OnCommand 5 Update

We made more progress on getting smvi and snapvault to work with OnCommand 5. OnCommand 5 replaces SMVI and the sv-smvi script.

We needed the follwoing KB articla to configure this and to understand the differences between how OnCommand 5 does snapshots compared to VSC and SMVI.

http://communities.netapp.com/thread/19792

vSphere 4.1 Upgrade Progress

I wrapped up the ESX upgrades on Sunday. Upgraded the final five ESXi servers to 4.1 Update1. This worked flawlessly. A huge help in doing this was incresing  the memory on two esxi hosts to 192 GB. This allowed me to vmotion many VMs ahead of time to get five hosts ready.  Upgrading five hosts and verifying each took about 2.5 hours.

I am impressed with 4.1 so far. It seems to be a very solid version with significant improvements over 4.0.

Goals for 2012

Here are my goals for 2012:

• Get certified in vSphere 5 - done , 2/28/12... JIT to save me from taking the What's New course.
• Get a VCAP certification
• Learn  Power CLI (change to just Power CLI)
• Get experience with cloud self-servicing portals and cloud automation
• implement a vmware monitoring tool
• Get VSP

vSphere 4.1 upgrade is almost finished

With five ESXi servers left to upgrade, I'll be completing the vSphere 4.0 to 4.1 this coming Sunday. This will make 29 ESXi upgrades to ESXi 4.1 Update1. vCenter was upgraded to 4.1 Update1 and a month after Update 2 was released, we upgraded vCenter to Update 2. Update 2 resolved an issue with editing the settings on a template.

I did experience one issue in this upgrade, and that was that  vCenter stopped updating the performance data. This happenned about two weeks after upgrading vCenter Server from 4.1 Update 1 to 4.1 Update 2. And, and it took approximately one month to get it completely resolved. The KB's for this are on a previous post. For us, we had to re-create the views within the database before it was completely resolved. This was the first time I had experienced this issue.

We've already upgraded VMware Tools on three clusters, and will finish upgrading this within the next month or two after all the ESXi servers are upgraded.

NetApp Management Console 5.0

NetApp has release OnCommand 5.0, which replaces OnCommand System Manager 2 and VSC. This provides NetApp storage management, provisioning and cloning, and SMVI.

Provisioning and cloning and smvi was previously located in vCenter with VSC,  and has been moved to the OnCommand 5 suite.

If you currently use VSC, you will need to uninstall it and remove the Pluig-In. Uninstalling VSC is straight forward and is done by running the installation program for VSC.

Removing the Plug-in is not so obvious. You will need to go to the MOB (Managed Object Reference) page for your  vCenter server. To do this, point your browser to: http:// vCenter Server name/MOB
  1) Select "content"
  2) Select "extension manager"
  3) Select your NetApp plug-in from the list
  4) Click on the extension list, look at the properties and copy the key string
  5) Go back one page on the browser, and look for unregister Extension on the Methods table
  6) On the next screen, paste the copied string and click invoke Method, you will get the status as: "Method Invocation Result: void"
   7) close the window and log back into the vSphere Client.

Now that VSC is uninstalled and the Plug-in removed, you can finish installing the OnCommand 5.0 suite.

Quickest Way to Add NFS Storage

If you have three or more esx serves in a cluster with a couple dozen NFS datastores, it can be time consuming adding 24 datastores to one server or adding one or two new datastores to each server in the cluster.

I have found the quickest and easiest way to do this is using VMware’s Management Assistant - either the Linux or Windows flavor. To do this, run the following command from your Management Assistant CLI:
esxcfg-nas.pl - server 'esx server name' -username 'user' -a 'name of your new datastore' -o 'ip address or name of your NFS server' -s 'name and path of the nfs export'
for example: esxcfg-nas.pl -  myesxserver - username me -a mynewdatastore -o 1.2.3.4 -s /vol/newvol/newqtree

That's it.