Tech-Gen

Virtual SAN One of the products I strongly believe in and truly love is Virtual SAN aka VSAN. I have written a whole bunch of articles on this topic so far and I figured I would list all of them on a single page. I also wanted to list some of the articles by other folks out there which you might find interesting. I decided to select those which bring something unique to the table rather than listing every single VSAN article out there, as it would be too much to read anyway for most people. So lets get started. My articles on YB: Introduction to VMware vSphere Virtual SAN (Duncan Epping) Testing vSphere Virtual SAN in your virtual lab with vSphere 5.5 (Duncan Epping) VMware vSphere Virtual SAN design considerations (Duncan Epping) How do you know where an object is located with Virtual SAN? (Duncan Epping) Frequently asked questions about Virtual SAN / VSAN (Duncan Epping) How VSAN handles a disk or host failure (Duncan Epping) Isolation / Partition scenario w...

This post we are going to understand in detail about Memory Ballooning. Memory Ballooning is one of the common question which are asked during VMware Administrator interviews to test the knowledge of the candidate because there are lot of misunderstanding out there about this feature. So, decided to explain about VMware Memory Ballooning in simple and understandable manner. VMware Memory Ballooning is one of memory reclamation technique used by hypervisor, when ESXi host is running low on memory. We have discussed in detail about ESXi host Memory states in my previous post “Understanding ESXi Host Memory States” . When the ESXi host memory state is High, None of the action will be taken by hypervisor expect Transparent page sharing. In understand about Transparent Page sharing, take a look at my post “Understanding TPS” . Memory Ballooning will be active, if your ESXi host Memory state is soft. Memory Ballooning is the memeory reclamation technique used by hypervisor ...

This post going to explain detailed view about Transparent Page Sharing. In my Previous post, “VMware Memory Management Part 1 – Understanding ESXi Host Memory States” . I have explained the relation between ESXi host memory states and various memory management techniques.One of the important memory technique which always work towards to save the memory on the host is Transparent Page sharing. Also referred as TPS Which is similar to the storage deduplication technique but it works for memory instead of storage. Transparent page sharing runs by default regardless of ESXi host memory state. TPS will always run on the ESXi host even ESXi memory state is high. Transparent page sharing works with powered on Virtual machines. Transparent page sharing finds all the identical memory pages of the virtual machines running on the host and maps that all identical pages with a single page. ESXi hosts periodically scans the content of guest physical memory for sharing. Let’s consider,...

This post is going to be one of my favorite posts  this year because i have been asked by lot of my readers to write about the ESXi host memory management techniques. Fairly all VMware Administrators will be aware about the ESX memory management techniques to handle the over commitment of the memory. Over commitment means nothing but you can allocated more memory to your virtual machines than the actual available memory of the ESX host. Let’s assume,your ESXi host having total memory of 40 GB but you have 10 virtual machines and each configured with 4 GB with the total of 40 GB memory. But actually total memory available at your ESXi host is just 30 GB. This over commitment can be achieved with the help of memory management techniques and also not all the VM’s will be utilizing 100% of memory allocated at all the times. If it happens, ESXi host will actively use its memory reclamation techniques to handle this situation efficiently. Below are the Memory Management t...

My VMware vCenter Service failed and unable to start the service. I have  reveiwed  the  logs from  vpxd.log file and got the below error message, whenever I try to start the virtual center service.  ”ODBC error: (42000) – [Microsoft filegroup >’ filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup, adding additional files to the filegroup, or setting autogrowth on for existing files in the filegroup.” is returned when executing SQL statement “< sql statement>” . An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Error: Error [ VdbODBCError] (-1) “ODBC error: (42000) – [Microsoft dbo . VPX_HOST_VM_CONFIG_OPTION’.'PK_VPX_HOST_VM_CONFIG_OPTION’ in database “vcenter4 . 1″ because the ‘PRIMARY’ filegroup is full” I have resolved the issue by following the KB Article 1025914 . I strongly recommend to read the Caution and NOTE mentioned in the KB Article before the running...

Unable to start the vCenter service and error message  is “VirtualCenter Server service fails to start with an Error code 2.” This post is gives you the resolution step based out of the VMware KB article 2056296 .  This issue occur because of both IPV4 and IPV6 entry present or not present  for local host in host file entry. I have analyzed the vCenter log file vxpd.log and found the below error message “Unable to create SSO facade: vmodl.fault.SystemError”   Step to Resolve the vCenter Service Startup Issue 1. Login to vCenter server 2. Open the Hosts file in text editor from the location   C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts 3.I have found my host file entry have commented out for both  ::1 and also 127.0.0.1 entry for Localhost #127.0.0.1 localhost # ::1 localhost 4. I have removed the hash # symbol  from the IPV4 entry and changed my host file entry similar to the below one and saved the host file. 127.0.0...

Error 1067  unable to start the VMware Virtual center Server Service I got a call that our Vcenter server  is not working. and I felt ohh thats it….let me start the Vcenter service. I noticed vcenter service was not started and i tried to start the service, it is throwing the below error. “Windows Could not start the VMware VirtualCenter service on local computer. Error 1067: the process terminated unexpectedly” I wont say the below is the standard to follow to troubleshoot the issue. It was the approach which i used to resolve the above issue. Troubleshooting Step 1:  My first place to troubleshoot the Vcenter service failure is “vpxd.log” on the below location Windows 2003 – C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs Windows 2008 – C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs” In VPXD logs, i found the below error [2012-06-05 03:57:53.047 08104 error 'App'] Failed readin...

This post is going to share a resolution for one of the issue which i have faced yesterday. My Virtual center server windows virtual machine was hung  but it was reachable via network with ping. Even RDP it is not accessible. We tried rebooting multiple times. Finally after uninstalling some of the security software, vCenter came up. I tried to start the VMware Virtual center server service but it was failed and throwing an general windows service start failed error. To troubleshoot the Virtual Center Service. You should always to use vpxd.log  logfile stored on the below location vCenter Server 5.x and windows server 2000, 2003: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\ vCenter Server 5.x and earlier versions on Windows Vista, 7, 2008: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\ When i have analyzed the vpxd.log, I found the below error messages in the vpxd.log  [03852 error 'win32vpxLdap_win32'] [LDAP Client] Failed to add ...

This post is just to bring the VMware’s definition about vCloud director and provide details about the Physical and logical components of vCloud Director and also about vCloud suite. I don’t have my own words here. All the explanation and definition is taken from VMware’s official documentations. I have collected all the definitions along with some architecture diagrams to easily understand the basic concepts about vCloud Director Understanding the VMware vCloud Suite The VMware vCloud Suite is a combination of products designed to enable an IT organization to build and manage a private cloud based on a vSphere environment. The product suite consists of several components, including the following: Graphic Thanks to VMware.com VMware vSphere is the industry-leading virtualization platform and enabler for cloud computing architectures. vSphere enables IT to meet SLAs for the most demanding business-critical applications, at the lowest TCO. VMware vCloud Director ...

This post explains you the step by step procedure to attach a vCenter server with vCloud Director 5.1 This is the first step in building the Cloud environment. This will provide the resources (it will be used by the end users to deploy vAPP from the vCloud Director) to the vCloud Director that will be abstracted from the attached vCenter server. Once vCloud Director is up and running, Login to the vCloud Director with the Cloud administrator credentials. It will display the below steps 1.Attach a vCenter 2.Create a Provider VDC 3.Create an external network 4.Create a network pool 5.Create a new organization 6.Allocate resources to an organization 7.Add a catalog to an organization Lets start the first step in building the Private Cloud with vCloud Director 1. Click on Attach a vCenter under Quick Start option in the Home Page 2.Enter the Necessary information (Hostname or IP address of vCenter server, Port number, Username,password, vCenter name to be identified fr...