Devoted to VMware

Situation:- 100 CPU based SRM License for our environment.

Problem – VMware changes their Licensing model from CPU based to VM based.

Solution:- Spoke to VMware Licensing support about this issue. They were ready to cover 5 VMs per CPU License what we had purchased. I am not sure, from where they got this number. I think there are so many factors which determines the number of VMs per CPU. Factors like – Hardware, CPU, memory etc…I spoke with VMware about this issue and after showing the numbers of VMs in our environment, they readily agreed to cover more than VMs for per processor purchased.

So, earlier we were going to get almost – 100*5=500 VMs protection

Now, we are going to get 100*12=1200 VMs.

Thanks VMware Support for quick resolution !!!

During the course of my powershell learning, I realised this little one line script can help us to retrieve Hardware version from all the powered-on VMs which are running on old hardware version i.e version 4.

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.PowerState -eq PoweredOn} | Where-Object {$_.version -lt "v7"}

Get hardware version

Click to enlarge

Today, in out office we were facing a interesting problem. Every now and then one of the VM will timeout. This was causing lot of issues. The VM was in production. This VM was created few days ago and everything was running fine. We were not sure what was causing the problem.
We looked at couple of things like ;-

1. Network issue
2. Switch issue
3. May be the VMware tools had a problem this VM is using VMXNet3 adapter.
4. Logged a call with VMware support and they wanted config logs for Networking switches – Network Manager was not at all happy when he heard that.

I just realized may be there might be a Duplicate MAC somewhere on the network that might be causing this problem. Here comes powershell to rescue. Did a google and found this nice script , from vNugglets which can tell us if there are any duplicate address on the network.

After running the script, we did find that there was indeed duplicate MAC address on the network which was causing this issue.
Thanks for the script it saved us lot of time.

On a side note :- I was wondering if there are duplicate MAC address across multiple VCenter Server, how are we going to troubleshoot that. Need to do some research to get answer to that question.

During VMworld 2011 event  VMware handed out PowerCLI and vSphere ESXi CLI reference poster. They can be downloaded from the following location

PowerCLI 5.0 Reference Poster

vSphere CLI ESXi5.0 Reference Poster

It was amazing to attend VMworld 2011. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. In fact I stayed in Vegas for 10 days. It was a business/pleasure trip.

Here are the few take away points from my VMworld/Vegas experience

1) Try to book your trip via Priceline, I got a good deal from them.

2) Come a day earlier and get enough rest. (No heavy drinking before and during VMworld)

3) Wear comfortable footwear. Just in case if you forget them, go to walking company and get a good insole OR shoes.

4) Collect your pass a day before VMworld  starts and get acclimatize to the entire surrounding. It will help you.

5) Many bloggers have already mentioned don't try to attend each and every session, you won't be able to. Try to make a strong network and have attend labs. Next year, if I get a chance, I will try to finish all the labs and register myself for a free VMworld 2013

6) This year the facility at the Venetian was very good and so was the food.

7) I was lucky to meet Duncan, and got vSPhere Clustering Technical Deepdive book signed by him, had a meeting with him for 15 min. All though I did not register for it, he came 15 mins early and I was able to talk to him. It was a wonderful experience.

8) Met lot of vExperts it was amazing to see, how helpful and down to earth these people are

9) If you like to blog and want to help the community, get in touch with John Troyer, (@jtroyer) he is the guy who can not only help you get in touch with other bloggers but also get your site registered with PlanetV12n
 

Timeshare Tip

During my stay at Vegas, I met lot of people who approached me for Timeshare. They really had a very nice way to approach you – They will start either by asking you – Do you need $250 free gaming chips OR Do you need free show pass. They will ask you to attend a meeting of 2-3 hours and your return gift, is $250 chips to play at casino.

Since, we had some time, my wife and myself went to two different timeshare meeting. Wyndham and Bluegreen. Got $500 gift checks from them and went to casino to enjoy,

Please note – These are not worth $500. You have to win from them and then take that money. You cannot encash them for money. We went to Luxor, and Excalibur casinos. Here they gave us $5 chips, we thought we might get $1 chip but that was not the case and when we went to MGM Grand we got $25 chips. You don't get a option to use $1 chips with the gift cards given by Timeshare company. Moral of the story call the casino and get it conformed from them, the denomination of chips that they will provide, when you produce the Gift checks.