Vlan, Iscsi, vmware notes

VLAN
VLan is a tag added to traffic, and appears as an additional device in ifconfig.  for instance if your adapter is eth0, eth0.5 is the vlan 5 for that device.

Hand for use thru managed switches, etc.

I'll have to study uses of this with the IPCop and suti configured switches, may be able to use the cisco 2950's to partiton some of the traffic in the suti facility.

Here is a howto site link for VLAN on linux.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-configure-linux-virtual-local-area-network-vlan.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NrydmHMtQY&feature=related

iSCSI

Some Utoob videos of iSCSI that are somewhat useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCDiz9C8Vvw&feature=related
very good  walkthru creating iSCSI target and configuring vmware ESXi to access it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc20IT1msAk

Vmware ESXi

more Utoob videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1X29hOviBs

For the youtube videos, turn off the sound in most of them.

Diskless (or iSCSI boot disk) Windows XP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBc9WePkliE&feature=related

I hit a snag trying to import a disk to the ESXi system.  You must not use sparse disks, or ide disks.  They must be LSI logic scsi disks fully allocated.  create and DD any data drives to be moved to such drives.  If you didn't set the system up and these are boot drives, you may have problems getting the system up, and will need a utility boot to get going.  That is a separate subject.

To import the data drive, copy the data vmdk files for each disk to a datastore which you have created (separate subject).  The next thing you will need to do, is "import" or register the disk.

Vmware server, player, etc. (not vmware server 2) all pretty much treat any set of files which have the right metadata in them as a virtual machine.  You only have to play with them with the editor when moving them around and make sure the file types, etc. are correct to move data.

On ESXI and vmware server 2.0, there is more control, because those systems are made to play inside a larger multi platform multihost environment with either Vsphere, or vmware vcenter managing multiple platform with different capabilities and also different storage capabilities.

So the machines you have and the data files you have have to be properly formatted and registered to be usable, not just moved onto the ESXi platform as data.

To properly move the disk, there is a utility which will import the disk.  I created a virtual machine for my imap mail server some time ago anticipating this move and created it with a SCSI drive.  I didn't know about the "no sparse" limitation, so had to create a copy onto a fully allocated nonsparse or nosparse disk on the vmware server it was on.

I moved all the bits of this disk, since it was allocated as 2gb chunks to also allow moving to windows to the ESXi server.

Then use the command in the ESXi command line, either on the console, or enable ssh logins, and on an ssh login shell:

/vmfs/volumes/41cdeaf3-10db5074-3834-00127994be1e/imap # vmkfstools -i imap-full.vmdk imap-full-new.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS zeroedthick
Cloning disk 'imap-full.vmdk'...

to create "import" the disk.  This disk can then be added to the virtual machine.

When you need to import the virtual machine, that is accomplished by going to your vmware client, and selecting the line with the server on it, select Configuration tab, and Storage.  You can right click the storage your vm resides on and you will see the vmx file.  if you right click it, "add to inventory" is one of the options.

When you want to manually import data, you can use the vmware client to import it.  You can also manually move file by such as sftp into the ssh client.

The data is stored off directories from root /vmfs

The subdirectories there are volume and device.  Under volume, you should find datastore1 datastore2, or whatever you have created.

I am not sure how the file system works, but you can guage what you are importing and not exceed the size and probably do okay.  The file system df command does not work, and is of no use, as it does not see these file systems.

The networking probably will be messed up as well.  Add a VMware ESX NIC port and  delete the old one.  The one that existed was created w/o any external connection to the internal net.  When one is created it apparently connects properly.

ESXi performance
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011771
ensuring a system has resources

1. Start esxtop.
2. Type e and the GID of the virtual machine in question. Press Enter.
3. Look at the %RDY time for the vmm worlds.