Build A Better Cloud With StratoGen VMware Hosting
The VMware vSphere Health Check performs quite a number of checks but doesn’t really explain why values are good or bad. Today I released three new sections that explain the theory behind the CPU, Memory and Storage checks. Click the “Health Check” button in the menu bar of my blog to access these new sections or just follow the links below:
At the Dutch VMUG event 2011 I gave a presentation on how to check your VMware environment to make sure it is healthy. When creating the presentation I had a lot of doubts because I was afraid everyone would think these points were very obvious. But on the other hand, when visiting customers and doing these health checks for them, I found a lot of those “obvious” issues in their environment. I decided to stick to my plan and test the audience and it turned out they were very happy with my presentation and I saw a lot of people in the audience taking notes. The replies afterwards also showed that for many people there were a lot of eye-openers in this presentation. I therefore decided to convert the power point presentation into this blogpost and hope my readers find it a valuable health check.
In the top menu bar of this blog you’ll find the “Health Check” section. There you can find the various pages that together give you a complete health check.
Ever had it happen in your environment? Committing a snapshot on a VM fails and you can’t get your VM to boot again because there are disks missing. This could happen because when initiating Delete or DeleteAll snapshots, the snapshot details are deleted from Snapshot Manager, then the snapshot files are consolidated and merged to another snapshot file or to the virtual machine parent disk. If the consolidation fails, there were no snapshots shown in the Snapshot Manager, but the snapshot files were still being used on the datastore. This can cause the datastore to run out of space.
Unfortunately today this happened for me too, but it has been the first time this happened in a vSphere 5 environment. And therefore it was also the first time I noticed a new feature in VMware vSphere 5 / vCenter 5: “consolidate snapshots”. When a VM has snaphots present on the datastore but they don’t seem to be linked to the VM anymore, vSphere 5 will detect this and report an error on the summary tab: “Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed”. (more…)
Today VMware released their Technical Preview of the VMware View PCoIP client for OSX. We’ve all been waiting for this since the release of VMware View 5 and today I finally got to test it on OSX. Of course I had to install it right away and run a test drive from work to my VMware View 5 lab at home. Even though I have only a small uplink to my ISP, I was able to run a Youtube movie at 480p without issues. Running it at 720p works fine to when windowed, but 720p full screen is a bit too much for the small upload I have and you can see some small hick-ups. But still a reasonable viewing experience.
From the VMware website :
When deploying XenDesktop in a VMware environment, you could run into the following error when trying to connect your XenDesktop host to your VMware vCenter environment: “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address”. This is due to the fact that VMware vCenter only allows https connections by default. To make your XenDesktop server use VMware vCenter 5 (or 4.1 and 4.0) as the virtualization platform to deploy the desktop VMs, a change is needed in the proxy.xml file. (more…)
