Groupwise 8 SP1 available

As you have read on many site including Novell Coolsolutions, Groupwise 8 sp1 is out!

Tonight I’m going to upgrade my Groupwise server. We will find out what’s new!

What’s for sure, that there are many bug fixes. Here you can find a list. It’s to long to post it here.

Ok, 20 minutes later and I updated my system. After a first look I don’t see any issue. If I find them, I will posted it here!

vSphere: Host Profile

When you have multiple ESX 3.x hosts (in a cluster or not, that doesn’t really matter) you want all the same host have the same setting.
For example: NTP, VMkernel default gateway, DNS servers etc.

In ESX 3.x you must configure this per host. I was easier if you created a Kick Script for installtion but for most System Administrators this is much work and misconfigurations are easily made.
In vSphere we have the option to create a host profile and apply this to other hosts. This is a great step forwards! Of course we have to have vCenter for this option.

So let’s see how we create and apply this profile to other hosts.

• In the Home view of vCenter under de Management Section select Host Profiles
• Right click in a white section of host Profile (on the left) and select Create Profile. The Create Profile Wizard pops-up.

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• Select a vSphere host where you want to create the host profile from

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• Give it a name and if you want a description

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• Select finish

Now the profile is created, but maybey you want to change some setting before applying the profile to other hosts. In my case I want to adjust the NTP settings.

• Select de profile and click in the commands section on Edit Profile (Note the Export Profile option, real nice for all Consultants who install more vShpere hosts on a regular basis)

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• Goto Date and Time Configuration | Time Settings.
• Adjust the time source (in my case 172.16.16.254) and click on Ok.
• This save the profile

Ok, now it’s time to apply this profile to a host.

• In vCenter Home View goto Hosts and Clusters in the Inventory section
• Make sure your server in in Maintenance Mode.
• Rights click on a host | Host Profile | Manage Profile

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• Now you can select the profile you want to apply to this host by selecting the profile and click on Ok.

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• Note on the summary tab of the host in the General section you will see that the profile is attached (not yet applied) to the host

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• First we’re going to check the compliance of the profile (If the setting of the profile are the same as the setting of the host. Right click the host | Host Profile | Check Compliance. If the setting of the profile are not the same as the host a red cross will appear saying the profile is Non Compliant.

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• To apply the profile, right click on the host | Host Profile | Apply Profile.
• The Apply Profile wizard will run. It can be that you have to provide some information (for example a ip adres) that is only for this host. If all goes well you will see a log screen saying what has changed. Click on Finish in order to close the wizard.

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• After the host configuration is update you can check Host Compliance again. If all went wel, the host will say it’s Compliant.
• Now you can exit maintenance mode.

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As you can see it is not hard to create, modify and apply a Host Profile. It can make our lives as a VMware System Administrator a lot easier!

vSphere: Create a Distributed Switch

In VMware ESX 3.x you had to make sure that is you have a cluster every host has the same network configuration with the same port group names. Whit a couple of host this isn’t that hard, but what if you have a 16 node cluster, or more? Making a change to the network configuration could take some time.

With vSphere you have the ability to maken a switch that is automaticly distributed acorse all attached hosts. This is called a Distributed Switchs (dvSwitch).

So, how do we created a Distributed Switch?

• In vCenter goto Home and under Inventory select Networking
• Right click the Datacenter object en select New Distributed Switch. The following screen is displayed

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• Give the dvSwitch a name and select the number of dvUplinks . A dvUplink is later connected to one or more physical nic’s in the host.

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• Here you can select the hosts you want the vdSwitch on. When you select a host, you can also select the physical nic for the dvUplink. Just put a mark before it.
  You can also do this later bij clicking on Add Later.

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• If you click finish a default port group is created. I like to create my own port group so I deselect Automatically create a default port group

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• Wait a few seconds before the dvSwitch is created and is distributed to all the hosts. You can check this to look at your recent tasks
• When the dvSwitch is ready click on the name of the dvSwitch you just created. In the command section you can select New Port Group.

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• Give the name for this dvPortGroup (In my case dvPortGroup-Demo) and the numbers of ports for this portgroup and if you want VLAN’s.

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• Select finish to let the dvPortGroup be created

The only thing we have to do is to migrated the excisting Virtual Machines that are connected to a ‘normal’  port group to the newly dvPortGroup.

• In vCenter select the dvSwitch and in the commands field select Migrate Virtual Machine Networking

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• Select the source Network (the ‘normal’ port group) and destination Network (the dvPortGroup) and click on Show Virtual Machines.
• The Virtual Machines connected to the source Network are displayed in de bottom field. Here you can select the Virtual Machines who you wanne migrated to the new dvSwitch

So what if I want to add for example the VMkernel or Service Console portgroup to it? Ok, here we go.

• First, you can only do this at host level. Every host will have it’s own ip adres for a VMKernel or a Service Console.  Go to the VMware host | Configuration | Distributed Virtual Switches and click on Manage Virtual Adapters

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• Click Add to launch the Add Virtual Adapter

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• Now we have to choose if we want to migrate existing virtual adapters or if we want to add a new virtual adapter. In my case, I choose to migrate.

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• Select the port group you want to migrate and to witch dvPortGroup you want to migrate it to.

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• You will a summary and when you click finish the port group will be migrated

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Of course you will have to repeat this step on all the other hosts.
As you can see, it isn’t hard to create a dvSwitch with dvPortGroups.  I find it a great step forwards and a great new feature of vSphere.

vSphere: Migrate from a Thick to a Thin VMDK

Inflating a Thin VMDK to a thick VMDK is easy, just browse your Datastore, select the VDMK file you want to inflate, right mouse click on it and select inflate.
Note: Your Virtual Machines needs to be powered off and inflating a disk can take-up some time. In my test I inflated a 5 GB Thin disk on witch 3,6 GB was occupied took 8 minutes.This was on a NetApp with Fiber Channel (1GB).

But what if we want to do the opposite? There are a few way to create a Thin VMDK file:

• Create a Virtual Machine
• Clone to a template
• Clone a Virtual Machine
• Use VMware Storage VMotion to migrate the virtual machine storage

So, the most easy way to migrate a Thick VMDK file to a Thin VMDK file is to use Storage VMotion.

1. Right click the Virtual Machine and select Migrate
2. Select change datastore
3. Select the Lun you want to move the Virtual Machine to
4. Select the format. This will be Thin provisioned format of course
5. Select finish

That’s all

Extend VMFS Datastore in VMware vShpere

When your VMFS Datastore in VMware ESX 3.x was running out of disk space, you had 2 options. One was to move all of the VM’s on that Datastore to a new VMFS Datastore with more space avaliable or increase the Lun on your storage and add a extend to the excisting Datastore. There are many blog writting if it’s wise to add a extend to a Datastore.

Now with vSphere it’s easy to increase the size of your VMFS Datastore if you have the space avaliable on your lun.

Here my setup. 2 vSphere servers with vCenter installed. I have one Lun on a NetApp. The lun is 15GB big with I created a 10GB VMFS datastore on it.

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Select the properties of the Datastore and click on Increase.

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Notice that on the same Lun the Datastore excits Expandable is marked as: Yes

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You will see the free space avaliable. In my case 5GB.

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Select the size you want to add to the Datastore.

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A summary it displayed. If you agree select Finish.

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When the action is finished you will see that the Capacity is increased. In my case 15GB.

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To prove there is no second partition. Here a screenshot from the Service Console with fdisk (fdisk -l).

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As you can see, now it’s pretty easy to extend a excisting VMFS Datastore.