Configuring layer two VM as inline IPS in VMware ESX

 ips, VMware  No Responses »
Nov 192008
 

To setup properly the portgroups in VMware vSwitching environment, we had to create two portgroups per vSwitch as depicted below:

schema for connecting two vswitch with SG IPS in ESX

Reason for this configuration is that “operative portgroups” where servers and machines are connected should not be in Promiscuous mode to avoid sniffing other machines’ traffic, while portgroups dedicated to IPS inline ports must:

    be configured in promiscuous mode to receive all traffic of the vSwitch they are connected to

    be part of VLAN ID 4095 to “pass” all VLAN IDs to Virtual Machine without any intervention

OpenFiler 2.3 Troubleshooting.

 Network Attached Storage, VMware  2 Responses »
Oct 272008
 

OpenFiler is a great system to implement NAS (Network Attached Storage) in a network using general purpose hardware.

On the ‘Net you can find great tutorial about how to setup with VMWare ESX servers, but it contains one important mistake:

When you define the ACL the netmask for every host is /32 or 255.255.255.255. Using /24 or 255.255.255.0 will prevent connection to OpenFiler.

I’ve tested and found it working with VMWare ESXi 3.5 free server.

Installing VMWare Server 1.0.5 tools on CentOS 5.1 guest

 linux, VMware  No Responses »
Apr 222008
 

Running vmware-config-tools.pl script on a guest CentOS 5.1 virtual machine in a VMWare Server 1.0.5 environment will not find the proper kernel modules, so it will prompt you to compile the modules.

To do this you need a compiling environment (namely gcc) and the C kernel headers installed.

If your machine is connected to the Internet, this is easily solved by invoking the following commands:

<prompt># yum install gcc (about 8+ Mb)

<prompt> yum install kernel-devel (about 4.7 Mb)

Expand a VMWare Virtual Disk Size

 VMware  No Responses »
Dec 282007
 

Regardless of VMWare Version you’re using, you should have the command line tool

vmware-vdiskmanager

This useful command line tool can be used for many operations (vmware-vdiskmanager --help) including expanding a Virtual Disk without losing data contained.

The syntax for expanding is:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 36Gb virtual_disk_name.vmdk

If you have partitions within the disk, remember that the tool expands just the size of the disk, NOT the size of the partition; if you need to expand the partition size, please use some third party tools (more info here).

If you have ESX/ESXi…

The following vmkfstools command can be used to extend a virtual disk file to the new specified length:
vmkfstools [-X | --extendfile] #[gGmMkK]

For ESX/ESXi 4.1 and 5.0 :
vmkfstools [-X | --extendvirtualdisk] # [gGmMkK]

Caution: This operation makes fundamental, irreversible changes to the virtual machine’s disk. VMware strongly recommends making a complete backup of this virtual machine before attempting this operation.
Warning: In current versions of ESX/ESXi 2.5, 3.x, 4.x, and ESXi 5.x, do not extend a disk that has snapshots. Commit or discard snapshots before increasing the size of the virtual disk. Extending the size of a virtual disk that has snapshots invalidates the snapshots.