Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak has written a nice little “how to“. His post shows all the steps to take so you can get all the historic VMotion info and present it in an Excel sheet. The data is  extracted directly from the Virtual Center database and can be updated any time.

Network Monitor 3.2 Beta is available!

We are our proud and excited to announce the release of NM3.2 Beta, available at http://connect.microsoft.com. Please visit the Network Monitor Project on Microsoft Connect and download the Network Monitor 3.2 Beta. You can also view the FAQ from the home page for more information about the latest version.

Also remember that you can visit our blog for continued updates about using NM3 and network troubleshooting in general: http://blogs.technet.com/netmon.

What's New since Network Monitor 3.1

• Process Tracking: View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID). Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.

• Find conversations: Quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation. Isolate TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.

• PCAP capture file support*
• Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks. NM 3.2 drops significantly fewer frames that NM 3.1

· Extensive parser set: Parsers for over 300 protocols! Parsers for the protocols covered by the Windows Open Protocol Specifications (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx).

· NM API: Create your own applications that capture, parser and analyze network traffic!

• Better parser management: By default only a subset of parsers are loaded. You can load the full parser set by changing the parser search order in Tools>Options>Parser
• Support for frame truncation. Go to Tools>Options and limit the number of bytes captured per frame to improve performance.
• More extensive documentation of the NPL which includes documentation on the new NMAPI. Access the documentation from Help > NPL and API Documentation
• Enhanced filtering on items within NPL while loops or arrays. You can specify an index into the array or while loop to filter on
• IA64 version now available.
• ContainsBin Plug-in: Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings. For example, ContainsBin(FrameData, ASCII, "msn").
• More UI indications of conversation status, dropped frames and the number of frames in the capture buffer.

• . and more. See our Release Notes in the NM3.2 installation directory for a complete list of new features and known issues with the Beta.

Found at VirtualWorld

Very interesting read: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/VMware-Prepares-for-HyperV/

If you have a problem customising a Windows 2003 Server template when deploying after upgrading to Virtual Center 2.5 then follow these steps:

To fix this you need to download the new sysprep files

Extract them on your VirtualCenter server and placed in the following folder: %SYSTEMDRIVE%\All Users\Application Data\Vmware\VirtualCenter\sysprep\svr2003

Once extracted the template should now work again.

For more details read the Virtual Center 2 Template usage and Best Practices found here: Usage and Best Practice Guide

Tripwire ConfigCheck is a lightweight version of Tripwire Enterprise For VMware ESX Server a security and compliance-checking application designed to evaluate large server installations. Tripwire ConfigCheck is designed to sift through the hundreds of configuration settings within VMware’s ESX Server and identify those that are not set according to VMware’s recommendations.

The new tool also provides guidelines users can follow to fix the problems, if they choose to do so.

ConfigCheck

Article found on Run-virtual

An interesting article which may help decrease the login time for your TS/Citrix session….

http://www.brianmadden.com/blog/GabeKnuth/BriForum-Video—Decreasing-Windows-Login-Time

Found this article on another blog, its very usefull for deploying citrix on vmware, I have performed most of these in the past so can vouch for this, the tuning list is from personal experience the blog and the experience of several users on the VMware forum.

Needed:

• Virtual Infrastructure 3 (Latest Version)
• Windows 2003 Std (or Enterprise) Edition R2 (x86, do not use x64)
• Citrix Presentation Server 4.0

How To:

• First this: it all depends on the applications used! Context switches is the key here…
• Use Windows 2003, not Windows 2000
• Don’t P2V your servers, but use clean templates
• Make sure the correct HAL (single or multi) is installed in the virtual machine. Otherwise, your vCPU will spike.
• Always assign 1vCPU. If necessary, add a 2^nd vCPU. Do not use 4 vCPUs!
• Use 2 GB to start. Scale up to +-4 GB of vRAM if necessary
• Use 1 .vmdk for your system partition (C:\ or other remapped drive letter) and 1 separate .vmdk for your program files.
• Put the page file on the 2^nd .vmdk
• Important: disconnect any .iso file in your virtual CD-Rom
• Use roaming profiles and cleanup your profiles at logoff
• Disable sound for your published apps
• Install the UPH service (download it here)
• User sessions: for me, 30 users on a VM. Do not expect to get as many users on it as on a physical box!
• Scale out, not up. A major advantage of VM is to clone/NewSID/sysprep existing servers and put them into your existing Citrix farm. Just stop & disable your IMA service, clean up your RMLocalDB (if you use enterprise) and NewSid the thing. Refer to this support article for more info.
• Use dual core or quad core systems. This because ESX will have more CPU to schedule its vCPUs on.
• Don’t ever use a 2 vCPU Citrix virtual machine in a 2 pCPU physical machine!
• Do not install the memory ballooning driver while installing the VMware Tools
• Do not use a complete installation Vmware tools: there is an issue with roaming profiles and the shared folders component. See this previous article for more info.
• Disable COM ports, hyperthreading, visual effects & use speedscreen technology where possible.
• Use snapshots when installing applications or patching your servers (yes! With VMware you can do this!). In case of disaster, you can still revert to the original working server without using backups. Make sure all snapshots are removed ASAP when finished!
• Always check that there are no snapshot leftovers (f.e. the infamous _VCB-BACKUP_ when using VCB)
• Don’t forget you can use DRS rules to run your citrix servers on separate physical hosts.
• Check out this vmworld 2006 presentation
• And last but not least: do not forget to read ESX's (excellent) performance tuning white paper.

Take a look at this blog, it’s a combination of a laptop, e-ink and a Nintendo DS. All I can say is, send me a prototype and I’ll be happy to test it and write a review.

Recently I needed to install multiple ESX servers by CD, the CD’s kept getting lost and scratched, I wondered if there was a way to install from USB, surely this would be faster too.

I looked through the forums and found a couple of people that had managed it, I have amended there instructions slightly to get this working….

Requirements

You will need SYSLINUX, a Linux boot loader for removable media.

This can be downloaded here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/

These instructions are based on a Windows PC for my simplicity.

If you're a Linux guru (you know who I’m talking about!), then you can obviously do this under Linux. You'd need to know how to mount .ISO images in order to extract files, etc.

Steps Required

Throughout this example my USB hard drive was I: replace this with your letter.

1.  Plug in your USB flash disk and format it in dos using the following command: FORMAT I: /FS:FAT

2.  From Windows Explorer, find the boot.iso file in the /images directory on the ESX 3.x CD-ROM. Copy boot.iso into a temporary directory on your hard drive.

3.  Using your ISO extraction or mount program, extract the contents of the boot.iso file to your USB flash drive.

4.  Delete the isolinux.bin and updatecd.cfg files from the USB disk.

5.  Rename the isolinux.cfg file on the USB flash disk to syslinux.cfg

6.  Using WordPad (not Notepad), open the syslinux.cfg file and add the keyword usb to the end of every line that begins with append. Here's what the file should look like when you're done:

default esx

prompt 1

timeout 600

display boot.msg

F1 boot.msg

F7 snake.msg

label debug

  kernel vmlinuz

  append initrd=initrd.img noapic nomediacheck debug usb

label esx

  kernel vmlinuz

  append initrd=initrd.img usb

label text

  kernel vmlinuz

  append initrd=initrd.img text usb

label expert

  kernel vmlinuz

  append expert initrd=initrd.img usb

label ks

  kernel vmlinuz

  append ks initrd=initrd.img usb

label lowres

  kernel vmlinuz

  append initrd=initrd.img lowres usb

7.   Extract the syslinux.zip file into another temporary directory on your hard drive.

8.  Open up a command prompt and navigate into the win32 directory. For example:

C:\temp\syslinux-3.36\win32

9.   Now, run the syslinux program to apply the boot loader and boot sector to the USB flash drive:

syslinux -s –ma I:

10.   Copy the ESX 3.x ISO image onto the USB drive root
 
11.   Confirm that your USB flash drive contains the following files:

boot.cat

boot.msg

initrd.img

snake.msg

splash.lss

vmlinuz

syslinux.cfg

esx-X.iso

12.   Your ready to go, ensure your bios on the server you want to install too is setup to boot from USB or select USB from the alternate boot menu.

13.   The ESX installer will detect the USB device and whatever SCSI / disk controllers you have. When the installer asks you what the installation source will be, choose Hard Disk.

14.   You will need to choose the right disk device (ie. /dev/sda, /dev/sdb) that corresponds to your USB disk. Chances are it will be /dev/sdb.

15.   Finally, the installer will ask you what directory to find the ESX installation CD image in. Just use / and it will find the .ISO image for you.

That’s everything, my servers managed to install in around 4 minutes which is not bad really!  I have now modified my 4GB USB drive to include other tools like Knoppix and a dos boot disk all amendable from the main menu with not too much work.  I might blog how to do these on another day.