Dan B. Lee

VMware’s Community Forum and website has always been super helpful in providing technology resources and information quickly and easier. The lagging side has consistently been the tough to find downloads that you need in order to upgrade or install new products. VMware Tools can be downloaded quickly and easily using a web browser to review the file structure, instead of heading to the website and navigating through the links. Here’s the site:

http://packages.vmware.com/tools

VMware calls them Operating System Specific Packages - http://www.vmware.com/download/packages.html

This should make finding what you’re looking for a bit easier. Be sure and use the folder with “…latest” appended to the end of the name, if you’re looking to download the latest, depending on the version. Also, pay attention to x86 and x84_64 versions as well.

Cheers!

I was recently looking over an environment running VMware vCenter 4.1 and saw in the tasks that a task called “check new notifications” was queued about a dozen time or so. The schedule for the tasks varied. Some of the tasks were before the current time and others were afterwards. Either way, there were about a dozen or so of them and they needed to be dealt with.

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vSphere Client Version: 4.0.0
vCenter Version: 4.0.0

TL:DR – Highlight your Cluster > Storage Views Tab > Reports button > Check the snapshot space.

You can’t. You can’t just get a nice map or an overview of every snapshot listed for every VM. vSphere just doesn’t have the capability to do that for you, no matter how convenient it would be for you. If you’re doing anything like our ideal environment, we backup our VMs at a vmdk level using snapshot technology through VEEAM. It’s very reliable and really quick, especially if you’re using a SAN. Here’s how it works:

1. Backup Begins
2. A snapshot (basically a full image copy of the vmdk file) is taken
3. VEEAM backs up the snapshot so the VM isn’t bogged down with anything other than I\O or bandwidth traffic, depending on how your network is set up
4. When the backup completes, VEEAM deletes the snapshot
5. Backup Ends

But VEEAM has some rules. There cannot already be snapshots taken of the VM. If there are, it will create its own snapshot as well, but it will delete them all at the end of the job. And even though its reliable, sometimes a snapshot will hang for some reason and not get backed up. Needless to say, there needs to be a way for administrators to view what snapshots have been taken in order to make sure everything runs smoothly. Granted, this method doesn’t give you the chance to see how many snapshots are taken, but you should be familiar enough with your environment to know based on the sizes of the snapshots:

Highlight your Cluster > Storage Views Tab > Reports button > Check the snapshot space

It should give you a good idea of where you’re at, without all the clicking. Cheers!

Console access is only needed at the worst of times. Once our hosts are configured and added to the cluster, if we are logging into the console we’re either making changes because something went wrong or getting logs because something went really wrong. No one enjoys having to log into an iLO and toggling between ALT+F1 and ALT+F2 to hop into unsupported mode. SSH mode may not make our woes disappear, but it’s one less thing we have to deal with in the most stressful of times. The vSphere Management Assistant is no exception. Being able to SSH into the appliance without having to deal with the vSphere console is a huge, huge, convenience. Below you’ll see what needs to be done in order to SSH into your VMA effectively.

Similar to your ESXi hosts, SSH is not allowed by default on your VMA. Also similar to ESXi, all you’ll need to do is edit a file and you’re good to go.

1. Open up your console and log into the VMA. In case you forgot (like me, always…) your default username to your VMA is not root, it is vi-admin.
2. Type the following command to open the file using nano: sudo nano /etc/hosts.allow
3. Use your arrow keys to add the following below any of the lines that are commented out: sshd: all : allow
4. Save the document by closing it using the command ^x (The ^ means CTRL) and and typing Y when prompting to save.
5. No services or anything need to be restarted. Once the document is closed, give it a shot and see if you can SSH into the Appliance.

This is compatible with VMA version: 4.0.0

Good luck. Leave comments with your successes and failures.

I came across an interesting error attempting to delete am empty datastore from one of my VMware environments. Here’s the error I get:

The resource [datastore name] is in use.

• Version: ESXi 4.1
• Pesky Datastore: iSCSI SAN Volume

In use? But I moved everything off of the datastore and deleted the rest of the snapshot data and rubbish spread about the left over directories. What gives?

Datastores will still be in use if something is still pointing or mounted to them

Although you may not be dealing with a ISO issue, this KB article kind of explains how mounted items inhibit the ability for the datastores to be deleted:

kb.vmware.com/kb/1015791

As I’ve read though the KB articles and forums posts, I’ve found this to be the most prominent. Even though the files are gone, there still may be resources that believe they are mounted to something very real on the datastore.

To avoid going through every VM, take a look at your maps view and see if there is anything connected to the datastore you’re trying to get rid of. If it’s an offline VM that’s attached to it, you’ll have no problem seeing it there and knowing just how to take care of it. (The steps below that indicate how to remove a confused template can be used to remove and add a VM as well). For those of you that have command access to the host, give this a shot:

vmware-cmd -l

This will show you what items are registered with the datastore and may help to determine what to focus on during your hunt.

As painful as it sounds, you may have to check the settings of every VM recently associated with the datastore in question and see if there is still a CD Drive, mounted ISO, template, or hard drive pointing to it.

In my case, I found a template that was still convinced it’s hard drive was on the datastore. The steps to fix this were easy:

1. Right click on the faulty template and choose “Remove From Inventory”
2. Browse out to the datastore where the VM Template now resides
3. Right click the .vmx file and choose “Add to Inventory”

Removing the template from inventory will finally release the datastore. If that’s the last thing attached to the datastore, you should be able to delete it now. Adding the template back to inventory puts your template back in your list, ready for use when you need it.