 7.1.0 installation of VMware Workstation.

I kind of think that the first is true.  I say this, because when VMware Workstation is initially installed, a VMware VIX installer presents itself to augment the installation.

The Solution
I went to VMware’s site to download the latest version of VMware VIX.
http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/automationapi

After installing the updated VMware VIX build, my problems were solved.

vSphere 4.1 is out.

You have already upgraded VMware vCenter Server to 4.1.

You realize that you downloaded vCenter Server 4.1 and either your ESX 4.1 or ESXi 4.1 media.

But… You didn’t download the vSphere 4.1 client.  Remember that the 4.1 client is not included in the installation of ESX or ESXi.

Now when connecting to an ESX/ESXi host with an older client, the same installer in the past would allow download of the client from the host.
This is no longer the case:

The host redirects the updater to vsphereclient.vmware.com to download the client.  This can be a long process, or a short process, depending on your connection speed, as well as proxy settings, etc.

Never fear, even though VMware didn’t bundle the client with ESX/ESXi, it is still available to download from your vCenter Server.

Or you can connect to the vCenter Server first to upgrade the vSphere client.

Either way is better than having to download the client from VMware.

Update: How to have your ESXi installation point to your vCenter download URL

From Tech Support Mode, modify clients.xml on the ESXi installation

The command is vi /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/client/clients.xml.

The format of the file looks like this:

<ConfigRoot>
<clientConnection id=”0000″>
<authdPort>902</authdPort>
<version>4</version>
<exactVersion>4.1.0</exactVersion>
<patchVersion>1.0.0</patchVersion>
<apiVersion>v4.1</apiVersion>
<downloadUrl>http://vsphereclient.vmware.com/vsphereclient/2/5/8/9/0/2/VMware-viclient-all-4.1.0-258902.exe</downloadUrl>
</clientConnection>
</ConfigRoot>

To change this, replace the <downloadURL> tag with the URL to your vCenter Server.  I replaced this line to match my download URL, my clients.xml looks like this:

<ConfigRoot>
<clientConnection id=”0000″>
<authdPort>902</authdPort>
<version>4</version>
<exactVersion>4.1.0</exactVersion>
<patchVersion>1.0.0</patchVersion>
<apiVersion>v4.1</apiVersion>
<downloadUrl>https://vcenter.jasemccarty.com/client/VMware-viclient.exe</downloadUrl>
</clientConnection>
</ConfigRoot>

Now press :w! to save the file, followed by :q! to exit vi.

Now your ESXi host will point to your vCenter server to download the vSphere client.

VMware vSphere 4.1 has been released!

This is a release that many have been waiting for.  Virtualization.info leaked some early details a couple days ago.

Some of the features that are added include:

• Memory Compression – compressing RAM pages rather than using disk swapping, which will improve performance (could significantly help VDI environments)
  
• Storage I/O Control – VM’s with a greater need for disk resources can be given priority.
  
• Network I/O Control – Can better leverage network utilization by setting QoS priorites for each flow type (iSCSI, NFS, etc)
  
• DRS Host Affinity – VM movement can be more granular (great for limiting SQL VM movement, reducing SQL license requirements)
  
• ESXi will have native Active Directory Integration
  
• VMware vCenter Server – Will only run on 64-bit Windows.
• vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) - New protocol to interface between VMware and storage arrays.  This can offload some storage tasks to the storage array natively.

The maximums have become larger

• 3,000 VMs per cluster (increase by 2 times)
• 1,000 hosts per vCenter server (increase by more than 3 times)
• 10,000 VMs per vCenter (increase by more than 3 times)
• Up to 8 vMotions in parallel when using 10GbE

Additionally, some names have changed:

• VMotion is now vMotion
• Storage VMotion is now Storage vMotion
• The free ESXi package will be called vSphere Hypervisor
• ESX & ESXi (paid version) will be discussed as the Hypervisor architectures

Well, I can’t wait to get it installed in the lab and give it a spin. Go to http://www.vmware.com/download to download it too.

My second attempt also worked out pretty well, but the DataONTAP PowerShell Toolkit, has been released, and I wanted to update my script to leverage a supported toolkit. If you have a NetApp, and are getting deeper into using Powershell, this toolkit is for you.

I’m not going to go deep into the details of how this script works, as most of that is covered in the previous post.

What I am going to detail is the difference between the old and new scripts.

The Old Script

#Load the PoshOnTap Module
Import-Module PoshOnTap

#Connect to the Filer
Connect-NaServer -Filer netapp2

#Pull The Data
$body = Get-NaSnapMirror|Select Source,Destination,Status,State,Lag,LastTransferSize,LastTransferDurration|Out-String

#Send e-mail
Send-MailMessage -From "user@yourdomain.com" -To "user@yourdomain" -Subject "NetApp Replication Script" -SmtpServer mail.domain.com -Body $body

The New Script

#Load the DataONTAP Module
Import-Module DataONTAP

#Connect to the Filer
Connect-NaController netapp2

#Pull The Data
$body = Get-NaSnapmirror|Select SourceLocation,DestinationLocation,Status,State,LagTime,LastTransferSize,LastTransferDuration|Out-String

#Send e-mail
Send-MailMessage -From "user@yourdomain.com" -To "user@yourdomain" -Subject "NetApp Replication Script" -SmtpServer mail.domain.com -Body $body

The only differences between the 2 scripts are at lines 5 and 8.

Line 5:

• Connect-NaServer -Filer becomes Connect-NaController

Line 8:

• Source becomes SourceLocation
• Destination becomes DestinationLocation
• Lag becomes LagTime
• LastTransferDurration becomes LastTransferDuration (obvious typo in PoshOnTap)

Other than those 2 lines, the scripts are identical.

I’d like to give a shout out to Glenn Sizemore for leading the way with PoshOnTap and NetApp for following his lead with the DataONTAP PowerShell Toolkit.

Update to this post
I was digging a little deeper on this post, and apparently dates are returned as INT64 Integers.  Makes things a little messy, and requires some data manipulation.

There’s a post about it on the NetApp Communities that details a workaround (again, kind of messy).  PoshOnTap handles dates better, so maybe NetApp will see the issue, and quickly release a v1.1 of the toolkit to correct the problem.  Nevertheless, I’ll continue using the supported (albeit a little more clunky with regard to dates) toolkit.

As soon as I find a clean/optimized way to address the situation, I will update this post.