VMware View 5 – Consolidating Snapshots

I’ve not updated my blog in a while but thought I would write about how safe it is to consolidate snapshots.

I’d heard conflicting reports of how users had had problems about consolidating snapshot chains within VMs that are being used as ‘Gold’ images within VMware View.

Take the following VM snapshot chain…

VM1 >> Team1 >> Updated Apps >> Updated OS1 >> Added App5 >> Updated OS2 >> You are here

I have found that it is completely safe to click on say ‘Updated OS1’ and click delete. What this will do is consolidate where you updated the OS in snapshot ‘Updated OS1’, in to ‘Updated Apps’.

Basically, the tree moves sideways. All the information from that particular snapshot that you deleted, will consolidate in to the one before.

The last thing you need to do is make sure the tree is up to date when it comes to provisioning more Virtual Machines.

Open VMware View Admin console, naigate to the Inventory > Pools > Select the relevant pool > Edit > vCenter Settings > Snapshot, and just relselect the snapshot you wish to deploy from. It may already be up to date with the latest Snapshot Tree information, but just in case I would do this again.

Hope this helps and removes some fear from removing Intermediary snapshots!

Major Issues with ESXi 5 Datastore connectivity – latency message

I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem with ESXi 5.0.0 but I am having an issue where the event logs are showing that connection to a Thecus NAS device is dropping every 5 seconds to every 5 minutes.

The VMX configuration files int he inventory change to ‘Unknown’ and then roughly around 10 seconds later they come back. The VM 99% of the time doesnt turn off but I have known it to.

The way that the standalone ESXi server is set up in this configration has worked perfectly with previous versions and I can only put down this ‘latency’ message to fcat that I have installed or upgraded I should say to ESXi 5.

The server has 2 NICs that were teamed to host all the VMs on a 10.0.x.x range with the NAS device also on the same range presenting the storage via iSCSI. I know that VMware recommend that the storage be presented on a separate IP range but this has worked before.

I have now tried having 1 NIC set up for ISCSI vmkernel and 1 for VM Network and binding the sofware iSCSI adapter to the vmkernel port for iSCSI but no luck. Next is to add an ip range for iSCSI after that I’m stuck and it will be a fresh install of ESXi 4.1.0 which I know works. The only issue I might have is that I’ve already formatted the LUN that stores the VMs as VMFS v5 😦

Can’t install Exchange 2003 on Server 2003

Had a problem where after installing all the prerequisites on Server 2003, fully patching it, installing all updates and AV I got the dreaded

Exchange is not compatible with this version of Windows.

Now, in the past ive usually clicked continue and that should be that. Although this time it was greyed out!

Long story short… EXCHANGE 2003 DOES NOT WORK ON WINDOWS SERVER 2003 X64

Bugger!

Upgraded to ESXi 5.0.0

It’s about time but we’ve finally upgraded one of our ESXi servers to version 5.
Whilst I can’t comment too much on the features because it’s not a part of VCenter I can say that the upgrade process is painless. It is simply a case of sticking the CD in, going through the options to upgrade and you’re done!

As for upgrading the ESXi servers within a VCenter environment I will post about that when I get round to it.