I received the following error this morning on my vCenter server after a brief reboot for a few Windows updates:
Hardware Monitoring on This Host is Not Responding
This error is generated when I click on the Hardware Status tab on each Host. I went to Plugins -> Manage Plugins disabled and re-enabled to no avail.
Came across this post at VMware Communities. Looked at half the suggestions and came to one indicating to restart the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices.
I had some temperature spikes in the data center recently that caused havoc and for some reason I never received notifications. I guess this isn’t configured to email by default, rather it sends a trap.
To change this behavior so that I can get escalating notifications when temperature dramatically spikes, you can modify it to do so.
Go to the Alarms for the vCenter server root domain and double-click on Host Hardware Temperature Status:
In the settings for this, you want to change the action (click on Action tab) to send email notification. I send to my email as well as SMS:
You can always check out what the temperature is of your ESX host by going to the ESX host in vCenter and clicking on Hardware Status tab and expanding Front Panel Board Ambient Temp (or similar depending on your hardware):
I recently discovered a utility called fio that allows you to benchmark disk subsystem in Linux. Here are the results for this test.
What is fio?
fio is an I/O tool meant to be used both for benchmark and stress/hardware verification. It has support for 13 different types of I/O engines (sync, mmap, libaio, posixaio, SG v3, splice, null, network, syslet, guasi, solarisaio, and more), I/O priorities (for newer Linux kernels), rate I/O, forked or threaded jobs, and much more. It can work on block devices as well as files. fio accepts job descriptions in a simple-to-understand text format. Several example job files are included. fio displays all sorts of I/O performance information. Fio is in wide use in many places, for both benchmarking, QA, and verification purposes. It supports Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X, OpenSolaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows.
Windows fio download: http://www.bluestop.org/fio/
OS – Debian Linux “Wheezy” AMD64
RAM – 8GB
Virtualized – YES
VMware Tools – YES
Disk – 1 x 50GB Thin Provisioned
Test File – 10GB
Note: Disk is on a LUN that is comprised of RAID5 using 6 disks @ 15kRPM – no throttling for disk/cpu is configured on VM.
Here are my fio test files:
[randrw] rw=randread size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=randr-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=randread size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=randr-8k bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=randrw size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=randrw-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=randrw size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=randrw-8k bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=randwrite size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=randw-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=randrw size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=random-rw-direct bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=read size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqr-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=read size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqr-8k bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=rw size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqrw-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=rw size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqrw-8k bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=write size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqw-4k bs=4k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log [randrw] rw=write size=10G direct=1 directory=/tmp/ numjobs=1 group_reporting name=seqw-8k bs=8k runtime=30 write_iops_log write_lat_log write_bw_log
I used fio_generate_plot to generate gnuplot graphs.
In vSphere Client 4.1, it is documented that to disable the Getting Started tab of VMs, you go to Edit -> Client Settings and untick Show Getting Started Tabs as noted below:
Came across a great step-by-step article on migrating from standard vSwitch to vNetwork Distributed Switch in VMware vSphere 4.1.x.
Zod Chen did a great write-up on his site dashVue: http://www.dashvue.com/2011/04/migrating-to-vnetwork-distributed-switch/
