Basic System Administration -Part 3

With ESX 3.0 you can migrate suspended VMs under cold migration process. You can move files of VMs only when they are power off and suspended.

When you modify User’s permissions, Users do not need to log off and log on into Virtual Center for changes to take effect. All changes take effect immediately.

You can define permission on

• VM
• Folders
• Datacenters
• Resource pools
• Templates
• Host
• Clusters

You cannot directy define permission on

1. Networks
2. Datastores

In virtual center you can assign permission to

• Folder
• Datacenter
• Host
• VM
• Templates
• Cluster
• Resource Pools
• In ESX server you can assign permission to
• Resource Pool
• VMs
• Hosts

There are two types of roles

System (cannot be modified): administrator/read-only/No-access

Sample (can be modified):

Detail Description is available in Excel Sheet HERE

Basic System Administration -Part 2

When you install VMWARE Tools it installs

1. Vmware tool service
2. Set of Vmware device drivers

• SVGA Display drivers

• Vmxnet networking drivers

• Bus Logic SCSI drivers

• Memory control driver

• Vmware mouse driver

• I/O consolidate backup to quiesce I/O

1. set of scripts that let’s you automate guest OS
2. component that supports copying between the guest and managed host

If you don’t have vmware tools installed you don’t have option to restart or shutdown option. You will’ve to gracefully shutdown OS within VMs console. In order to upgrade VMWare tools, you need to shutdown VMs.

When you suspend VMs, a file is created with a. vmss extension is created, which contains the entire state of VMs. The remove from inventory cmd removes the VM only from VI client and not from from it’s datastore, however delete from disk removes it from datastore. Similiarly .vmtx is extension for template and remove from inventory and delete from datastores applies here as well. File with NVRAM extensions contains BIOS Settings.

In many cases, you can get past the problem by temporarily disabling acceleration in the virtual machine, but the applications stablize deselect “disable acceleration”

Choose Hyperthreading Sharing Mode from the pull-down menu. The options are:

Any – (default) The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine can freely share cores with other virtual CPUs of this or other virtual machines.

None – The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine have exclusive use of a processor core whenever they are scheduled to it. The other hyperthread of the core is halted while this virtual machine is using the core.

Internal – On a virtual machine with exactly two virtual processors, the two virtual processors are allowed to share one physical core (at the discretion ofthe ESX Server scheduler), but this virtual machine never shares a core with any other virtual machine. If this virtual machine has any other number of processors other than two, this setting is the same as the none setting.

Audio is available only for Windows XP and not for Window2000/windows 2003

If you wish to edit template, you’ll need to convert the template into VM.

Customization of guest OS is saved in xml file. Saved customization files are unique to each VirtualCenter Server and to each version of VirtualCenter due to encryption. You must recreate the customization files for each VirtualCenter Server. Also if you uninstall VirtualCenter and later do a fresh installation, the ability to decrypt passwords from the earlier installation is lost.

Basic System Administration

Bullet points from Basic system Administration Guide -Part01

• The text is sent as a notice message to all active session users and to new users when they log in. The MIB definition files can be found at C:\Program Files\VMware\Vmware VirtualCenter\MIBS when the default installation directory is used.

• You can perform migration between datacenters, the root folder is set as a default for every virtualcenter server, you can change the name but not add or remove it.

• ESX SERVER SUPPORTS 5 DIRECT, CONCURRENT VI CLIENT CONNECTIONS

• When you add multiple ESX servers to Virtual Center, VC will identify any naming conflicts that exist between virtual machines and alerts system administrator, who can rename virtual machines as necessary. The name can be 80 character long and may contact underscore,hypen.

• Disconnecting managed hosts differs from removing it, when you disconnect it; virtual center monitoring activities are temporarily suspended. When you remove it, VC stops are monitoring and managing functions of that managed host. Hosts and all VMs on the host are removed from the inventory but historical data is not removed from VC database.

• When adding or removing hosts, make sure NFS mounts are active, if NFS are unresponsive, the operation fails.

• Systems with dual-core processor (two CPU cores in each processor) must use ESX server 2.5.2. VC licenses are issused by pairs of processor packages not by processor cores. Host can be removed from the cluster only if all of the virtual machines on it are powered off and host is placed into maintenance mode.

• The Virtual CPUs page does not appear if the host is single-processor or the guest operating system does not support SMP (for example, NetWare and Windows NT 4.0)

• When you map a LUN to a VMFS volume, virtual center creates a file that point to the LUN.Encapsulating disk information to the file allows VC to lock the LUN so that only one Virtual Machine can write to it.

 

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