Some interesting features from VMware included in ESX 3.5 Update 2.  Most interesting is the official support for Virtual Machine High Availability and the ability to extend virtual disks while machines are running.  Also included is the ability to clone virtual machines while they are powered on, which may suite well for some organisation when it comes to disaster recovery (cloning a VM and then copying the clone offsite)

Below are details ripped from VMware’s website.

 If you talk to CIOs who really “get” virtualization, the benefit that excites them the most is not cost savings but agility. I’m talking about the ability to say yes, quickly, to a business side request. Virtualization is helping smart IT leaders morph from “no” people to “yes” people. That’s a huge shift for many IT organizations and companies. But in order to be a yes person, you need to have enough carefully-managed virtual infrastructure on hand.

Physical HBA Storage adapters

•  16 HBA’s per ESX host (dual port, quad port or 8 port)
• Provides 32 paths to a single LUN
• Total amount of paths supported 1024
• 256 LUNS can be presented to a single ESX server (128 during installation, the remainder can be added later)
• 256 VMFS partitions per ESX host.

VMFS Sizing 

• The current maximum size for a single VMFS volume is 64TB
• A VMFS volume will support a maximum file size of 2TB 
• Maximum number of files supported 30,000

VMDK Sizing

• Maximum VMDK size is currently 2TB (with 8MB block size)
• Maximum VMDK size is currently 256GB (with 1MB block size)

From within a Virtual Machine

• Maximum virtual HBA’s per virtual machine is 4
• Maximum targets per virtual HBA 15
• Maximum VMDK’s (virtual machine disks) per virtual machine 60 (windows and linux) 

Regards,

Lee Wynne 

Feel free to join me on linkedin 

Sometimes the Virtual Center won’t do the job.  You virtual machine has hung and you need to kill it. Here are 2 examples of how you can kill the vm from within the service console:

1. The ‘VMWARE-CMD’ command

• Log on to the service console and issue the following command ‘vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<datastorename>/<vmname>/<vmname>.vmx stop’ you must not use the friendly datastore name.  If you need to know the location of all vm’s type ‘VMWARE-CMD -l’ that will list on vm’s and the location for the corresponding vmx file.
• If that fails, then try it with the hard option, ‘vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<datastorename>/<vmname>/<vmname>.vmx stop hard’ this command will just try and kill it without shutting it down.

2. Kill it using the PID command

• Run the following command: ps auxfww | grep <vmname> to locate the correct PID of the virtual machine,  the first number to appear in the output is your vm’s PID. Use the PID number to terminate the process by issuing kill -9 <PID NO>

Regards,

Lee Wynne 

Feel free to join me on linkedin 

A command I always forget..