Blackforce » VMware

VMware Infrastructure, Blank / Black Console Screen

Dale — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:01:39 +0000

Its usual practice to RDP to a Virtualcenter box and then access the Console of Virtual Machines. However today I had a customer where when they went to the console screen of the VMs it just was black. No image was drawn at all.

Restarting the Virtualcenter server and the ESX servers did not resolve the matter.

The solution in the end was to increase the colour depth of the RDP session. With 256 Colours the Console screen is not drawn. Never knew that.

How to forcefully kill a virtual machine in VMware ESX

Dale — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:31:48 +0000

I had an error message come up about a VM:

The redolog of xxxxx.xx.vmdk has been detected to be corrupt. The virtual machine needs to be powered on. If the problem still persists, you need to discard the redolog.

I couldn’t power off the VM and it was stuck in an endless loop prompting me to click okay.

Found a good guide on how to kill the VM without having to power cycle the host.

- SSH to the Host that has the VM running on it.

- We need to run a command to find out the VM ID for the VM having the issue.

cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

This will return a line for each VM running.

vmid=1251 pid=-1 cfgFile="/vmfs/volumes/48ee2ea5-0d1d15c7-0d1c-001f2955194d/example/example.vmx" uuid="56 4d 07 c7 3f 85 f9 09-35 56 41 8c e9 e2 54 7b" displayName="example"

So if we wanted to kill the VM called example we will need to take note of the ID, which as you can see above is 1251.

We now need to find out the Master World ID number.

less -s /proc/vmware/vm/1251/cpu/status

A table will then appear. If you scroll to the right you should see a value under group. It will be something like vm.1234.

In this example the number will be 1234.

Run this command to kill it.

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 1234

If you got the right number you should see a line come back with

Warning: Apr 22 09:01:35.476: Sending signal '9' to world 1234

Your VM should now be off.

Link : VMware Forum

VMware ESX – Commit snapshots safely with no data loss.

Dale — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:52:05 +0000

If you have been unfortunate enough to find yourself with loads of snapshots in ESX and have snapshots with file sizes bigger than a couple of GB. Then you might be scared to commit them in case of data loss.

You can easily get rid of all the snapshots without any data loss. Using the VMKFS tools you can clone out the hard drives in their current state including snapshots to 1 VMDK. To do this run the following when SSH’d in.

vmkfstools -i harddrivename-000001.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore/ new foldername/new_harddrivename.vmdk

Then it will clone the drive. This may take a couple of hours depending on the size of your drive. Then you just attach the new drive to a newly created VM.

VMware Knowledgebase : 1002458

VMware ESX – How to find out what VM’s have snapshots / Deltas

Dale — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:41:47 +0000

Found out a nifty command which allows you to find out what VM’s have Delta / Snapshot files. Run this when SSH’d in.

find /vmfs/volumes/ -name "*delta*" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du --human-readable --total

Xbox 360 Streaming with Vista, VMware Workstation and Windows Media Player 11

Dale — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:30:10 +0000

I’ve been able to stream movies etc to my Xbox for a while now using Vista Home Premium and Windows Media Player 11. However the other day I decided to install VMware Workstation 6.5 on my laptop. Streaming then stopped working. Whenever I went into “configure sharing” in media player. I was presented with the following error message :

Media sharing is currently disabled, either because the sharing service is not running or your firewall settings have changed. To restart sharing, you must first confirm your sharing settings.

I tried a couple of things to get streaming to work, all resulted in no joy. Eventually I found 2 ways of getting it to work.

1) In Network and Sharing Center simply change the unidentified network to private. However when you next reboot it goes back to its prior state. This is less than ideal.

2) Disable the 2 VMware NICs. This is the option I took. Since I only use Bridged networking in my VM’s there is no impact. If you use NAT or host then this is not an option for you.

If anyone know any permanent way to make the vmware network private permanently then please let me know.