The guys over at vmrefernce.com have just updated there VI3 reference card, having used the last version many times and always keeping a copy on my desk I would check out the updated version and print off a few copies for you and your colleagues.

I have just recieved an email notification from Vizioncore about a new product:

Vizioncore Inc., today announced that vRanger Pro 3.2.8, the latest version of its recognized industry-standard backup and restore solution, will be the first and only product on the market today to provide full support for VMware ESXi 3.5.

VMware ESXi 3.5 provides a thin hypervisor compared to the full ESX version, and has been designed to provide a smaller footprint to both simplify adoption of virtualization as well as increase security of the platform. Both free and licensed versions of VMware ESXi exist, and vRanger Pro 3.2.8 will provide backup and restore currently for only licensed versions typically found in large organizations.

“While other solutions do exist on the market, they are only able to provide backup and cannot properly restore. These products do not incorporate a method to support ESXi without the console capability that existed in ESX,” explains Chris Akerberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore Inc. “vRanger Pro is the only product available today that both backs up and restores virtual machine images running on VMware ESXi hosted servers without the need for scripting.”

VMware has been shipping a free version of ESXi, however the free version has limited functionality. While the free version makes it easy for customers to adopt virtualization, they will need to move to licensed versions of ESXi to allow them to take advantage of additional functionality provided by VMware such as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), Update Manager, HA and VMotion. Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro 3.2.8 can leverage the VCB framework to perform full backup as well as offering significant value-add features such as differential backups and compression of ESXi.

Another important feature offered by vRanger Pro 3.2.8 allows users to take advantage of remote data access that VMware has provided for a clean and simplified restore process. “Customers are looking to adopt ESXi because it is an embedded install which is far more secure and reliable for the user,” continues Akerberg. “At Vizioncore, as we rapidly respond to new developments in the virtualization market, we demonstrate, yet again, that Vizioncore leads the way when it comes to providing support for VMware’s latest technology.”

For more information please visit www.vizioncore.com.

After configuring a few NLB VM’s recently on VMware I was intrigued when one of the people I follow on twitter was having issues with cloned NLB’s, SimonLong_ kindly agreed to document the details so I could blog about it and share his experience……

My Job; Cluster 2 VM’s using Microsoft NLB, a simple 2 minute job right? Wrong!

Why? Because my 2^nd VM was a clone of the 1^st.

Once I had my newly created VM’s configured I proceeded to fire up the NLB Manager tool and began to create my new cluster. Cluster configured…first VM added to the cluster, no problems.

Then I tried to add the 2^nd VM… I was confronted with this Error:

“No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster”

Great there goes my lunch break!

After a little Googling I come across this MS Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828258

Because I had cloned the 2^nd VM this meant that the Network Adapters on both VM’s had identical GUID’s in the registry and apparently NLB isn’t a fan of matching GUID’s.

There are two ways I found to fix this;

1. The Lazy way (which I first used)
2. My Recommend solution found here (which I now use, when I realised that I was being a Cowboy).

Solution 1

• Add a second NIC to either VM that your trying to cluster
• Remove the configuration and Disable the primary NIC
• Configure the second NIC

You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

Solution 2

• On either VM enter “Device Manager”
• Expand “Network Adapters” and right mouse click on the Network adapter that you are trying to add to the NLB configuration.
• Select ‘Uninstall’. NIC has now been uninstalled.
• Next you want to re-add the network card which in turn will create a new GUID for it. Do this by right mouse clicking your servers name at the top of the ‘Device Manager’ list and select ‘Scan for hardware changes’. This will now re-detect the NIC and give it a new GUID.
• Now exit out of “Device Manager”
• Re-configure the NIC

You should now be able to add both VM’s to the NLB Cluster.

Now that I was able to add the VM into the cluster I did receive the following errors;

· Could not read configuration of interface "{DF52417D-E337-4543-A223-8D17514E02BC}": error 0x800706ba

· Update 2 failed with error 0x800706ba

Ignore it the VM still seems to converge fine into the cluster.