Mingle Mangle of my mind

I was lucky to get into the session, I left the General Session quite early and there was already a queue, the room filed quickly and was full 15 minutes before the session officially startet. Quite a mess I have to say.

Speaker: Paudie O’Riordan, Technical Support Engineer

General Information:
settings are saved via a hourly cron job to first partition, other way is to graceful reboot the ESXi server
restarting hostd will check all vm’s which are registered to this esxi server
if hostd takes really long to start this could point to storage problems
vima can only handle 90 hosts atm

Technical Support mode:
unsupported
will be logged into the logs
commands will not be logged
you can enable tech support, but you are than unsupported, you should try vima and rcli instead, click on the link to get information on how to enable tech support.
lockdown mode will disable tech support mode
or via advanced settings vmkernel.boot.techSupportMode (which will require reboot)

ESXi Boot Sequence:
Grub
Hypervisor1
Hypervisor3 (esx.conf, password, hostd, etc)

Alt+F2 DCUI (Default)
Alt+F1 inactive console
Alt+F11 Summary
Alt+F12 vmkernel log

Direct Console User Interface:
configure networking (don’t forget DNS, VLAN)
verify networking
restart management network
restart management agents
view logs
access tech support mode
Function Keys needed:
f2
f3
f11
f2

Logs:
/var/log (Hypervisor3)
messages has all the messages (incl. vmkernel)
loging is minimum
after reboot the logs are lost
Best Practice is to use syslog server and / or vima logger or to redirect the log to an external partition
configuring syslog can be done via syslog.Remote in the advanced settings
or if no syslog server is available change location of the log in Syslog.Local.DatastorePath e.g [datastore]/directory
cores will be in /var/core
the cores will be extraced when you run vm-support
check if VMKCore is configured via vicfg-dumpart.pl
agent logs:
hostd /var/log/vmware/hostd
vxpa /var/log/vmware/vpxa
vifs.pl –get /host/hostAgentConfig.xml localfile.xml
edit config
vifs.pl –put localfile.xml /host/hostAgentConfig.xml

Troubleshooting Network:
use vicfg-nics.pl, vicfg-vmknics.pl, vicfg-vswitch.pl
vmkping -D will ping all networks, default route and vmkernel interfaces
standard networking commands such as nslookup and ping are available
tcpdump is not available
workaround is to create a new port group in the desired vSwich, enable promiscous mode and use vm with wireshark, if using vlans use vlan 4095
stat -i will show available inodes, if no inodes are available networking will not work

Troubleshooting Storage:
loging level can be raised via setting scsi.PrintCmdErrors to 1
via RCLI escfg-advcfg.pl -s “1″ Scsi.PrintCmdErrors
e.g. change the queue depth
esxcfg-module.pl -s “ql2xmaxqdepth=64″ qla2300_707_vmw
verify change esxcfg-module.pl -g qla2300_707_vmw
/proc/scsi/vendor will hold information about the storage infrastructure
vmkiscsi-util can help with iscsi
esxcfg-vmhbadevs:
-q will list all accessible luns
-m will list all mounted and healthy luns
fdisk -lu to check partition table
no /dev/sdX need to use /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.*

VIMSH and VIM-CMD:
vimsh is an interactive shell
vim-cmd is a wrapper for vimsh
e.g vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
esxcfg-info > file to get full config
use vim-cmd to get a list of command
vmware-cmd is not available on the shell,
vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms will list all registered vms, vm-support -x will list all running vms
/vmsvc/get.guest vmid to check status
/vmsvc/power.off vmid to power off
/vmsvc/power.on vmid to power on
/vmscv/power.reset vmid to reset
if vm is loocked you can use vm-support -x to get the vmid and than a vm-support -X vmid to core the vm
you can use vim-cmd help vmsvc/snapshot.create for help

ESXi Patching:
ESXi can store two builds, one boot build and one standby build
each update will update the standby build, after the patching the builds are switched
updating can be done via update manager, viclient with Infrastructure Updade and vihostupdate RCLI Util
rolling back can be done during boot via the DCUI, during boot when you see “loading vmware hypervisor” press shift r, to select standby after that shit + y to confirm and press enter
vicfg-cfgbackup.pl for backup and restore of the configuration, should be done after changing config and updating
-s will store, -l will restore

More from Mingle

• General Session
• Partnerday – Comperative Introduction to VMware Thinapp
• AP12 -vCenter AppSpeed: Technology Preview