Veeam acquires nworks

Their customers have been asking to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures through a single console – and we know that many of you have significant investments in HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.  That’s why Veeam’s acquisition of nworks, announced today, is exciting news for all our customers.

nworks’ products are the Smart Plug-In for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager and the Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager. These connectors allow you to directly incorporate day-to-day VMware management into enterprise management frameworks from HP and Microsoft.

By combining Veeam’s resources with nworks’ proven enterprise management expertise, we’re moving the industry closer to eliminating the management separation of the physical and virtual worlds that has been problematic since the inception of virtual infrastructures.

Recreating Missing VMDK Descriptor Files!

A few times over the years VMDK files have been ‘lost’ when a customer has had to shutown their storage in a less than graceful fashion.

In every case so far, touch wood, it is only the desciptor files that have been deleted so the raw data is still present in the *-flat.vmdk file.

It is actually quite simple to rescue the situation you simply restore from backup. Ahaha what if you do not have a backup, then there is another way.

Firstly, identify the size of the *-flatvmdk file using putty or something similar. Once you know how big it is, 250GB for instance, either find another flat-vmdk file the same size or create a new one that size.

Once you have created or identified the 250GB *-flat.vmdk you’ll notice it has an accompanying *.vmdk file, run a cat against it, and you’ll notice something like this:

cat rescue_me.vmdk

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=7131fc31
parentCID=ffffffff
createType=”vmfs”

# Extent description
RW 419430400 VMFS “rescue_me-flat.vmdk”

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = “4″
ddb.geometry.cylinders = “26108″
ddb.geometry.heads = “255″
ddb.geometry.sectors = “63″
ddb.adapterType = “lsilogic”
ddb.toolsVersion = “7201″

Now make a copy of this file to the folder that has the original *-flat.vmdk file:

cp rescue_me.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/mysan/rescued/rescued.vmdk

Using your favourite editor change the following line as below from:

RW 419430400 VMFS “rescue_me-flat.vmdk”

To:

RW 419430400 VMFS “rescued-flat.vmdk”

Obviously making sure that the name of the .vmdk file corresponds to the scis*:*.fileName field in the Virtual Machine vmx file.

You should now be able to power on the VM with all the original disks intact.

Clear as mud, I hope.

Bron: www.vm-aware.com

Customization fails after VC 2.5 Upgrade

A few people have notice that since upgrading to Virtualcenter 2.5 deploying a Windows 2003 VM from template no longer gives them the ability to customize.  The option is disabled.

The fix for this is simple.  You need to grab the new deployment tools from Microsoft’s site here also referred to as the sysprep files. You will be downloading WindowsServer2003-KB892778-SP1-DeployTools-x86-ENU.cab

This file needs to be extracted on the Virtualcenter server and placed in the following folder-

All Users\Application Data\Vmware\VirtualCenter\sysprep\svr2003

Once these files exist in the correct folder, you will be able to deploy your W2K3 template.

For more details read the Virtual Center 2 Template Usages and Best Practices http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vc_2_templates_usage_best_practices_wp.pdf