I have added a new quiz feature to the site, currently I have a Config Maximums Quiz that can be found here
It’s currently 49 questions.
Come back soon for more quizzes.
Category: Virtualisation
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ThinApp – How to virtualise the vSphere Client (4.1u1)
As promised yesterday here is a quick tutorial showing how to ThinApp the vSphere client, so as to reduce the package size as much as possible the work was carried out on a fully patched Windows XP SP3 machine with the J# redist installed as well.
The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes so I have edited the video to cut out long and boring installation routines.
A couple of things to note is that I never managed to get my client down to the same size that VMware have but to my defence this is my first attempt at using ThinApp but I did get it down to a respectable 133mb and also that this is my first attempt at video creation, also this video doesn’t contain any sound but future releases will do.
One thing missing from the video is that testing of the client was carried out on a Windows 7 virtual machine, this machine had no additional software installed on it (unlike the XP machine that had the J# redist).
If there are any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.
ThinApp’d vSphere Client 4.1u1 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.
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VMware ThinApp 4.6 Starter Bundle Licensing Issues
About six months back when VMware had a deal going where if you purchased VMware Workstation you also received a license for VMware ThinApp Starter Bundle I decided to take the plunge and made the purchase (it was also at the time when workstation had a $50 discount going on).
Before now I hadn’t really had any reason to install ThinApp but recently I had decided to try my hand at packaging up the vSphere client using ThinApp (like VMware have done with the 4.1 release but my aim was to do it with the 4.1u1 release).
Last night I decided to install ThinApp on a dedicated ThinApp machine (Windows XP SP3) but ran into an issue when it came to actually licensing the application.
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VMware VCP 4 – Additional Study Material
For those of you wanting to study and pass the VCP 410 exam you need to know this isn’t something that’s easily done, I have heard it mentioned that VMware expect that 50% of people taking the exam for the first time fail it but I haven’t managed to verify that figure myself. I do know that VMware are very keen to ensure that those holding the VCP have done it the right way and I believe that they have it right by requiring people attend an accredited course, of course that in itself does give you the required knowledge to just pass the exam and that’s hopefully where this post can help.
Wanting to pass the VCP 410 exam has been on my agenda for a while, having got over the main hurdle of the required course (I sat the VMware ICM course at the 360GSP VMware Academy) I next had to ensure I had enough in the way of additional material.
For my study prep I have been using the following books, both physical and kindle editions (I own some of these books twice, once in each format).
Each book is dipped into when I need to read up on something, be it home lab environments in Maximum vSphere or some light hearted banter in the vSphere for Dummies book.
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vSphere Remote Management Applications for the iPad and iPhone
As most of you are aware VMware released the vSphere Client for the iPad back in March, the client itself is fairly limited in what it offers but as a freebie offering isn’t too bad. I wanted to see however how it compared to other vSphere apps for the iPad\iPhone.
With that in mind I downloaded or purchased three vSphere Remote Management Applications.
1. VMware vSphere Client for iPad
3. Project Eureka LLC’s iVMControl
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Free utilities for VMware administration
Having just finished my VMware Install, Configure and Manage (ICM) course I wanted to offer my classmates some advice on free utilities to make their lives easier when it came to managing their vSphere environments.
As the class are aware of my blog I have decided to also mention them here so that they can get the links to download them for themselves as well as offering links to other people who are interested.
There are a number of decent free utilities out there that people aren’t aware of unless they actually go out and look for them, some of the utilities I use and recommend to others are the following, this list is by no means complete and will be updated over time.
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Active Directory Web Services Event Log Errors – vCenter Server (4.1u1)
I am going through a project at home to centralise my ESXi and Windows Event Logs using Splunk and Snare and part of that process was going through my Event logs to try and fix any niggling issues.
Going through my vCenter event logs I discovered some errors in the ADWS logs that I did a Google for and came across a post from Gregg Robertson over on his site that resolved the issue.
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Veeam FastSCP Windows 64bit Fix
Having installed Veeam FastSCP onto my Windows 7 (64) Ultimate workstation I was getting frustrated with the error messages I was getting "Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID [5F1555F0-0DBB-47F6-B10B-0AB0E1C1D8CE} failed due to the following error: 800700c1", a quick google search found the answer for me.
Looking into the fix I found here I realised that it’s a tad long winded and bloated (no disrespect intended, as it is the fix). So I thought to myself, did I actually need all of that for the fix to work. The answer is no.
Having looked at what was required (running "corflags "C:\Program Files (x86)\Veeam\Veeam Backup and FastSCP\VeeamShell.exe" /32BIT+" to resolve the issue with FastSCP not working on any 64bit Windows OS resulted in the above error message when trying to copy files between Datastores) I decided to see what happens if I just took the corflags.exe file and ran that instead of having the entire SDK installed, the results were that the program now works.
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Hardware Status not displaying on vSphere Client – Fix
Today I reinstalled my vCenter server so that I could manage both of my vSphere Hosts centrally, the installation itself went as smoothly as possible but there was one small blip.
When connecting to the vCenter server I discovered that I couldn’t browse to the Hardware Status page but if I connected directly to the host with the vSphere client I had no issues.
A Google search later found that this had been an issue back in 2009 but I hadn’t really found much since, the methods to fix this differed slightly with me probably down to the fact that I had installed vCenter onto a 2008 R2 SP1 installation.
To fix the issue on a 2008 R2 installation do the following.
1. On the vCenter server go to Start – Run – ADSI Edit
2. Select connect to and ensure the following is selected under connection settings
– Connection name – vCenter
– Connection Point – Distinguished Name is selected and name is “dc=virtualcenter, dc=vmware,dc=int”
– Computer – Server name : localhost
– port : 389
– Click ok to connect
4. Once in Adsi Edit browse to
Right click on the CN=VIMWEBSVC and choose Properties.
Scroll Down to vmw-vc-URL
Here we can see that this is populated with a DNS name, we are going to change it to an IP address.
Click OK and exit out from ADSI Edit.
At this stage I then launched Services.MSC and restarted the two following services.
However, when trying to restart the VMware VirtualCenter Server service (which requires a restart of the Webservices service anyway) I had an issue where the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service wouldn’t restart, at this point a simple reboot resolved the issues.
Once the vCenter server had restarted (and I reconnected back via the vSphere Client) I then went to the Hardware Status Page and was presented with the following screen.
All fixed 🙂
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Iomega IX4 v Openfiler Performance Testing
Running my own home based lab I had struggled to find out which storage solution was going to be the best for me, I had multiple choices with the types of storage I could use (I own the following storage enabled\capable hardware; Buffalo TeraStation Pro 2, Iomega IX4-200d 2TB and HP’s MicroServer running Openfiler 2.3).
Over the last couple of weeks I have been carrying out various tests to see which device I would be using as my NAS\SAN solution and which device would end up being the location to store my Veeam Backups on.
All three devices run software raid, although I am about to try and fit an IBM M1015 SAS\SATA Controller in to my HP MicroServer (with the Advanced Key to allow Raid 5 and 50)) so both the Iomega and HP were similar where raid types were concerned. The Terastation is an already operational device that has existing data on it and could only be tested using NFS, it’s never really been in contention where SAN\NAS devices for ESXi was concerned.
Where I wasn’t sure about was whether I would be better off using RAID’s 0, 5 or 10 (obviously I am aware of the resilience issues with RAID 0 but I do have to consider the performance capacity of it as I do want to run a small VMware View lab here as well), not only was there a decision on the RAID types but also should I go down the iSCSI or NFS route as well.
Having read a number of informative blog and forum posts I knew that to satisfy my own thirst for knowledge I was going to have to perform my own lab testing.
Lab Setup
OS TYPE: Windows XP SP3 VM on ESXi 4.1 using a 40gb thick provisioned disk
CPU Count \ Ram: 1 vCPU, 512MB ram
ESXi HOST: Lenovo TS200, 16GB RAM; 1x X3440 @ 2.5ghz (a single ESXi 4.1 host with a single running Iometer VM was used during testing).STORAGE TYPE
Iomega IX4-200d 2TB NAS, 4x 500gb, JBOD – iSCSI, JBOD – NFS, RAID 10 – iSCSI, RAID 10 –NFS, RAID 5 – iSCSI and finally RAID5 – NFS ** Software RAID only **
Buffalo TeraStation Pro 2, 4 x 1500gb, RAID 5 – NFS (this is an existing storage device with existing data on it so I could only test with NFS and the existing RAID set, the device isn’t iSCSI enabled).
HP MicroServer, 2gb ram, 4 x 1500gb + the original servers 1.6tb disk for the Openfiler OS install, RAID 5 – iSCSI, RAID5 – NFS, RAID 10 – iSCSI, RAID 10 –NFS, RAID 0 – iSCSI and finally RAID 0 – NFS.
Storage Hardware: Software based iSCSI and NFS.
Networking: NetGear TS724T 24 x 1 GB Ethernet switch
Iometer Test Script
To allow for consistent results throughout the testing, the following test criteria were followed:
1, One Windows XP SP3 with Iometer was used to monitor performance across the three platforms.
2, I utilised the Iometer script that can be found via the VMTN Storage Performance thread here, the test script was downloaded from here.
The Iometer script tests the following:-
TEST NAME: Max Throughput-100%Read
size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply
32768,100,100,0,0,1,0,0
TEST NAME: RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read
size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply
8192,100,65,60,0,1,0,0
TEST NAME: Max Throughput-50%Read
size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply
32768,100,50,0,0,1,0,0
TEST NAME: Random-8k-70%Read
size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply
8192,100,70,100,0,1,0,0
Two runs for each configuration were performed to consolidate results.
Lab Results
After a long week or so (not only did I have to test each device twice, I also had to move the VM between devices which also took up time) I have come up with the following results.
Iomega IX4-200D Results
Openfiler 2.3 Results
TeraStation Pro II Results
Conclusions
Having looked at the results the overall position is clear, the Iomega IX4-200D is now going to be my Veeam backup destination whilst my HP MicroServer is going to be my centralised storage host for ESXi, I now have to decide whether to go for the R0 or R10 iSCSI approach as they offer the best performance, at this stage I am tempted to go for the Raid 10 approach however because the disks in the server aren’t new. Over the next few months I will see how the reliability of the solution is and take it from there.
One thing I can add however is that over the next couple of days I will be attempting to fit my M1015 RAID controller in there and seeing how that performs, once fitted I will re do the Openfiler tests and post an update.
