Political war between Marathon and VMware on Fault Tolerance Feature of VMware.

Political war between Marathon and VMware on Fault Tolerance Feature of VMware.

A great political debate has been started on VMWare fault tolerance feature during
VMWare world meet at LA 2008. A four reason listed by Marathon has draw sharp criticism from VMware lover. Please read the complete story here. One of the four reason listed for short fall of VMWare FT is listed as ========================Snip==================================

2. Complexity on top of complexity. In order to use VMware Fault Tolerance, you’ll first have to install both VMware HA and DRS. No small feat in and of themselves. Then, because VMware FT requires NIC teaming, you’ll also have to manually install paired NICs. Then you’ll need to manually setup dual storage controllers (with the software to manage them) because it requires multi-pathing. And to top it all off, you’re required to use an expensive, and often complicated, SAN.

========================Snip====================================

To this Mike has given a great response on his blog and responded how easy HA and DRS to configure

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See those two check boxes? Click them and you've just enabled HA and DRS. If that's
too hard then please comment and let me know how it could possibly be easier. Even my dog has figure out how to do this now. Granted, it's a pretty smart dog.

=======================snip=====================================

What a response… Well Q is if you want to sell you product sell it ,but please do not do some cheap marketing. Where VMwaer is right now MS or any other will take ages to reach and I am ready to bet on my word

DAMN you Microsoft

How To Rename The Host and Change IP address

How To Rename The Host and Change IP address

Sometimes host has to be renamed or IP address has to be changed. Please follow these steps.

1. Change the name under

[root@xxxxxx root]# more /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-vswif0

DEVICE=vswif0

MACADDR=00:50:56:4f:65:19

PORTGROUP="Service Console"

BOOTPROTO=static

BROADCAST=xx.xx.xx.255

IPADDR=xx.xx.xx.xx

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

ONBOOT=yes

2. [root@xxxx root]# more /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes

HOSTNAME=<Full DNS Name>

GATEWAY=XX.XX.XX.XX

GATEWAYDEV=vswif0

3. [root@xxxxxx root]# more /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs

# that require network functionality will fail.

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

xx.xx.xx.xx %FQDN Name of the host% %NetBIOS name%

Best would be reboot the host.

How to Rename Service Console

I was given task to build the system and then I started building it. It is not that I don’t know how to perform ESX build and believe me each hardware and every environment is different. Person has to go through these experiences as they explore the environment.

I build a new ESX box (DL 380) and then gave everything default. I choose a default VLAN for service console. When machine came back online it is not able to ping the default gateway. I started trouble shooting and starting to figure out how to make sure that if NIC are getting trunked on correct VLAN. To find out this one I used

“esxcfg-nics -l” . This will list us which NIC is up. Now the challenge was if the correct NIC is listening to the “Service Console”. To find out this one I used “esxcfg-vswitch -l” This will show the VLAN ID as well as which NIC is it is configured for.

Here you can see that “vmnic1” is “UP ” but “Service Console ” is configured for “vmnic0” . So here I have to basically swap the cable and bring “vmnic0” or change service console to listen to “vmnic1”. Easier would be swap the cable and then label the “service console” to listen to appropriate VLAN. Right now “Service Console ” is set to VLAN 0. To change the VLAN label use following “ esxcfg-vswitch –v <vlan id> -p “Service Conole” vSwitch0 ” (Command in the fist quotes should be run).

I did that and that fixed the network.

How to fix “Unable to mount root fs ” Error

Mount point has been created and given to me by the NetAPP engineer. I mounted the space on host. After a performed the mount for some reason it started showing up some wired error message like when I ran “vmware-cmd –l ” I get a message vmware auth failed to login. I thought something really goofed up when I created the “VMKernal” to access NFS mount. I decided to reboot the host and see if that clear the error messages but no it has created more problems for me. When I rebooted the host it gave me message

Something really bad happened ☹ . I started hunting on google to got some clue

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-kernel/7283-kernal-panic-vfs-unable-mount-root-fs-00-00-a.html

I decided to change boot parameters. In order to do so let the machine boots up and then when you get this screen

Here you press “E or e ” on Key board and it will take you the screen

Again press “E or e” and then it will give you option where you can edit the field and type the value as suggested in the earlier link.

it says above that i gotta change "LABEL=/" to "/dev/hda0"

Once you are done with editing then reboot the host. But in my case situation still persist. So I decided to do more google and here is the command which work like a butter.

“esxcfg-boot ”

Follow the steps.

1. Boot the system and wait till you see following screen .Select here “Service Console only”

2. It will let you inter through into service console (Everything is done through physical connection like ILO).

3. Once you logged in then run the command in following order

1. esxcfg-boot –p

2. esxcfg-boot -b

3. esxcfg-boot –r

Reboot the host and select “VMware ESX server ” and host should bring of the esx.