I have a couple of lab machines that are running VMWare server 2.X under 64-bit CentOS 5.2. VMWare server has a cool feature where you can create “clusters in a box.” The cluster in a box feature allows you to share a virtual disk between more than one virtual machine, and since it support SCSI [...]
I came across two bizarre issues last week while installing VMWare server on a Fedora Core 6 desktop. The first issue occurred when the vmware-config.pl script attempted to build the vmmon kernel module: $ vmware-config.pl Making sure services for VMware Server are stopped. Stopping VMware services: Virtual machine monitor [ OK ] Configuring fallback GTK+ [...]
While setting up two new ESX 3.0 server nodes, I ran into a bizarre problem where the VI client refused to initialize several Clariion CX700 devices. Since the VI client isn’t the best environment to debug problems, I ssh’ed into the service console, and began my research by running esxcfg-vmhbadevs to list the devices on [...]
While poking around the ESX 3.0 service console last week, I came across the amazingly useful esxcfg-info utility. This utility can be used to extract statistics and configuration data for the network devices, hardware and storage that are attached to a server. To view the network configuration, you can invoke esxcfg-info with the “-n” option: [...]
VMWare ESX server has a bunch of command line utilties to display and modify the ESX server configuration, and the vast majority of them are buried in the /usr/sbin directory. One useful utility is esxcfg-nics, which displays the NIC type, the virtual NIC name, and the current configuration of each NIC in a server: $ [...]
When fibre channel is used to connect a host to storage, multple paths (e.g. cables) can be used to allow the system to load-balanced fibre channel frames over one or more links. This allows a host to transparently handle link failures, and allows your host to keep chugging along when you perform SAN maintenance or [...]
