ESX Uptime info

To view your ESX servers uptime, open a shell and type “cat /var/log/vmksummary.txt”. The summary shows how much planned and unplanned downtime you had. May come in handy.

Virtual Center Historical Performance Problem

After installing ESX 3.5 Update 3 Virtual Center didn’t show any historical performance information. After some digging I found that there were no SQL jobs to generate the stats. Now what ……. Google offered no solutions so it was up to me. The first thing I tried was reinstalling VC2.5u3 that didn’t restore the SQL jobs for me. So what next? Well I created a temporary database on the SQL were the original VC DB was placed. Then I installed a virtual machine with Windows Server 2003, created an ODBC connection to point to the TMP_VCDB and installed VC 2.5 Update 3 on it. Still no SQL agent jobs

Now what? Let’s check the installation files …. In the file vpx.cab I found some sql scripts so let’s see what the do. Based on logical naming I started with the files job_schedule1_mssql.sql1, job_schedule2_mssql.sql1 and job_schedlule3_mssql.sql1. I opened the Query Analyzer on the SQL box and pasted the query. Don’t forget to select the correct database in the top field, I tried it on a TMP DB. Now press Execute Query …….. Completed Succesfully. Now when I check the SQL Agent jobs there is a job named “Past Day stats rollup”. I repeates this for the 2nd and 3th query. Now the jobs are there again.

The big question now is: Did I loose any performance data? Well a quick look shows perfomance graphs so it doesn’t look like it. But it takes a day for all schedules to be run.

VMworld Europe 2009

After tough negotiations my colleague and I managed to get green light to go to VMworld Europe 2009. So in about two months we are going to Cannes in France. Interesting information will be posted so stay tuned.

VMware HA troubleshooting

If you are having trouble with VMware HA, DNS is the place to start troubleshooting. VMware HA uses the default gateway of the Service Console and other hosts to determine if it’s isolated. When ESX host 1 cannot ping the gateway and it can ping other ESX hosts, host 1 thinks it OK.

For throubleshooting look for the log file in the directory /etc/aamSupport/vmware/<servername>/sysconf/name_lookups.out and for /var/log/vpx/vmware/vpxa.log. This will show if there are DNS issues.

Don’t forget to check the firewall config to see if traffic from the aamclient is allowed.