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On vSphere-land the yearly voting for the top VMware and virtualization blog(s) is open.  

By voting you can reward the bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them.

You can vote till 7 February 2012, so please take a couple of minutes and vote for your favorite 10 blogs and rank them (if you want to vote for my blog it’s on the left side in the middle). You can win a copy of the Train Signal’s  new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.

Please vote by clicking the button or here.

 

The result will be announced on a special podcast after 7 February 2012.

Last year my blog was listed as “Virtual Ief”. This year as “Ivo Beerens”.

When looking for performance data in vCenter 4.1 from the past week, month or year, I got the message “Performance data is currently not available for this entry”. Only real time data is visible in vSphere client.

In the vCenter Service Status the warning “Performance statistics rollup from Past Day to Past Week is not occurring in the database” appeared.

The vCenter server is installed on MS Windows 2008 R2 and uses vCenter server version 4.1 Update 2 Build 491557 with Microsoft SQL Server 2008  Express R2 64-bit.

When looking in the VMware Product Interoperability matrixes, it says is a supported configuration.

Searching on the VMTN I found more people who are experiencing this problem. The following KB article says:

To resolve this issue, migrate the SQL database to a full edition (32bit or 64bit) or a 32bit SQL Express edition. For more information on how to move the vCenter Server SQL database, see Moving the vCenter Server SQL database (7960893).

For small environments this is not an option! When installing vCenter 4.1 Update 2, the MS SQL Express 2005 database is default installed. MS SQL Express 2005 is 32-bit and you can have a maximum database size of 4GB. With MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit you can have maximum database size of 10GB. 

vCenter 5 installs by default MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit and doesn’t have this bug.

The MS SQL Express database is only supported for test and small VMware environments (5 hosts and 50 VMs maximum).

So watch out when considering MS SQL Server 2008 Express R2 64-bit and vCenter 4!

 

I often get the question: “What Virtual Machine hardware version do I need?”.

It depends on the features you need. If you want for example use the “Changed Blocked Tracking (CBT)” feature, you need at least hardware version 7.

In ESX 3.x hardware version 4 is introduced, in vSphere 4.x hardware version 7 is introduced and in vSphere 5 hardware version 8 is introduced. Here is an overview of the hardware version and the features they have:

Hardware version	Features	Products
8	- Up to 32 vCPUs per VM - Maximum 1 TB RAM per VM - 3-D graphics and high-definition audio - Smart-card reader support - USB 3.0 devices are supported - Improved network driver for the E1000e network adapter, provided by VMware tools - Greater resources are available with vCloud Director 1.5	Hardware version 8 is the default for new VM in: - ESX 5.x - Fusion 4.x - Workstation 8.x - Player 4.x
7	- Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual device for Microsoft Cluster Service — Provides support for running Windows Server 2008 in a Microsoft Cluster Service configuration. - IDE virtual device — Ideal for supporting older operating systems that lack SCSI drivers. - VMXNET Generation 3. VMXNET is optimized for performance in a virtual machine  - Virtual Machine Hot Plug Support— Provides support for adding and removing virtual devices, adding virtual CPUs, and adding memory to a virtual machine without having to power off the virtual machine. - Change Block Tracking (CBT) support. Incease VADP backups	Hardware version 7 is the default for new VM in: - ESX 4.x - Fusion 3.x - Fusion 2.x - Workstation 7.x & 6.5 - Player 3.x - Server 2.x
4		Hardware version 4 is the default for new VM in: - ESX 3.x - ACE 2.x - Fusion 1.x - Player 2.x
3		Hardware version 3 is the default for new VM in: - ESX 2.x - GSX Server 3.x

Considerations before upgrading the hardware version of the VM:

- Important to know is that upgrading the hardware version of the VM requires downtime!

- Virtual machines with hardware version 7 can only run on ESX(i) 4.x and ESXi 5.x. Virtual machines with hardware version 8 can only run on ESXi 5.x

- When you upgrade from virtual hardware version 4 to version 8, the upgrade is reversible if you take a virtual machine backup or snapshot before performing the upgrade.

- To automate this process, consider using Update Manager for virtual machine upgrades

- Update Manager takes automatic snapshots before performing virtual machine upgrades

- Be sure to upgrade first the VMware tools of the VM.  I you upgrade the virtual hardware before you upgrade VMware Tools, the virtual machine might lose its network settings

- Verify that all VMs and .VMDK files are stored on VMFS3, VMFS5 or NFS volumes

 

Steps in the hardware version upgrade process:

- Do an inventory on the current hardware and VMware tools versions. This can be done for example by using the vCenter client, RVtools utility or PowerCLI

- Install or upgrade the VMware tools (reboot required)

- Power on the VM

- Before upgrading create a backup or snapshot of the VM

- Backup the NIC IP settings with the VMUpgradeHelper.exe command. More information can be found here

- Power off the VM

- Upgrade Virtual Hardware

- Start VM  (reboot after the new hardware is discovered)

- Check if all the IP addresses are correct

 

Downgrade methods:

There is no button in vCenter to revert back to an earlier Hardware version. Here are two methods to go back to an earlier version of the hardware version:

- Create before upgrading the hardware version a snapshot when the VM is powered down.

- Using VMware Converter

 

Upgrading issues to know about:

- Upgrading virtual hardware in ESX 4.x may cause Windows 2008 disks to go offline (more information can be found here)

- After a hardware version upgrade the configuration can be messed up on  for example Microsoft ISA, Microsoft NLB clusters and RSA servers

- After upgrading a Windows virtual machine from hardware version 4 to hardware version 7, virtual NIC settings (such as static IP configuration) are lost. Make sure you backup the VM IP settings with the VMUpgradeHelper.exe command. More information can be found here

 

On my home lab I tried to create a new VMFS volume on a RAID-0 disk set that was coming from another host. When creating the new VMFS volume from the vSphere client, the following  error appeared:

Call “HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions” for object “datastoresystem-9” on vCenter Server “VC01″ failed.

On the VMware ESXi 5 server I enabled “Local Tech Support Mode” (more information can be found here), so I was able to logging in directly on the console and used the fdisk-l command to see the partition information on the disk. I notice that the disk contains four old partitions from another system.

I deleted the four partitions by using the following commands (displayed in bold):

- fdisk /dev/disk/mpx.vmhba3:C0:T1:LO (see the above picture)

- p (for printing the partition information and verify that you choose the right disk)

- d and enter the partition numbers (1, 2, 3, and 4) for deleting the partition

- p to verify that all the partitions are deleted

- w to write the modifications to disk

 

After the deletion of the old partitions I was able to create the VMFS volume on the RAID-0 disk set.

I tested the following NICs in my VMware ESXi 5 whitebox server at home:

NIC	Recognized by VMware ESXi 5	Listed in ESXi 5 as
Intel PRO/1000GT Desktop Adapter PCI	Yes	Intel 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Realtek RTL 8111E	Yes	Realtek 8168 Gigabit Ethernet
Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter PCI-e	Yes	Intel Corporation 82574L
Intel 82579 Gigabit LAN controller	No You need the make a customized ESXi 5 ISO or VIB file. This is a not supported configuration!	Intel Corporation 82579V  or Intel Corporation 82579LM

To add the Intel 82579 chipset, create a customized ESXi 5 ISO.  This is very simple because some people have already done the hard work.

Here are the steps:

1. Download ESXi-Customizer (create by Andreas Peetz) found here.

2. Download the driver (created by Chilly) found here.

3. Start the ESXi-Customizer and follow the 3 steps:

And your ready to install the customized VMware ESXi 5 ISO. The ISO supports the Intel 82579V and 82579LM NIC(s) found on many whitebox motherboards.  Possible future updated version(s) of the driver can be found in the following post.