TechDecode.Com

ESXi and Qlogic HBA’s Paths – Now You See ‘Em, Now You Don’t

mike — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:23:37 +0000

For some wierd reason, I have a ESXi 4.1 U2 cluster of HP BL460c G7 blade servers that seem to have a mind of their own. Well, at least their Qlogic QMH2562 8GB FC HBA’s do. It all started after we installed the new blade chassis and built out the new cluster of ESXi boxes. At random intervals, random boxes, and random HBA units, for saome reason, they would drop their logon to the Clariion CX4 array via Brocade 5900 switches. one time it would be HBA2 on server 1, another HBA3 on server 5. Just wierd, wacky stuff.

So i strated with VMware support and opened a ticket. Almost immediately, they pointed fingers at EMC and told me I had to open a case with them before they would proceed any further. So we did. A little while longer, EMC pointed squarley at VMware and said it was their issue, or just buy PowerPathVE and all will be right with the world. Meanwhile, I’m calling HP, who won’t let me opwn a case on software I did not purchase from them (which is total BS), and who told me to use their “forums” to get assistance. Lame.

Ok, so everyone is pointing at everyone else, but we are getting nowhere and the only way for us to get our dead/broken paths back is to reboot the boxes. They come back up with all 4 paths, but after awhile, they start disappearing again. I got pretty tired of cycling these boxes through maintenance mode and reboots just to resolve this issue, so I started my hunt to find a better way. i had to dig really deep and put in just the right Googly words, but finally came up with a duct-tape fix until a vendor comes back with something worthwhile.

Thanks so much to Cameron Kennedy and his blog post on how to force a Qlogic HBA to re-login to the array – no reboot needed! Here’s the gist of it -

Find out what host has a HBA that’s offline by looking in the GUI for 2 broken or missing paths.
SSH into the host and cd /proc/scsi/qla2xxx. There should be 2 files there, one for each hba.
Cat each file to see which one is offline – the last few lines end in “…. Offline”. The good hba will say “… Online”.
Enter the following, substituting for the number of the file that shows Offline:

echo “scsi-qlalip” > /proc/scsi/qla2xxx/

Watch the paths magically re-appear in a few seconds in the GUI. If they don’t, do a Rescan to force it.

**Note: This is an ongoing support case with VMware and EMC. If I have updates, I’ll post them as I get them.

HP Opens VIB’s Depot for vSphere

mike — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:11:15 +0000

HP opened a new website for HP hardware running vSphere. This site allows you to connect directly from Update Manager, Image Builder, or manually download hardware bundles that can be installed on your HP hardware running vSphere. Check it out here – http://vibsdepot.hp.com/

vCenter 5 Issues with Non-Standard SQL Port For Performance Stats

mike — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:17:45 +0000

I recently was asked by a DBA to investigate moving a vCenter 5 DB from SQL 2005 over to SQL 2008R2 and determine the best way to do it. I checked around and found that it was a fairly straight forward process, while adding a few manual steps for the DBS to recreate some of the SQL Agent jobs in the MSDB (You should really automate this VMware).

The DBA moved the DB without an issue and recreated the Agent jobs. All seemed well for awhile, but then something wierd happened. I was looking through some of the VM’s Performance charts in the Advaned tabs, and then somehow clicked on the Overview button (which I almost never look at). Bang – a big red error bullet – “Perf charts service experienced an internal error”. Hmmm. So I go to my friend Google and try my luck. VMware has two KB articles that I found that contained the subject I was looking for – KB1035561 and KB1012812. Both offered very little help since they are both written (and NOT updated) for vCenter 4. But, they did help me look for the right log – stats.log, although it is in a different location on Windows 2008R2 (\Program Data\VMware\Vmware VirtualCenter\Logs). In that log, I found the issue -

Caused by: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: The TCP/IP connection to the host mysqlserver/INF, port 1433 has failed. Error: "null. Verify the connection properties, check that an instance of SQL Server is running on the host and accepting TCP/IP connections at the port, and that no firewall is blocking TCP connections to the port.".

Our DBA’s have a 2008R2 cluster that serves many, many databases. In order to do that, SQL requires you to use different TCP ports for the seperate instances, not only for DB seperation, but also increased security. So, our instance isn’t listening on TCP 1433, but rather TCP 54321. On that note, I thought it was funny that VMware suggests to fix the non-standard port problem is to go in and change it back to 1433 on the SQL server. Ok VMware, so let’s just throw security out the door on this one, huh?

So I found the culprit, now to try and fix it. I tried several different things that Googling had me chasing my tail on like changing the ODBC string to add the port (the same as the Regsitry edits that VMware suggested – \,). This didn’t work. After getting the DBA’s involved and running traces, they were insistent that the slashes in the default vcdb.properties file (the connection file that the Management Webservices service uses to make stats reports (i.e. Performance charting) were wrong. The original vcdb.properties file looked like this:

# For Windows, just deduce the JDBC URL and user/password from the # data source information in the VC registry

usevcdb=true

url=jdbc:sqlserver://mysqlserver/INF;databaseName\=vcenterDB;integratedSecurity\=true

dbtype=mssql driver=com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver

I then commented out the usevcdb=true line (as per VMware KB) and changed the url line to reflect the new port:

#usevcdb=true

url=jdbc:sqlserver://mysqlserver/INF:54321;databaseName\=vcenterDB;integratedSecurity\=true

Still no joy. The DBA’s said, “Trust us, add another slash before the instance name.” Ok.

url=jdbc:sqlserver://mysqlserver//INF:54321;databaseName\=vcenterDB;integratedSecurity\=true

Nope, still no-workey. On a whim, i Googled again, this time for JDBC. I found a document in the vSphere online documentation titled “JDBC URL Formats for the vCenter Server Database”. It showed examples of using the double slahes, but in the opposite direction (they still did not have any example for using an Instance Name though). So I tried this:

url=jdbc:sqlserver://mysqlserver\\INF:54321;databaseName\=vcenterDB;integratedSecurity\=true

I restarted the Management Webservices service and Bingo! The stats log looked good with no errors, and I opened the vCenter client, clicked on the Overview button, and everything looked like nothing had ever gone wrong. All the charts were there.

This was a head-scratcher of a problem, confusing both myself and the DBA’s. VMware’s notorious lack of updated documentation and KB articles did not help the issue either. but, in the end, me and my best friend Google saved the day… again.

EMC Clariion / VNX DIY Heatmaps Updated

mike — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:47:59 +0000

Penguinpunk.net has posted about the new update of scripts that will produce interesting heatmaps of disk utilization for EMC Clariion and VNX arrays. It is very simple to use and quite cool.

The article is here.

VMJuggler for PowerCLI

mike — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:41:13 +0000

Maish over at his Technodrone blog publlished a PowerCLI version of Richard Garsthagen’s executable for VMJuggler. For those that do not know, VMJuggler performs a constant vMotion of a guest between two hosts to measure network throughput, latency, etc. Great tool!

Go to the Technodrone article

ESXi 4.x to 5 VM Migrations Come With Possible HA Protection Issues

mike — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:40:17 +0000

In setting up a new ESXi 5 cluster of hosts, I naturally enabled the High Availability feature before moving or creating any VM’s on it. I had a ESXi 4.1 cluster that this ESXi 5 was replacing, so I started to vMotion machines once I had the storage shared between the two. I moved about 10 machines when I started to notce that on the machine summaries, under “VShpere HA Protection”, they were all showing as “Unprotected”. Hmm. I checked the HA datastores and sure enough, it showed that there were no Protected VM’s, and 10 Unprotected VM’s. So, I did what every good admin does, I started Googling.

VMware calls this out in their new vSphere Online documentation, but is of course in true VMware fashion, very cryptic in how to resolve it. Nothing they had really pertained to my situation, so I decided to try the obvious option, disable HA and then re-enable it. It worked. All the machines then showed as “Protected”. So, I moved on and migrated a few more. Low and behold, they showed as “Unprotected”. move a few more, disable HA, re-enable HA, and they are now “Protected”.

I feel kinda bad for folks that may have hundreds or even thousands of VM’s they have to migrate, as this process will be a royal PITA.

Adding Web App Icons to Office 365 “E” Plans

mike — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:03:19 +0000

Just a quick Office 365 tip I found. The company I’m working with is doing a kick the tires POC on Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan. In their infinite wisdom (and yes, that’s a joke), the Office 365 folks have decided to not give the “E” plan users the same as the “P” plan (Small business) users in that when a user logs in to the portal, they don’t have these very convenient icons that allow them to create Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote documents without having to go through hoops. And by hoops, I mean not only for the users, but the administrators as well since they have to manually create the document types in the libraries in order for users to create them. What a huge pain in the butt. What I don’t need is for Microsoft to make my job harder.

So here’s something I stumbled across that was posted on the Office 365 community threads between Myles Jeffery, and Office 365 MVP (wow, they already have them??), and Alex Kap. Here’s the jist of it -

You will need to know something about working with SharePoint Designer to do this. I don’t know a lot, but had enough to get by for this.

You’ll also need to create a new subsite off your Home site that uses the Express Team Site template. That appears to be the only way to get the icons and the code to add them to any document library. You’ll also have to create a new document library since, like I said, I’m not that good with Designer and I usually don’t like messing with “default” anything, but rather a copy of it.

In the subsite, open the “Documents” library on that site.
Click on the Site Actions dropdown. Select Site Settings.
Click on Customize Documents.
Click on Save document library as a template.
Give it a filename, etc., and check Include Content.
Once created, open SharePoint designer and open the subsite in it.
Open the Lists and Libraries, double click on the site.
Click on the All Files in the left pane, and then the Document Library you created. Click on the + next to the library name. Click on the + next to Forms.
Right-click on AllItems.aspx and select Advanced Edit.
Add this text at the top, after the others like it -

<%@ Register TagPrefix=”WpNs0″ Namespace=”Microsoft.SharePoint.Spx” Assembly=”Microsoft.SharePoint.Spx, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c”%>

Add this text to any place you like after the tags -

Right-click on the filename in the tab on top, and select Save. You’ll get a warning, but go ahead anyways.

That’s it. If you refresh the page now, you should see the icons in the page. I not, don’t ask me.

One more thing, if you want to add these icons to a page that is “outside” the subsite (say, maybe the Home site), you’ll need to add this CSS code to the Document Template. I have no idea if it works yet, and even where to put it, but that’s what I read.

Customizing the Citrix Web Interface 5.4

mike — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:02:07 +0000

There are some very long threads on the Citrix forums, along with other blogs and articles, on how to customize the Web interface 5.4 interface. there are so many good ideas out there from folks that I wanted to combine them all into one post. I would thank them all by name, but there are too many and some I cannot remember. I got a lot of them via this forum posting and my thanks to all who contributed.

Web Interface is difficult to customize for the average I.T. folks. Citrix makes it that way, and I’m not sure why they do (or rather why their contracted web developers do), but it really is a pain and a struggle to get the pages they way you want. One Citrix SE asked me, “Why would you want to modify it? It’s great the way it is”. After I told him that he has drunk too much Citrite Kool-Aid, I reminded him that not all users in this world like to see “change”, especially change that makes them think they are not in the right place, doing the right things.

Here is a list of things you can do to make changes to the default out-of-the-box site that Citrix makes for you. It is in no way an extensive list, the best way to do things, or even supported by Citrix. Heck, it’ll probably be overwritten on the first patch you put in place in the WI. So use them at your own risk. ‘Nuff said.

A lot of things on the layout of the pages can be removed or modified by editing the\app_data\include\fullstyle.inc file. This is basically a CSS style sheet for all the pointers in the aspx and javascript files that make up the whole HTML page. By adding a line to a particular section you want to not show on the page, you simply add “display: none;” at the bottom. There’s also the subject of images. Some important things to keep in mind when replacing images is that 1) Always make a backup, and 2) Always try to keep the image the same size and type as the one you are replacing. Most images in 5.4 now come as two flavors, .PNG and .GIF, so you will need to replace both for High and Low graphics. The sites Webinterface.conf file is another place to look to enable or disable features manually (which I advise against), or to add custom text to the custom Content that you can add via the GUI (i.e. Logon text, footer text, etc.). The biggest reason I use this is since I want to add a URL to the footer of all my screens, but if you add it via the GUI, it doesn’t format right. One very important thing to keep in mind about the Webinterface.conf file – anytime you open a site in the GUI, it modifies that file, so if you made manual edits, they may be gone after. Always check for certain.

Fullstyle.inc Edits:

**Remove CTX tagline – only use if not changing tagline text. Otherwise, see “Change CTX Default Tagline Text” below.

#hor1izonTagline {

color: #F2F2F2;

font-size: 180%;

font-weight: normal;

margin: 50px 0 0 0;

padding-bottom: 10px;

text-align: center;

display: none;

}

** Remove all footer images and text (this includes the HDX and Citrix logos, and also any Footer text you may have specified in the Web Site Appearance Wizard)

#footer img

{

padding: 0 8px;

vertical-align: middle;

display: none;

}

.horizonPage #hdxLogo {

display: inline;

display: none;

}

.horizonPage #footer p {

color: #F2F2F2;

display: none;

}

**Change SysMessage text size and bold

#sysMessage

{

width: <%=wiContext.getString(“PageWidth”)%>;

margin: 0 auto;

padding-top: 8px;

font-size: 12px;

font-weight: bold;

}

<%

// The width is set shorter than the background width

%>

#sysMessage p

{

text-align: left;

padding: 10px 0;

font-size: 14px;

font-weight: bold;

}

**Change Tagline to smaller font

#horizonTagline {

color: #F2F2F2;

font-size: 120%;

font-weight: normal;

margin: 50px 0 0 0;

padding-bottom: 10px;

text-align: center;

}

Graphics Changes:

**Replace CTX XenApp top logo with YourLogo.png

replace \media\CitrixXenApp.png
replace \media\CitrixXenAppLoggedoff.png

**Remove computer screens graphic

rename \media\Devices.png to Devices_orig.png
rename \media\Devices.gif to Devices_orig.gif
rename \media\DevicesLoggedoff.gif to DevicesLoggedoff_orig.gif
rename \media\DevicesLoggedoff.png to DevicesLoggedoff_orig.png

Misc. Changes:

**Change CTX default tagline text

copy \program giles\citrix\web interface\5.4.0\languages\accessplatform_strings.properties to \inetpub\wwwroot\citrix\\languages.
Edit file:
- #HorizonTagline=Your Windows desktops and apps on demand – from any PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet.
- HorizonTagline=

**Add logo to Login box (Thanks Jon Woods!)

\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\XenApp\app_data\include\loginMainForm.inc
<% // LoginType set to Explicit, but only if it is allowed
if (viewControl.getExplicitDisabled()) {
%>
value=”">
<% } else { %>
value=”<%=WIAuthType.EXPLICIT%>”>
<% } %>
<%
}
%>
<% // added table row and cell for logo %>

<% // end table row and cell for logo %>
<%
if (viewControl.getShowLoginTypeOptions()) {
%>
**Add the desktop Viewer (Drop-down toolbar) to Virtual Desktops (Be careful, this has been known to mess with Dual Displays):
In the sites webinterface.conf file, add line – “ShowDesktopViewer=On”
**Override the styles:
read the posting on this forum string from “efontan512″. Really good stuff.
**Add logo to top left:
\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\XenApp\app_data\include\header.inc
before:

<%
after:

;
<%

HP releases new ESXi 5.0 image for download

mike — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:13:51 +0000

For those of you that may use the HP customized version of the ESXi 5.0 image (like I do), HP has released an updated Sept. 2011 image on the Software Depot. Here’s a list of fixes and known issues from the relase notes. Folks that use AutoDeploy, be warned that it is still broken with the included be2net driver for Emulex 10Gb Nics.

The new updates for the HP ESXi 5.0 customized image for September 2011 include:
• The VMware ESXi 5.0, Patch Release ESXi500-201109001.
• An updated license file that resolves the issue described in http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?locale=en_US&objectID=c03005742.
The new features introduced in ESXi 5.0 are as follows:
• Supports G5 through G7 upgrade.
• Provides BladeSystem, Virtual Connect, and FlexFabric support.
• VMware IOVP Certified Device Drivers added to HP ESXi 5.0 installation images for HP device enablement.
• Supports HPSIM, HP Insight Control for Virtual Center.
• SNMP Trap support via Providers.
• Insight Control HPSIM, WEBES and RDP support for HP customized images.
• Supports update of HP VIBs using VUM.
• Supports remote online reporting of installed FW versions (report generated via CIM provider data).
• Support for VMware AutoDeploy with HP VMware ImageProfile.
• Provides a HP-VMware Online Depot on the Web in support of image build customer update using VUM.
• Includes HPONCFG and HPBOOTCFG. (See HP VMware Utilities User Guide).
• Supports Intel Trusted Execution Tecnology (TXT).

Important notes and recommendations
• HP-Brocade Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters are not supported with HP-Management software in this release
• HP-Brocade devices require device drivers that are not included in this release. HP-Management software for ESXi 5.0 will not support any HP-Brocade Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters with this release.
HP-Qlogic devices require additional driver(s)
• HP-Qlogic devices CN1000Q and NC523SFP require device drivers that are not included in this release.
• VMware AutoDeploy is not supported with this release through HP-Emulex 10Gb adapters, including G7 BL-series servers with HP-Emulex 10Gb adapters as the embedded networking solution Emulex be2net driver included in VMware OS media does not have support for gPXE, which is a pre-requisite for VMware AutoDeploy support.
• Flex-10 and Flex Fabric configurations are not supported with the VMware ESXi 5.0 inbox be2net 4.0.88.0 driver due to a VLAN tagging issue
• The Autodeploy, Flex Fabric, and Flex-10 issues will be resolved with an updated be2net driver and firmware set that will be available in the near future.

Fun & Schmoozing at EMCworld

mike — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:12:57 +0000

My second day at EMCworld proved to be better than the first. I sat in some god sesions covering VPLEX and virtual storage, which has some very promising things coming out in the not too distant future (alpha right now). The Unified Storage lab, although tough to get into (as all the labs are), was showing some really cool new features that will be in the next two releases. Then it was on to the Solutions Pavilion where the real schmoozing started. I was suprised to see quite a few new partners where the names where not familiar, but they had some pretty cool product technologies. The mood was casual and had some god conversations and a few laughs trying to race mini cars around the track vs a collegue.

I’m just starting Day 3 and looking forward to more!