Saturday, August 27, 2011

Setting the number of cores per CPU in a virtual machine

  • Power off the virtual machine.
  • Right-click on the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
  • Click Hardware and select CPUs.
  • Choose the number of virtual processors.
  • Click the Options tab.
  • Click General, in the Advanced options section.
  • Click Configuration Parameters.
  • Include cpuid.coresPerSocket in the Name column.
  • Enter a value (try 2, 4, or 8) in the Value column.
Note: Ensure that the number of vCPUs is divisible by the number of  cpuid.coresPerSocket in the virtual machine. That is, when you divide the number of vCPUs by the number of cpuid.coresPerSocket, it must return an integer value. For example, if your virtual machine is created with 8 vCPUs, coresPerSocket can only be 1, 2, 4, or 8.
The virtual machine now appears to the operating system as having multi-core CPUs with the number of cores per CPU given by the value that you provided in step 9.
  • Click OK.
  • Power on the virtual machine.
For example:
Create an 8 vCPU virtual machine and set cpuid.coresPerSocket = 2. Window Server 2003 SE running in this virtual machine now uses all 8 vCPUs. Under the covers, Windows sees 4 dual-core CPUs. The virtual machine is actually running on 8 physical cores.
Only values of 1, 2, 4, 8 for the cpuid.coresPerSocket are supported for the multi-core vCPU feature in ESX 4.x.
In ESX 4.0, if multi-core vCPU is used, hot-plug vCPU is not permitted, even if it is available in the UI.
Only Hardware Version 7 virtual machines support the multi-core vCPU feature.

For more information read this article from VMware
Also read the article Use Coreinfo to view VM core and socket count

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Dell PowerVault MD3620f storage arrays configured with VMware ESX/ESXi fail

According to this VMware article you need to add a claim rule to ESX/ESXi host:
To add a claim rule:
Login to the ESX host as root. Run the command:
For MD3600i/MD3620i:
esxcli nmp satp addrule -V DELL -M MD36xxi -s VMW_SATP_LSI
For MD3600f /MD3620f:
esxcli nmp satp addrule -V DELL -M MD36xxf -s VMW_SATP_LSI

SNMP configuration steps for VI3 and vSphere 4.0/4.1

Please read the following article from VMware.

Monday, August 8, 2011

How to use wget through proxy

To get wget to use a proxy, you must set up an environment variable before using wget. Type this at the command prompt / console:

For Windows:
set http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:8080

For Linux/Unix:
export http_proxy="http://proxy.example.com:8080"

Replace proxy.example.com with your actual proxy server.
Replace 8080 with your actual proxy server port.

You can similarly use ftp_proxy to proxy ftp requests. An example on Linux would be:
export ftp_proxy="http://proxy.example.com:8080"

Then you should specify the following option in wget command line to turn the proxy behavior on:
–proxy=on

Alternatively you can use the following to turn it off:
–proxy=off

You can use –proxy-username="user name" –proxy-passwd="password" to set proxy user name and password where required.
Replace user name with your proxy server user name and password with your proxy server password. Another alternative is to specify them in http_proxy / ftp_proxy environment variable as follows:
export http_proxy="http://username:password@proxy.example.com

For more info read the following article: How to use wget through proxy

How to debug ACLs in squid

If ACLs are giving you problems and you don't know why they aren't working, you can use this tip to debug them.
In squid.conf enable debugging for section 33 at level 2. For example:
debug_options ALL,1 33,2
Then restart or reconfigure squid.
From now on, your cache.log should contain a line for every request that explains if it was allowed, or denied, and which ACL was the last one that it matched.
If this does not give you sufficient information to nail down the problem you can also enable detailed debug information on ACL processing
debug_options ALL,1 33,2 28,9
Then restart or reconfigure squid as above.
From now on, your cache.log should contain detailed traces of all access list processing. Be warned that this can be quite some lines per request.

How to install Dell Open Manage Server in vMA appliance

- Login to vMA using vi-admin account
- Enter the follwing commands
sudo bash -l
export dist_base=el
export dist_ver=5
export dist=el5

- Optionally configure a proxy server to use: (assuming our proxy is proxy.mydomain.com listening to port 3128)
export http_proxy="http://proxy.mydomain.com:3128"
export ftp_proxy="http://proxy.mydomain.com:3128"

- Download and run bootstrap.cgi from Dell:
wget http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi
sh bootstrap.cgi

- Modify dell repository finding all lines starting with mirrorlist and setting osname=el5, for example:
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/dell-omsa-repository.repo
changed line: mirrorlist=http://…/mirrors.cgi?osname=el5&basearch=…
- Install and start omsa web server:
yum install srvadmin-webserver
sudo service dsm_om_connsvc start

- Open port 1311 in vMA's firewall entering the utility:
system-config-securitylevel-tui
- Try Open Manage Server opening in a browser the address:
https://vma.ipaddress.com:1311
where vma.ipaddress.com is vMA's IP address
- Remember to select Manage Remote Node in web interface and before you login check Ignore certificate warnings in the same page

For more information go to the Dell OM 6.5.1 Linux repository.
You can also read these articles:
http://www.liquidstate.net/2010/12/07/using-dell-openmanage-with-vmware-esxi-4-x/
http://techontip.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/dell-open-manage-server-administrator-for-esxi-4-1/
http://www.md3v.com/dell-openmanage-on-centos-5x