Just think, your lab is  in a week time and you’ve lost your all virtual machines (pub, sub, unity etc?). The ESX server doens’t boot !! hiue.. happy birthday!

Well I put about 15 hours to figure out how to bring up the creshed VMWARE ESX server.

Root cause of server CRESH:

I tried mounting 1TB disk to VMWARE but vmware ESX server kernel and anaconda doesn’t have UCCI support for USB devices.
As a result it creshed the VMWARE modules and I couldn’t recover it by using several methods including – booting from redhat/fedora/centos disk/, esxcfg-boot -p -r stuffs. nothing seemed working.
I found that the /etc/pam.d files were gone when I chrooted the ESX server hard drive. also in /etc/sysconfig/network-script/  -the folder was empty.

Solution:

It was damn easy. I wasted whole saturday night trying to figure out the best method. The challenge was I had unity, ipcc, CCM 4 to 6 vmware images in the server. So building from the screach wasn’t an option.

I tried everything but still no luck till 4am.  I took some fizzy drinks and had a quick nap of 20 minutes and then resumed what I was doing. A new idea came up in my head. Google didn’t tell me what to do and any helpy url. I popped in the vmware ESX 3.0.1 CD to my other laptop’s cdrom and started installing it.  I saw there is an option when you install a new server which says  tick on “do you want to keep existing .vmx/datastore”, just ticked there.  I was so relexed afte rseeing that option.  I took that CD out from my laptop and popped into the ESX 3.0.1 monster server (ML580) and started installation. During installation there is an option
which says “keep your vmstore” and wipe out everything. Volla … here you go , the mother of all trouble was  just sitting there in ESX partion option.

So I choose > install (not upgrade)>> then ticked on that keep old vmware-store in partion prepration step and continued the installation procedure.

In a nutshell, above excercise installed VMWARE ESX server and  also retained old partition which had my all vmware images.

The whole above process only took 40 minutes.

After installation finished, the server boot up with a fleshy screen asking for password. after I punched my password immediately i checked .vmx files and found they are there…

Sometime it’s too easy task but we seems not finding it right away. I hate vendor not documenting things like that. Yes vmware have poor documentation which wasted my Saturday night staying at home and doing nothing but playing with vmware esx box.

Anyhow, it was a good fun and i really enjoyed as there was  a challenge and it was good to find out solution by myself.

-push bhatkoti

CCIE voice#21569

How to transfer files (GIGS in size) between  ESX 3.0.1 or 3.0  server as an FTP client

A friend of mine asked me if I can sell my CCIE server to him for $1500. Normally I won’t sell it, rather keep it as a monoument, after all I passed my lab using this server.
But after several requests, to keep friendship I finally agreed to sell my server. After that the challenge was that I had to take all virtual machines backup.

On last friday I bought 1 terabytes (TB) hard disk (for AUD $200) and tried transfering files using winscp. I couldn’t transfer those files because those were biggg.

So finally I had to install vsftp in the ESX server and make a softlink of my /vmfs to a ftp users home directory then download using “File zilla ftp client”

Hardware details: HP ML-580, Dual Xeon 3.0 processor, 4 gig RAM. loaded with CCM pub/sub, unity and IPCC.

Here is the procedure:

1. SSH to ESX server – issue ‘chkconfig iptables off’ , service iptables stop (its culprit)
2. Download vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm
3. Copy vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm to your ESX server
4. SSH to your ESX server console using root account (make sure in /etc/sshd/sshd_config has root account enabled else use below method)
5. after loggin in using a normal user, become the root user (su -)
6. Install the FTP server rpm -ivh vsftpd-1.2.0-4.i386.rpm –nodeps
   
7. vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf
   • Change anonymous_enable=NO (for security)
   • You need to add the following lines to force passive mode to only use ports 2050-5000.
     pasv_min_port=2050
     pasv_max_port=5000
8. Start the FTP server with service vsftpd start
9. Create a user. Do not use ‘anonymous’ or ‘ftp’.
   User and Pass cannot contain symbols like @ (single quote)
   • adduser mybackups.
   • passwd mybackups.
10. To have the ftp server automatically start on boot, type:
    chkconfig –level 3 vsftpd on
11. Remember you will probably have to change the permissions on the /vmfs/volume you are using as a FTP destination.
    chmod 1777 /vmfs/volumes/(UUID of Folder)
    You can also link the path to a simpler name, such as:
    ln -s /vmfs/volumes/UUID-NAME/backups /backups
    Then use just ‘/backups’ in the esXpress configuration.
12. use filezillaftp  client to download the files from ESX server

gochaas?

Make sure that you have NTFS or Ext2/3 file system where you are going to store the files.
I had FAT32 and it won’t copy more than 4 gig file size. It will come up with error saying that no desk space. how stupid is this error message, after all I had 1TB of hdd and still got that message that can’t copy the file , disk running out of space.

Here is the limitations:

fat16 – 2 gig max
fat32 – 4 gig max
NTFS – Above 2TB
EXT2/3 – 2 TB

Thats all.