virtual machine with input specifications already exists

While in the progress of deploying new virtual machines the deployment of a virtual machine stopped in one particular pool. After doing some investigation the viewcomposer log gives me the following message:

Violation of UNIQUE KEY constraint ‘IX_SVI_SIM_CLONE_GUEST_NAME’. Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.SVI_SIM_CLONE’

I created a support call with VMware, the responses I got where remove those particular record from the database. Removing those records didn’t solved the problem, cause those records were written in different tables, so we created a query which does the trick for us.

Doing a search first, so we know which records will be deleted:

# Finding VM from VM_NAME and BASE_DISK key

SELECT * FROM SVI_SC_BASE_DISK_KEYS

where PARENT_ID = (SELECT ID FROM  SVI_SIM_CLONE

WHERE  (VM_NAME = ‘<VM-NAME>’))

SELECT * FROM SVI_SIM_CLONE

WHERE (VM_NAME = ‘<VM-NAME>’)

When I know which records will be removed I used the following query to actually remove the records:

# delete VM from VM_NAME and BASE_DISK key

delete from SVI_SC_BASE_DISK_KEYS

where PARENT_ID = (SELECT ID FROM  SVI_SIM_CLONE

WHERE  (VM_NAME = ‘<VM-NAME>’))

delete FROM SVI_SIM_CLONE

WHERE (VM_NAME = ‘<VM-NAME>’)

After actually removing the faulty records i was able to deploy new virtual machines again.

Distributed Power Management on x3850

While working at a customer site I have been working on setting up Distributed Power Management, DPM is an experimental feature delivered through VMware ESX 3.5 and vCenter 2.5. While having some problems with the configuration I had two goals. I wanted to keep redundancies within the current configuration and wanted to comply to the goals of the customer, which was as Green as possible.

To get the redundancy I created a single vSwitch with two portgroups one for the Service Console and one the VMotion port, with each a difference VLANs configured. At both portgroup an active physical NIC was attached which was standby on the other portgroup. My first goals was reached.

To get the second goal I selected the first internal NIC at the ESX host and configured this one attached to the VMotion portgroup. Within the portgroups I configured the auto negotiation as on the Cisco switch to. The reason for this is that is that the used NIC only support wake-on-LAN at 10 or 100 Mbit and not at 1 Gbit.

More info can be found at the following URL: http://tinyurl.com/r8bwth

Silent install without reboot

The View client can be installed in two ways. You can do a normal GUI based install what means that you click through the installation wizard or you can do a scripted or silent installation. The silent or scripted View Client installation can be personalized with loads of MSI parameters. Some of them are standard MSI, some of them are specific.

If you need to know the parameters just start a View Client installation and search for the files vmmsi.log and vminst.log. In these installation logfiles you can also find the MSI parameters used during the installation. If you want to suppress the system reboot after the View Client silent installation you could try to use the MSI parameter /norestart but it will not work. To suppress the reboot with the View Client you need to the the option: RebootYesNo.

(Screenhost from the vmmsi.log file)

To suppress the reboot after the View Client installation start the silent installation of the View Client like shown below:

VMware-viewclient-{3.x.x-xxxxxx}.exe /s /v /qn RebootYesNo=”No”

View Designing

When doing a design for a View Architecture there are a lot of things to think about in difference areas, the following rules are general and can be used for doing the View design.

The following design specifications will be observed when designing the View Composer architecture:

· Every View partition with View Composer desktops requires that View Composer is installed on that container’s vCenter Server system

· Maximum of eight ESX/ESXi hosts per View Composer cluster

· Maximum of 500 vClones (linked clones) per Parent VM replica; this is a good practice for recompose/refresh operations

· Maximum of three 500 VM clusters per View container; this is to stay clear of the 2,000 VM limit in vCenter Server 2.5

· Maximum of 64 linked clones per datastore

There are a lot of other objects to observe, i will try to write them down here in the future.