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Vmware Esxtop Displaying Incorrectly In ESXi 5.5 Over SSH From Linux

/ Christopher Paquin

Clip-art-top-cat-796078So I ran into this odd issue last night working in the old homelab. I was working on troubleshooting an issue with datastore performance on one of my Supermicro ESXi servers. I have two and they are awesome beasts that have been migrated into fancy Cooler Master cases, however that is a tale for another day. Anyway, I digress… the datastore. So yeah, it's a local raid 5 datastore attached to an LSI 9260-8i controller. This particular datastore is 3 600gb 15k SAS drives, and for some reason its slow as all get-out.

So being the command line guy that I am, I ssh from my Linux (Fedora 19, specifically) into my troublesome ESXi server and attempt to run esxtop to see if I can get a read on the disks. Much to my chagrin, the output of esxtop is a garble of text Unreadable to say the least.

 

Esxtopmacdefault_thumb[1]

an example of the horror i saw that night

 

Turns out that this is an issue related to terminal emulation type. Thanks to this bro, who ran into same issue on his Mac, I was able to get back in the game and determine that yes, you should not configure raid 5 with a dead BBU. Anyway, while his fix was not exactly help for me, it let me know what I needed to do to fix this issue.

The gist of the issue is this. In Linux (Fedora at the very least) the default terminal emulation type is xterm-256color. Set your terminal type to this, ssh to and ESXi 5.5 box, and experience this formatting debacle for your self.

Thankfully the fix is simple, just change your terminal emulation type to "xterm" and you will be good to go. I accomplished this with the command below.

# export TERM=xterm

 

I can tell you this, I never had issues ssh'ing to ESXi 5.0 from Linux, so this was probably introduced in ESXi 5.5

 

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XenServer 6: There Was an Error Connecting to the Server. The Service Did Not Reply Properly

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

GoombaWow, this is a really overly complicated error for such a simple problem to resolve. Allow me to give you some background.

I am currently building my first production ready (well non-production really) XenServer cluster and ran into this issue when attempting to add my second host into the cluster. I hit google and found out that this was actually just a dns issue.

A quick check on the /etc/resolv.conf on two of my nodes, shows nothing but the following line.

; generated by /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post

Well great, on a standard linux box I would have just added my name server and would have been half way to the bar, but judging by the contents of the resolv.conf I figured that I was supposed to add it another way.

Well after a bit of poking around in XenCenter I found this. Click on the hostname of the XenServer, then click on the "Networking" tab, from there click on "Configure…" below the "Management Interfaces" section as illustrated below. You will then be presented with a pop-up window where you can enter your nameservers.

Screenshot4
Once you have configured DNS properly you can then add the host to the cluster.

Note that you can also do this from the command line, however you have to go basically reconfigure your management interface.. ip, gateway, and everything that goes with it.

First run the command below

#xe pif-list host-name-label=xen01 management=true

Then using the UUID of the management interface, run the command below. Replace my IP addresses and uuid with yours.

#xe pif-reconfigure-ip mode=static IP=10.120.72.11 uuid=dc6b6651-6067-9a52-2011-6ba102da39e1 DNS=10.120.69.1 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=10.120.72.1

Seeing how fickle XenServer Clustering is regarding DNS, its probably not a bad idea to add /etc/host entries on your XenServer nodes for each server that will be in your cluster.  You never know when dns might go out to lunch and you don't want your HA cluster affected.

For future reference you can check all the configuration parameters of your management interface with the following commands.

First get the UUID of your management interface.

xe pif-list management=true host-name-label=xen01

Then check the configuration via the UUID.

xe pif-param-list uuid=f61b8d4d-67ec-e262-3e16-4348baaed076

And for example if you need to configure the DNS search domain, you can run the following.

xe pif-param set uuid=f61b8d4d-67ec-e262-3e16-4348baaed076 other-config:domain=MYDOMAIN

Other HA Configuration Error in ESXi and ESX cluster

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Big-frame-hammer Ran into the error below yesterday after rebuilding an ESX 4.0 host as ESXi 4.1 and attempting to enable HA after the newly rebuild ESXi host was added back to the cluster.

Cannot complete the configuration of the HA agent on the host. Other HA configuration error.

Since error message was dissapointingly unspecific, I called VMware Support and asked for their guidance. According to my tech, they are actually getting a lot of calls on this error, as may who are doing in place upgrades to esxi from esx are running into this.

Specfically the error has to do with the fact that ESX has both a Service Console and VMkernel port used for host management, and ESXi only has a VMkernel port. To correct the issue and allow ESXi and ESX to place nice in the same cluster you must add the following.

First under VMkernel Properties make sure that both VMotion and Management traffic have a check mark to indicate that they are enabled.

Second right click on your cluster, and select VMware HA. Then click on Advanced Options and add the following 3 entries.

das.allowNetwork1 = Service Console

das.allowNetwork2 = VMkernel

das. allowVmotionNetworks = true

See screenshot below.

 

Snapshot1

 

 

UPDATE: Note that by default the original name of the management port group is,   Management Network. You must change this to VMkernel for this to work.