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three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

BnT posted:

Oh yeah, the reason I'm here; Does anyone know of a way to quickly find a list of VMs that have snapshots from vCenter? vSphere 4.1u2 if it matters.

In PowerCLI, to find snapshots:
code:
Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-Snapshot | Select VM,Name,Description,Created
To remove snapshots:
code:
Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-Snapshot | Where { $_.Name.Contains("Production") } | Remove-Snapshot

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Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Rob de Veij wrote a nice thing called RVTools that does a nice job of picking out all the things like old snapshots, out-of-date VMware Tools installs, etc etc, as well.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Mierdaan posted:

Rob de Veij wrote a nice thing called RVTools that does a nice job of picking out all the things like old snapshots, out-of-date VMware Tools installs, etc etc, as well.

This. Is. Awesome.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Mierdaan posted:

Rob de Veij wrote a nice thing called RVTools that does a nice job of picking out all the things like old snapshots, out-of-date VMware Tools installs, etc etc, as well.
This deserves an OP spot.

stubblyhead
Sep 13, 2007

That is treason, Johnny!

Fun Shoe
Any suggestions for pasting info from the clipboard into a VM console window in vSphere? I've been playing around with AutoHotkey, but I haven't been able to get anything working.

BnT
Mar 10, 2006

Mierdaan posted:

Rob de Veij wrote a nice thing called RVTools that does a nice job of picking out all the things like old snapshots, out-of-date VMware Tools installs, etc etc, as well.

Wow, thanks! Zombie VMDKs are listed on the vHealth tab too, this thing rocks.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

stubblyhead posted:

Any suggestions for pasting info from the clipboard into a VM console window in vSphere? I've been playing around with AutoHotkey, but I haven't been able to get anything working.
Install/update the tools on your VM and it should just work.

Fancy_Lad
May 15, 2003
Would you like to buy a monkey?
Anyone a VMUG Advantage member?

http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=10

The discounts on classes, tests, VMworld, and software are easy to see the value in if you plan on using them. Unfortunately for us, the budget isn't there this year for most of that.

I was curious as to how useful the eLearning courses are and if they are worth the cost alone?

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Fancy_Lad posted:

Anyone a VMUG Advantage member?

http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=10

The discounts on classes, tests, VMworld, and software are easy to see the value in if you plan on using them. Unfortunately for us, the budget isn't there this year for most of that.

I was curious as to how useful the eLearning courses are and if they are worth the cost alone?

Holy poo poo. $200 would save me $700 on the VCP course alone. I'd drop that for myself in a heartbeat.

complex
Sep 16, 2003

stubblyhead posted:

Any suggestions for pasting info from the clipboard into a VM console window in vSphere? I've been playing around with AutoHotkey, but I haven't been able to get anything working.

In 4.1 and higher it is disabled by default, for security. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026437

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
So I've gotten myself into a bit of a sticky situation. Here's what I've got right now.

Running an ESX 4.0 server standalone. I have a local VM store on the machine and an iSCSI RAID. When we first set it up we didn't have the RAID, so machines when on the local store. I'm now trying to move the machine from the local store to the external RAID. The machine is shut down, because we don't have fancy anything. In the Datastore browser I right clicked on the machine folder, chose move, and told it to move to the new datastore. Now this is painfully slow, which I guess is fine, but there's a problem.

This machine has a 500 GB iSCSI device mapped to it as a RDM, so there's also a 500 GB vmdk file (actually, there's 3 for some reason not sure about that) but it's not actually a vmdk. Now that I'm moving the folder, it's trying to move those 1.5 TB "files." Two problems. First, I'm not sure what it's going to do with the data on the iSCSI device when it does the "delete" part of the move command. Second, the device I'm moving the machine to is only 1 TB, so it can't hold 1.5TB of fake VMDKs.

I can't cancel the operation because... I don't know why. In the progress window, the Cancel button is greyed out (btw, this is going to take about 3000 minutes), and if I right click on the Move operation in the vSphere client, the cancel operation is also greyed out.

So I'm on a clock before everything shits the bed I guess.

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

Are there other VMs on the array? If not, can you just yank a cable and wait for a timeout? :haw:

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Erwin posted:

Are there other VMs on the array? If not, can you just yank a cable and wait for a timeout? :haw:

Basically everything is on that array. I might just have to reboot the VM server tonight after hours.

KS
Jun 10, 2003
Outrageous Lumpwad
There are a lot of ways around this, but the simplest since it is already shutdown would be to just remove the RDM from the VM during the move. Choosing to remove and delete from disk doesnt delete data on an RDM, but it will remove that VMDK from the folder. You can re-add it after the move.

In terms of the operation in progress, I believe you can cancel that from the command line.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

KS posted:

In terms of the operation in progress, I believe you can cancel that from the command line.

Any idea how to do that?

graph
Nov 22, 2006

aaag peanuts

Mierdaan posted:

Rob de Veij wrote a nice thing called RVTools that does a nice job of picking out all the things like old snapshots, out-of-date VMware Tools installs, etc etc, as well.

Trying this Monday.

mpeg4v3
Apr 8, 2004
that lurker in the corner

1000101 posted:

Generally something like video transcoding or rendering or anything of that sort will use 100% of the CPU resources you throw at it.

That said, if you went with the 6 core i7 you could give 4 vCPUs to the Ubuntu VM and run it 24x7 and still have enough CPU power to run your remaining 3 VMs (which I'd generally recommend you do with 1 vCPU each.)

What kind of load are you expecting on the remaining VMs? What kind of disks and how many?

What are you looking at to provide this functionality? Be wary of VMdirectPath and understand that not every device works perfectly with pass-through. It was generally intended to let you hook things like network cards, HBAs and disk controllers directly to virtual machines.

I do see here: http://vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_vmdirectpath_whitebox_HCL.php

that someone has managed to get a couple Radeon boards to work with 4.X though. I'd presume it'll still work in 5.X.

Also, make sure you shop the HCL or research hardware before you buy. To boot ESXi you need a supported disk controller and a supported NIC or it will PSOD. If your NIC isn't supported it'll PSOD with an LVM error and you'll spend all your time beating your head against the wall troubleshooting your disk controller.

For some reason I thought GPU passthrough worked well now, but I have no idea where I got that impression from. I guess that means I'll have to do all decoding in software, which is fine- but I'm really not sure if a single 4-core VM would be able to decode and reencode to 1080p with two or three movies at once. If I went with the 6-core, I was actually planning to assign the transcoding VM six vCPUs, and assign one vCPU to each of the rest of the VMs, with my reasoning being that the other VMs were not really going to be that CPU-intensive.

The ZFS file server VM is going to be running a 12-disk 3-vdev pool, and it doesn't see much action. The most that happens on it is just streaming of media to an HTPC and a few computers here and there. Nothing super intensive, so I'm not going to devote that many resources to it in the first place (except for RAM, of course, since ZFS loves RAM).

I'm probably going to host the VMs off of two leftover 750GB drives in a RAID1, if possible. I know multiple VMs absolutely kill platter drives due to random access, but the VMs won't be doing much disk activity anyway. I might spring for 2x 120GB SSDs instead, and just try and keep the OS sizes down, but I'd rather not have to spend the money.

BnT posted:

I'd make sure that whatever you're getting supports VT-d or AMD's thingy, especially if you're planning on running a guest with ZFS direct access. For this budget you could easily make a pretty beefy system centered around a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3 and the Intel C20x series chipsets, but that would require ECC (which I would recommend anyway), also this would only get you four cores.

Another thing to be aware of is that the free vSphere 5 entitlement only supports a single socket CPU (unlimited cores) and 32GB of RAM.

Thanks for the info- I knew the free version only supported up to 32GB of RAM, but didn't realize it only supported a single socket, too. That does change my plans- I was starting to think it would be best to wait for a dual socket 2011 and start off with one quad core for now. I've made sure to factor VT-d and IOMMU into the boards and CPUs I'm looking at.

I guess I'll just need to spend some time running tests of my own with a VM on my 2500K-powered desktop this weekend to see what video transcoding in a VM is like with four cores.

mpeg4v3 fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Feb 25, 2012

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

mpeg4v3 posted:

For some reason I thought GPU passthrough worked well now, but I have no idea where I got that impression from. I guess that means I'll have to do all decoding in software, which is fine- but I'm really not sure if a single 4-core VM would be able to decode and reencode to 1080p with two or three movies at once. If I went with the 6-core, I was actually planning to assign the VM all six cores, and assign one to each of the rest of the VMs, with my reasoning being that the other VMs were not really going to be that CPU-intensive.
If you're not going to be running all the encoder threads near 100% of the time, the extra cores may actually hamstring your VM performance because of the way that SMP co-scheduling works.

Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011
How do you all do hardware monitoring of your HP and Dell (and others) vSphere hosts?

The hardware status in vCenter/VI Client will show you basic status but one thing I always liked about HP servers was that they had a Windows agent that would simply email you if you lost a PSU or hard drive or something.

What's the recommended option for VMware without having to stand up a dedicated monitoring server with the HP software and the Dell software etc.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Bitch Stewie posted:

How do you all do hardware monitoring of your HP and Dell (and others) vSphere hosts?
Dell has a vCenter plugin if that's the way you want to go.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Bitch Stewie posted:

What's the recommended option for VMware without having to stand up a dedicated monitoring server with the HP software and the Dell software etc.
Dedicated monitoring server with IPMI software.

Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011
Can I get some guidance on how I should configure HA with a two-host cluster?

A host had an hardware issue and I saw "insufficient resources to satisfy ha failover" in vCenter where I'd have expected the other host to try and take over.

I'm struggling with the admission control settings on the properties of the cluster.

Either host is identical and has sufficient RAM/CPU to run all of our VMs, and each does so during maintenance/patch windows.

We use vSphere Standard and so don't have DRS, nor do we use reservations with our VMs.

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

With a two-host cluster that is your only cluster, you should probably just have Admission Control disabled. Its purpose is to prevent you from powering up too many VMs on a cluster, but the idea is that you would just power it up on another cluster.

RevKrule
Jul 9, 2001

Thrilling the forums since 2001

I'm trying to automate creating a VM as much as humanly possible but for the kickstart to work, I need to get the MAC address of one of the NICs.

Through human interaction I can check it via vSphere > Edit Settings > Select the NIC and tada. But I have yet to find a way to do it, preferably through vmware-cmd (which let me say is lacking is documentation). Does anyone have a good way of doing this? I've found a sample perl script in the powercli tools but the host has to be on.

Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011

Erwin posted:

With a two-host cluster that is your only cluster, you should probably just have Admission Control disabled. Its purpose is to prevent you from powering up too many VMs on a cluster, but the idea is that you would just power it up on another cluster.

Which I assume simply means "fail the lot over and to hell with the consequences" so we just need to keep an eye on resources (which having just two hosts we obviously do anyway)?

Bruegels Fuckbooks
Sep 14, 2004

Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

RevKrule posted:

I'm trying to automate creating a VM as much as humanly possible but for the kickstart to work, I need to get the MAC address of one of the NICs.

Through human interaction I can check it via vSphere > Edit Settings > Select the NIC and tada. But I have yet to find a way to do it, preferably through vmware-cmd (which let me say is lacking is documentation). Does anyone have a good way of doing this? I've found a sample perl script in the powercli tools but the host has to be on.

You can force the VMs to have a certain MAC by modifying the VMX file, rather than looking it up. I think with default setup, you might not know what the MAC address is before you boot a new VM, which is why that Perl script doesn't work.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Bitch Stewie posted:

Which I assume simply means "fail the lot over and to hell with the consequences" so we just need to keep an eye on resources (which having just two hosts we obviously do anyway)?
Disable HA on the VMs you don't want to fail over. If it's too much for the one host, welp. Congratulations, you now get to fight for some budget.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
And don't forget to set the restart priorities sanely for all your VMs if that wasn't a concern before.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Wait they removed VMware teams in 8?

The gently caress?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Corvettefisher posted:

Wait they removed VMware teams in 8?

The gently caress?
Teams are now folders.

http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2011/10/what-happened-to-teams.html

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
RE: Directpath I/O for video cards:

I haven't followed development in this area much, but it gets attention (at least the workstation/server-class GPU hardware does). Last I checked, which was ages ago, you can get Fermi-based nVidia cards working fine, and pretty much any Radeon HDs.
I haven't bothered sticking an expensive Fermi card my own system for testing yet, but I can tell you that a cheap Radeon HD card has worked fine. The problems seem to come up after allocating too much RAM to the VM (something like over 2.8GB of memory). You get BSODs during boot, that sort of nastiness in the Guest/VM.
It seems to me that it has something to do with how the video device BIOS sets up a range of DMAs, which later conflict with what the virtual BIOS and VMware VMX later arrange (or rearrange after power-on). Again, I'd have to look into it more...

Anyway, it works, but it's not without quirks. Every time I rebooted the Guest OS with a Radeon, it would just stop working and required me to fiddle with removing the device and re-adding it (in Device Manager), hoping it'll work on next boot. You had to disable the built-in virtual video device for it to work properly. And well, on next boot, it was using the built-in virtual video device again. My use case was surrounding DLNA servers and transcoding media in real-time. I since then built a media PC box and stopped media streaming (couldn't fast-forward in all codecs/containers, etc. so it was spotty).

I also imagined it would be kind of neat if I could create a gaming VM that had its own allocation of discrete hardware: A pass-through display adapter and sound card, direct USB input for a gaming mouse/keyboard, etc. then I can consolidate quite a of my home's hardware into a beefy workstation. HDMI (over Cat-5 or even IP) already makes remote computing between multiple floors quite doable. Multiple gamers and VMs? Yep, you can.

Ultimately, though, the way VMware would naturally need to do this, is to set up discrete video device hardware as VM shares/resources, so you can check off that 3D flag and have multiple VMs sip from real 3D hardware. It's a little ways out, though.

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

Question about VMware View pricing. Is it literally only $190/desktop for existing vSphere customers as claimed on this page?: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/howtobuy.html

I figured I'd start looking at View towards the end of the year when I have time because I figured it had an initial buy-in of several thousand dollars at least. Is it really just linearly priced on a per-desktop basis?

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Yeah, there's a little tiny price hump at the beginning to get the starter kit so you have composer and stuff, but after that the cost just scales linearly. I don't think you're factoring in support on the view licenses though, which from the last quote I got was about $160/3yrs/view instance.

fatjoint
Sep 28, 2005
Fatjoint

Erwin posted:

Question about VMware View pricing. Is it literally only $190/desktop for existing vSphere customers as claimed on this page?: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/howtobuy.html

I figured I'd start looking at View towards the end of the year when I have time because I figured it had an initial buy-in of several thousand dollars at least. Is it really just linearly priced on a per-desktop basis?

That is the cost of licensing, but that's not covering the costs of your backend storage or servers to host the instances.

You'll want so many IOPs per instance, in order to have an environment that truly replaces the desktop... but here's where things can be quite costly. For our environment, we were looking around $150-180k for enough backend storage spindle counts to support around 20-30 IOPs per instance.

fatjoint fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Feb 28, 2012

ragzilla
Sep 9, 2005
don't ask me, i only work here


Erwin posted:

Question about VMware View pricing. Is it literally only $190/desktop for existing vSphere customers as claimed on this page?: http://www.vmware.com/products/view/howtobuy.html

I figured I'd start looking at View towards the end of the year when I have time because I figured it had an initial buy-in of several thousand dollars at least. Is it really just linearly priced on a per-desktop basis?

The "existing customers" is if you want the add-on licenses- e.g. you have free capacity on your existing regular vSphere clusters and want to run desktops on them.

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

Well, we only have about 25 users. Usually at that size things are inefficiently priced, but this makes View very tempting. 500-750 IOPs is not a problem, and a bump in host capacity will cost less than replacing half of those desktops.

I'm not going to switch everyone tomorrow, but it's something to look at before we refresh any hardware.

Literally Human
Aug 12, 2011

You got a bat in the cave.
Our VM "expert" recently left for a new job, he had zero VM experience and the only reason we let him run with it was that everyone else was too busy. After he left another coworker and I decided to take a look behind the curtain.

We begin by logging into the only guest VM this guy stood up which made it into production. Everything looks pretty regular until we start wondering why exactly its taking up so much space on the SAN and has 3 vdisks even though it only shows 2 drive letters under My Computer. Lets load up the settings page and see whats going on!



Well, that's odd what is that little 40gb doing there. But I only see 70ish GB drives in explorer so ... wait no that can't be right. No one in their right mind would setup software raid on a guest OS, I mean it's sitting on a SAN it would just be wasting resources.

Oh :smith:

It is also fault tolerant! As we progressed we saw a ton of guests each with specs all over the place. A Windows XP(32bit) guest with 10GB of RAM reserved and 4 cpus with nothing at all installed just sitting there powered on and eating available resources. We haven't hired a replacement yet, and the letters "VMWARE" weren't anywhere in the PD they put out for him so it looks like I have to brush up on esxi and all the vWords.
:negative:

Literally Human fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Feb 28, 2012

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Fistfull of Jizz posted:

Oh :smith:

It is also fault tolerant! As we progressed we saw a ton of guests each with specs all over the place. A Windows XP(32bit) guest with 10GB of RAM reserved and 4 cpus with nothing at all installed just sitting there powered on and eating available resources. We haven't hired a replacement yet, and the letters "VMWARE" weren't anywhere in the PD they put out for him so it looks like I have to brush up on esxi and all the vWords.
:negative:

My boss does that with our DC and some other VM's
14GB ram
4cores
250GB Zero thicked disk

For a Domain controller... other than windows chacing I haven't seen it use above 10GB from the logs

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Corvettefisher posted:

My boss does that with our DC and some other VM's
14GB ram
4cores
250GB Zero thicked disk

For a Domain controller... other than windows chacing I haven't seen it use above 10GB from the logs
I always laugh my rear end at this. It should be a requirement for anyone who is doing anything with VMware professionally to understand disk alignment, co-scheduling, thin provisioning vs thick provisioning and the (lack of) performance impact.

I remember the guy who told us his boss made him give his DC for a small company some ridiculous amount of RAM only to find out it was something completely unrelated to the guest that was causing the performance problem. Our biggest VM RAM wise is our exchange datastore server. 8GB of RAM for 600+ mailboxes. We have a few 2 core SQL boxes. Our DCs are a MAXIMUM of 1 core 2GB 40GB.

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Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


Ok, so this old chestnut, virtual, physical or appliance for VCenter?

Moving to Vcenter 5 from 4.1 and we had it on a physical box (since it makes things easier for upgrades etc) but 'best practice' is having it virtualised apparently.

What do y'all do? Our enviroment has 2 ESXi servers with around 20 VMs on

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