Ubuntu OVA As you may know, VMware Horizon View supporting some Linux desktop distribution as virtual desktop from VMware Horizon View 7.x, it means that you can deliver Linux desktops to users. There is many performance recommendations about delivering virtual desktops to users and should be considered by administrators on any operating systems. Most administrators are familiar with Windows OS but few of them are expert in Linux. There is many guides and tools for Windows optimization such as VMware OS Optimization Tool but there isn’t enough official guides and tools for Linux. Ubuntu is most popular Linux desktop and server distributions and VMware’s engineers made a virtual appliance for using as virtual desktop by installing Ubuntu desktop on virtual machine. The image contains two scripts, first script will optimize Ubuntu machine for using as virtual desktop and second script will assist you about VMware Horizon View Agent installation. Requirements User permissions to deploy OVA/OVF Optimization script requires VM to have network access VM must be able to resolve https://raw.githubusercontent.com Domain Admin privileges (if joining to the domain) vSphere 6.0 U2, or later vSphere 6.5 or later ESXi 6.0 U2 or later Horizon Connection Server 7.1 or later Horizon Client 4.4 or later Comprehensive...
What’s VMware Cloud Native Application? Operating System Level Virtualization or Container is one of most popular IT concepts during few past year and many companies are working on their native solutions for supporting container concept on their products such as operating systems like Microsoft or Red Hat and Oracle. VMware has introduced VMware Cloud Native Application to supporting container on virtualization platform. VMware Cloud Native Application helps developers and operation administrators to create cloud applications quickly and securely. VMware delivers the Cloud Native Application by Photon Platform. Photon Platform is a Operating System Level Virtualization platform that deliver container on virtual servers based on Photon OS and ESXi. Photon Platform VMware Photon Platform is a container-optimized cloud platform which delivers on-demand tools and services for developers to build, test, and run modern applications while enabling IT to retain security, control and performance of data center infrastructure. Purpose-built for cloud-native applications with integrated container infrastructure support, Photon Platform is a fully API-driven, multi-tenant platform which brings the scale, performance and features previously accessible only to hyper-scale web companies into enterprise data centers. It leverages industry-leading compute, networking, and storage technologies to bring best-in-class performance, reliability and ease-of-use for cloudnative workloads. Photon Platform | Key Features Production-grade, fully supported Kubernetes distribution...
What’s VMware Docs VMware has launch VMware Docs officially, this is a single platform for accessing to VMware products documents as a unified portal. All documents are available in different versions (Actually Current Versions) and languages. VMware Docs Features Online or Offline Reading Users have access to all published documents for any VMware product via VMware Docs, the documents are available as HTML format and PDF format, so users be able to download and read the documents offline. Searching and Filtering VMware Docs provides searching and filtering feature to find exact information about the products, features, patches, installation, configuration and any other things. The search will return results from the below content sources: KB Articles Technical Papers Product Documentation Search results will be filtered by different information types, products and subjects. My Library VMware Docs provides My Library feature for each user and users be able to collect documents to collections. Collections are shareable and users can share their collections with each other. Searching and filtering features are also available on the collections.
What’s HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool? HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool is an online application designed to assist datacenter administrators and designers with qualified options details with reserve compatibility for particular platforms including Rack, Tower, Blade Systems, Synergy, HyperScale and storage devices. Using HPE Server Options Compatibility Tool At the welcome page (Home Page), there are two choices: My Server: Find all compatible components with a server or storage device. My Options: Find all devices that compatible with selected component. My Server This is an option to find compatible components with server and storage devices. The various parts of this page are: Family: Includes most server and storage family such a 3PAR storages and ProLiant servers. Generation: After choosing device family, the generation of the family will show on this table. Server: All generation members will be available on the table and components information will display according to the this selection. Search: This is a search box to finding device faster by entering the device name. After choosing the device, the compatible components information will display. The components includes: Processor Memory Hard Disk Drives Solid State Drives Power Supplies Networking (Compatible Network Interface Cards) Storage Controller Computational and Graphic Accelerators Power Distribution...
Linux shell is most popular than GUI in Linux systems and most of Linux administrators doing their tasks and system configurations via shell. But shell is most difficult than GUI. They do many thing via shell for example adding new disks or partitions for applications and services. Sometimes administrators and users faced with the below messages after create new partitions: WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8) Syncing disks. Or after run “mkfs.extX” command to create file-system on the partition: Could not stat /dev/sdXX — No such file or directory The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly? Actually, kernel couldn’t reload partition table at this situation and ask administrator to reboot the machine for reloading partition table. Let’s Review Solutions for Reloading Partition Table Partprobe This utility is the first solution for reloading partition table of the disk. It’s installed on most distribution by default. Run the below command to reload partition table manually: partprobe /dev/sdX (X is the device letter) If Partprobe doesn’t work and...
ESXi PCI Passthrough This is a combination hardware and software feature on hypervisors to allows VMs to use PCI functions directly And we know it as VMDirectPath I/O in vSphere environment. VMDirectPath I/O needs some requirements to work perfectly, please read this KB for more information, as we read it! https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2142307 There is also some limitation when using VMDirectPath I/O and the below features will unavailable: Hot adding and removing of virtual devices Suspend and resume Record and replay Fault tolerance High availability DRS (limited availability. The virtual machine can be part of a cluster, but cannot migrate across hosts) Snapshots I couldn’t find any other limitation specially about memory size, so now why we couldn’t use more than 790 GB to 850 GB of our server memory capacity?! Anyway, let’s review our test scenario! Our Test Scenario We have some Sun X4-8 servers with the below specifications: CPU: 8 x E7-8895 v2 Local Disk: 8 x 600 GB SAS Disk Memory: 48 x 16 GB – Totally 768 GB PCI Devices: 2 x QLogic 2600 16 Gb – 2 Ports (HBA) 2 x Intel 82599EB 10 Gb – 2 Ports (Network) Embedded Devices: 2 x Intel I350 1Gb ESXi 6.x U2 has...
VMware Tools Client VMware Tools Client is a beta tools to interact with VMs without network connectivity. May know, there is some vSphere API that developers can write some codes and developing their tools for vSphere environments. VMware Tools Client written by Pierre Lainé is a useful tool to managing virtual machines via vSphere Guest API and VMware Tools. The tool developed by Java, so JRE or JDK should installed on manage machine. As Java is cross-platform run-time, so VMware Tools Client will run on any machine, Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac. VMware Tools Client allows administrators to: Upload and download files between management client machine and virtual machine. Run scripts to reconfigure operating system, troubleshooting and other tasks. Troubleshooting network by ping some addresses from within the virtual machine. VMware Tools Client be able to connect to vCenter and load vCenter inventory, so administrators can select and manage any virtual machine. PowerCLI also provides commands such as Invoke-VMScript to run script or batch via VMware Tools on virtual machines but VMware Tools Client is more featured. It’s beta version yet but available on this link for public download: Download Link Screenshots:
Most of modern servers hardware are using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS and modern OS has dedicated partition to stores boot and EFI values. Some times, the partition gets full or OS generate the below log: kernel: WARNING: at fs/sysfs/dir.c:536 sysfs_add_one+0xbb/0xe0 Kernel includes a CONFIG_EFI_VARS_PSTORE feature, and a feature that dumps kernel message log (= the “dmesg” command output) into UEFI variables for persistent storage if the system is crashing (or even if the system is working normally, depending on the options chosen). The cause of the warning is duplicate dump file in EFI partition and OS is trying to write values on same file. There is a simple solution, remove old dump file! I hope this article help you to find out root cause of the warning and resolve that. Here is the complete log on our virtual machine: kernel: WARNING: at lib/kobject.c:196 kobject_add_internal+0x205/0x260() kernel: Hardware name: VMware7,1 kernel: kobject_add_internal failed for dump-type2-0-0-1493749396-cfc8fc79-be2e-4ddc-97f0-9f98bfe298a0 with -EEXIST, don’t try to register things with the same name in the same directory. kernel: Modules linked in: vmw_vsock_vmci_transport vsock oracleasm autofs4 ipv6 vfat fat uinput vmw_balloon coretemp crc32c_intel ghash_clmulni_intel microcode pcspkr sg ixgbe hwmon dca vmw_vmci i2c_piix4 shpchp ext4 jbd2 mbcache dm_round_robin scsi_dh_emc sd_mod...
How can we protect VM against ransomware? This is important question for any infrastructure administrator. Actually, Ransomware is a computer malware, and it will be installed on wide range of devices such as computers, smartphones and wearable devices. It can attack to data and encrypt data then ask user to pay for decrypt data. Users may encounter in a number of ways. The most common method used by attackers to spread software is via e-mail as an attached file. Protecting Virtual Machines Most companies are using VDI solutions to deliver desktop experience to the users and virtual desktops acting same as physical desktop. Even all protection steps are provided for protecting users data such as strong anti-virus, firewall, email malware detection and other ways, attackers will try new way to infect user data and keep data as hostage and ask to pay money. When users data is encrypted by a Ransomware, administrators can help them by restoring their data from a valid backup, so one of solutions to protecting data is taking backup from them. Traditional Backup Administrators can ask users to keep their important data on shared folder or removable devices or sync them with same folders on other computers. But this is...
Datacenters are going smaller compare to datacenters in past few years because of virtualization revolution. Organizations are deploying their services on virtual servers instead of physical servers and most companies over the world have large virtual farms. But some traditional challenges are still exists such as backup and disaster recovery. Virtual machine deployment and maintenance is easier than physical servers but administrators have to take backup from machines, files or any important data same as before, nothing changed! Also organizations still needs to recovery site for disaster recovery in other geographical location, all machines should be replicate between the primary and recovery site. Backup solutions are little different in virtual infrastructures with physical infrastructures but backup solution has also backward compatibility in virtualization platforms, means that the backup solutions covers both virtual and physical machines now. The new backup and recovery solutions still needs to storage space for storing backup files, bandwidth for transfer and computing resources for processing backup jobs. Any backup solution has some best practices and administrators should consider the best practices to achieve best results. Know VM backup best practices are important topics for planning and implementing backup solutions. Join me to review some of best practices...
What’s LM-Sensors Health monitoring is very important for critical servers because administrators can do proper actions before any impact on service. There is many third-party software for monitoring Linux and Windows servers but native agents are also useful. We are going to review one of native solutions for hardware health monitoring in Linux.
What’s UUID? Each virtual machine has UUID and it will appear on OS as guest UUID too. A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems, the 16 bytes of this value are separated by spaces. Microsoft uses the term globally unique identifier (GUID), either as a synonym for UUID or to refer to a particular UUID variant.
Based on Red Hat solution (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/47438), the below steps should be done before flush any multipath device, otherwise the command will be failed: Once all holders of the device have been removed, the device should be flushed with “multipath -f“. But may the above instruction failed at first step because the disk is hold by a process. Problem! Here is an example of the error: multipath -f {Multipath Alias} Mar 1 09:59:10 | {Multipath Alias}: map in use dmsetup remove -f {Multipath Alias} device-mapper: remove ioctl on {Multipath Alias} failed: Device or resource busy Solution! What is the solution for this problem? As Red Hat mentioned, “Locate any subsystem or process holding the device open”. Usually a process holding the disk or disks, so as the first step follow the below: lsof | grep {Multipath Alias} Output will be same as the below: oracle 10298 oracle 257u BLK 252,8 0t0 18446612177448267048 /dev/oracleasm/disks/{Multipath Alias} (deleted) In this example output, oracle process holding the disk and the process should be identified before any action: ps -ef | grep 10298 oracle 10298 1 0 2016 ? 00:00:00 oraclecmsrestd (LOCAL=NO) If there is no problem about killing the process, kill the process by the...
This post is 2nd part of Arch Linux installation guide and as you may read the first part, you know that we want to do it by Arch Anywhere and now, if you have downloaded ISO from Arch Anywhere website, mount it and follow the below steps. I’ll install Arch Linux on a virtual machine, you can do it on virtual machine or physical machine.
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