Monday, July 1, 2013

Excessive snapshot size but Snapshot Manager shows no snapshots?

Okay, so we got the alarm about excessive snapshot size and deleted snapshots.

It came back a while later and said "Unable to access file <unspecified filename> since it is locked"

Looking a little more closely, the snapshot was from commvault and it hadn't "Released disk lease" yet.

The end result is we still have a snapshot, which you can tell from the files in the VM's folder in the datastore, but snapshot manager shows no snapshots.

FIX:
Take a snapshot manually.

It will take a minute or so extra, but in the end it shows not only the one you created, but also the "Consolidate Helper- 0" snapshot


Friday, June 28, 2013

OVF

So, I rarely have to work with OVF files and they're a big pain every time I do and there are probably better ways to do this, but here's what I got to work:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool --network="<network you want to connect the VM to>" -ds=<datastore name> "<full path to appliance>" vi://<user>:<password>@<vcenter fqdn>/?ip=<ip of the host you want to initiate the copy to>

One additional thing I had to overcome was that the appliance was set to be hardware level 9 and I needed this in a v4.1 environment ... and the .mf file has checksums on the .ovf and the .vmdk

Special thanks to me already having a XUBUNTU instance going and to Jon Giffard's Blog for the instruction:

"openssl sha1  <filename>
This will give you the sha1 checksum.  Now edit the MF file and replace the old value with your new one.
vSphere will now deploy your appliance without complaining of a checksum error"

Friday, May 10, 2013

So yes, you can install Windoes8/Server12 in a VMware 4.x environment using the bios.400.rom trick.

That has worked well enough, but I learned a couple somethings over the last week.

Long story, but I'm moving my VMs to new datastores.

I could not get a Server12 VM to move. It is a heftier than normal VM, weighing in at 800GB and the move would go for hours and fail with:

A general system error occurred: Source detected that destination failed to resume.

Frustrating.

Eventually I asked the server owner if I could take it down for a day and get the move done, which went well until I went to power the VM back up.

Could not open bios.440.rom (No such file or directory).

I looked and no, the bios.440.rom file had not been moved. I re-uploaded it and the server booted fine.