The VI3 card is now ready for 1.0 status!

Forbes GuthrieNo Comments

I have spent quite a bit time over the last couple of weeks trying to tidy it up and adding in some of the 3.5 stuff which might start showing up. I haven’t had a great deal of hands-on experience with 3.5 yet, and haven’t needed to plough through the VMware documentation. Please let me know if you spot anything which is out of date. Things move so quickly in this field, it is often difficult to keep up.

So what’s next? Well, I am already gathering some material to add in a short section about 3i specific stuff. Let me know if you have any useful links.

When I was playing around with the 3i beta, I was thinking about a 3i advanced guide including busybox command listings. However, in retrospect I don’t know how much this would get used. It seems VMware want to hide this aspect as much as possible, and if you have to reboot your 3i server or set it up beforehand, then I can’t imagine many people really using it in anger.

For a long time, VMware has been promising to introduce a more advanced certification. The rumblings are starting to get louder around this, so hopefully it might be available soon. If there is extra material, or courses (which I can persuade someone to send me on) over and above the DSA course, then this could certainly be the basis for a different card. It would be great to design a card more focused towards architects.

If VMware ever improve the mess that is the RCLI, then I would definitely produce a specific reference card just for this. However, it seems like such an afterthought by them. I’m afraid that they won’t develop it further, but use it to placate the CLI and Linux set. As a little shell/editor for Windows, or a nifty little dedicated VM; this could be so useful. Unfortunately, throwing down a pile of perl scripts, just don’t cut the mustard. I like Scott Lowe’s entry here: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/01/07/underwhelmed-by-the-remote-cli/

And no, I have no great interest in MS’s powershell.

I’m hoping to get myself on a NetApp "Data ONTAP Fundamentals" course in March, so if I find that interesting enough and can get enough material together to study for the NCDA, then I might just put a card together for that. Does anyone have some good links to NCDA material, or can recommend a good book?

And lastly, I’m still interested in taking my Red Hat RHCE exam one day. I have been wanting to do this for quite some time, but I haven’t found an employer interested in Linux yet. I’m sure there are plenty RHCE reference cards already out there. I’d just love to have the opportunity to spend more time with Linux at work. Its hard studying for a fairly heavy curriculum, when I don’t get to use those skills regularly.

Oh, and I know I really need to do something about this site. I’ll need to get myself interesting in joomla, drupal, wordpress or something similar.

As always, please get in touch if you have any comments.

Corrupted vmdk and vmsd files

Forbes Guthrie4 Comments

I wanted to blog here about a silly mistake I made yesterday.

I need to expand a VM’s disk and was using the ol’ vmkfstools -X. However, I obviously do this all too flippantly and forgot to check if there was any snapshots. oops. That sunken feeling.

I corrupted the vmdk and the snapshot vmsd file.

Here’s how I fixed it all.

Firstly I couldn’t run anything against the original vmdk file, as it kept saying the file was locked by the host. I unregistered the VM from VC, put the ESX server into maintenance mode (which moved all the VMs off to other hosts in the clustering – fully enabled DRS) and power cycled the host. This remove the lock on the file thankfully.

The original vmdk had been 20GB before I tried expanding it to 30GB. So I created a new 20GB vmdk:
# vmkfstools -c 20G -d thick silver1.vmdk

I then copied the contents of the broken 30GB disk into the new one:
# dd if=silver-flat.vmdk of=silver1-flat.vmdk bs=1048576 count=20480

Moved the old vmdk and renamed the new one:
# vmkfstools -E silver.vmdk silver.vmdk.old
# vmkfstools -E silver1.vmdk silver.vmdk

All the snapshots rely upon a CID and a parentCID in their -00000x.vmdk files. I opened both snapshot disks to record the details.
# cat silver-000001.vmdk
# cat silver-000002.vmdk

Basically, 000002 parentCID is 000001’s CID. In turn 000001 parentID was set to point to the original vmdk. So I had to edit the new vmdk file and set this CID.
# vi silver.vmdk

I was then able to power on the VM. Phew!

However the snapshots were still screwed up. When I tries to commit the snapshots with:
# vmware-cmd silver.vmx removesnapshots

It thought it didn’t have any snapshots, but it was clearly using the two additional vmdk disks. The vmsd file was also corrupted. So I renamed the existing one:
# mv silver.vmsd silver.vmsd.old

Then I created a new snapshot, to re-generate a new vmsd file:
# vmware-cmd silver.vmx createsnapshot recreate_vmsd

And finally I could commit the snapshots:
# vmware-cmd silver.vmx removesnapshots

Now all that was left was to increase the disk:
#vmkfstools -X 30G silver.vmdk

I guess I won’t be doing that in a hurry again 🙂

Happy New Year

Forbes GuthrieNo Comments

I just wanted to let everyone know that I haven’t disappeared, I’m only busy.

I still plan to get another release out soon, and bring it up to 1.0 status. After that I have a couple more things to do. I’m going to create a "letter" version which will print out correctly on North American paper. After all I live here now, and I am stuck with these crazy paper sizes 😉
I am then going to add a new section, with the critical commands to use from the new RCLI with 3i. I’ve already run out of space, so I’m not sure where this is going to go. I will either have to shrink the font even more or create an annex page. If I shrink the font, then I fear your eyes might bleed.

Oh, and happy new year!