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Nested Virtualization Resources

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Here is a consolidated page on all the articles that I have written about the Nested Virtualizatoin (nested ESXi, Hyper-V, etc) and all the goodies that are "Not Supported".

vSphere / vCloud 5.1

vSphere / vCloud 5.0

Additional Info/Tips/Tricks/

Automating the Search for Lopsided Bootbanks in ESXi 4.x

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I read an interesting article this weekend about lopsided bootbanks in ESXi and as Kyle states, the impact of this is very minor. If you would like to check to see if you would be impacted by this and remediate prior to upgrading from ESXi 4.x to 5.x, you can use the following vSphere SDK for Perl script findLopsidedBootbanks.pl which was modified from an existing script (queryDiskParition.pl) that allows you to query for partitions on a disk.

Note: Remediation is only necessary if you plan on using VUM (Update Manager) to upgrade from ESXi 3.x/4.x to 5.x as it expects both bootbanks to be the same size, else a scripted install/upgrade will extend bootbank1 and ensure it matches bootbank2 size. 

Here is an ESXi 3.5 host that was directly upgraded to ESXi 4.0 and as you can see from the partition layout, bootbank1 (partition 5) and bootbank2 (partition 6) differ in size.

Using the findLopsidedBootbanks.pl you can connect to either vCenter server or directly to an ESXi host and it will check to see if there are any lopsided bootbanks.

Download: findLopsidedBootbanks.pl script here.

Hidden vCenter Debugging Performance Metrics

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While extracting the new performance metrics in vSphere 5 for a blog post, I came across a metric type that I had never noticed before, vcDebugInfo. These performance metrics seems to deal with some of the internal performance/counters in vCenter such as lock statistics, MoRef (Managed Object Reference) counts, etc. Majority of these metrics are available in either collection level 1 or 4 which is the highest level containing all statistics. VMware's best practice is to only enable collection level 1 or 2, 3 and 4 should only be enabled under VMware supervision for debugging purposes which is most likely when some of these stats may come in handy. So be warn, these are probably not supported by VMware

I found it interesting that these metrics are hidden from the vSphere Client UI, but they can easily be extracted when going through the vSphere API. It is just amazing on all the goodies you can find when going through the APIs 🙂

Metric Stat Level Description
vcDebugInfo
maximum.millisecond.activationlatencystats 4 The latency of an activation operation in vCenter
minimum.millisecond.activationlatencystats 4 The latency of an activation operation in vCenter
summation.millisecond.activationlatencystats 1 The latency of an activation operation in vCenter
maximum.number.activationstats 4 Activation operations in vCenter
minimum.number.activationstats 4 Activation operations in vCenter
summation.number.activationstats 1 Activation operations in vCenter
maximum.millisecond.hostsynclatencystats 4 The latency of a host sync operation in vCenter
minimum.millisecond.hostsynclatencystats 4 The latency of a host sync operation in vCenter
summation.millisecond.hostsynclatencystats 1 The latency of a host sync operation in vCenter
maximum.number.hostsyncstats 4 The number of host sync operations in vCenter
minimum.number.hostsyncstats 4 The number of host sync operations in vCenter
summation.number.hostsyncstats 1 The number of host sync operations in vCenter
maximum.number.inventorystats 4 vCenter inventory statistics
minimum.number.inventorystats 4 vCenter inventory statistics
summation.number.inventorystats 1 vCenter inventory statistics
maximum.number.lockstats 4 vCenter locking statistics
minimum.number.lockstats 4 vCenter locking statistics
summation.number.lockstats 1 vCenter locking statistics
maximum.number.lrostats 4 vCenter LRO statistics
minimum.number.lrostats 4 vCenter LRO statistics
summation.number.lrostats 1 vCenter LRO statistics
maximum.number.miscstats 4 Miscellaneous statistics
minimum.number.miscstats 4 Miscellaneous statistics
summation.number.miscstats 1 Miscellaneous statistics
maximum.number.morefregstats 4 Managed object reference counts in vCenter
minimum.number.morefregstats 4 Managed object reference counts in vCenter
summation.number.morefregstats 1 Managed object reference counts in vCenter
maximum.number.scoreboard 4 Object counts in vCenter
minimum.number.scoreboard 4 Object counts in vCenter
summation.number.scoreboard 3 Object counts in vCenter
maximum.number.sessionstats 4 The statistics of client sessions connected to vCenter
minimum.number.sessionstats 4 The statistics of client sessions connected to vCenter
summation.number.sessionstats 1 The statistics of client sessions connected to vCenter
maximum.number.systemstats 4 The statistics of vCenter as a running system such as thread statistics and heap statistics
minimum.number.systemstats 4 The statistics of vCenter as a running system such as thread statistics and heap statistics
summation.number.systemstats 1 The statistics of vCenter as a running system such as thread statistics and heap statistics
maximum.number.vcservicestats 4 vCenter service statistics such as events, alarms, and tasks
minimum.number.vcservicestats 4 vCenter service statistics such as events, alarms, and tasks
summation.number.vcservicestats 1 vCenter service statistics such as events, alarms, and tasks