Firewall Ports KB

Forbes Guthrie4 Comments

VMware has just released a new KB article covering all the firewall ports requirements for the following products:

  • Consolidated Backup
  • Converter 3.x
  • Converter 4.x
  • Data Recovery
  • ESX 3.x
  • ESX 4.x
  • ESXi 3.x
  • ESXi 4.x
  • Guided Consolidation
  • Lab Manager
  • Orchestrator
  • Site Recovery Manager
  • Stage Manager
  • Update Manager
  • vCenter 2.5.x
  • vCenter 4.x
  • View 3.x
  • View 4.x
  • View/VDM 2.x

This is something that has been sorely missing from VMware’s official documentation.  Some of the PDFs just don’t give the detail you would normally expect.  However this KB contains all the headers that a firewall engineer would need.  Great stuff.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1012382

Of course if you want to get a feel for the overall environment, then Dudley Smith’s fantastic Firewall Ports Diagram is still the best resource out there:

http://www.vreference.com/2009/09/22/firewall-diagram-updated-to-version-3/

vReference card 2nd page beta

Forbes Guthrie10 Comments

I’ve been working hard on creating the supplementary page that I discussed and asked for feedback here. I’ve been concentrating on the areas which are mentioned in the VCP4 blueprints, but are not covered in the card at the moment.  These are core parts of vSphere, but a probably not as important as the ones on the current card.

This is very much a beta version, and there is still plenty to do.  However, as a lot of people are studying for their VCP before the December 31st deadline (myself included), I though it might be useful to everyone to get it out there as soon as I could.  As an unfinished  beta, I’m looking for any sort of feedback you have.  Let me know below if you spot anything missing or incorrect.

So far the new sections are:

  • Compliance (Host profiles, esxupdate & Update Manager)
  • vCenter Converter
  • Backups (vDR & VCB)
  • Guided Consolidation
  • CLI & vMA – not finished yet
  • Orchestrator – not finished yet

Hope you find it useful.

SupplementBeta1

Don't make /tmp too small

Forbes Guthrie8 Comments

The default GUI install of ESX4 makes the /tmp partition 1GB and even then it is only categorized as optional.  I’ve been asked several times why you’d want to make /tmp any bigger.  If it fills up you just clear it out, right?

Well here’s a good reason.  It seems that VUM (vCenter Update Manager) uses /tmp.  When you stage updates, VUM copies all the patches to the folder /tmp/updatecache.  It does the sensible thing and checks that there is enough space first, but if it can’t then it tries to create a ramdisk.  I don’t think I’m that keen on my server’s ram being tied up with patches.  Sometimes you might want to stage the patches days in advance of an outage.  I’d hope that the ESX is clever enough to dump the ramdisk if there was any sort of memory contention, but still.

Anyway, with ESX3 I know the patches could accumulate to quite a size (a couple of GBs if you left them a few months). I hear ESX4 is better in this regard, however I would suggest keeping at least 2GB for /tmp during the install.

VUM isn’t a crucial service.  You can always manually copy patches to a different partition, but VUM (especially the new staging feature) is a real time-saver so I know I’ll be making sure there is plenty of space in /tmp.