check primary role of ESX hosts in HA cluster

For VMware High Availability to work, one ESX host in a cluster has the role of fail-over coordinator assigned. This role can be performed by a ESX host having the primary role. 5 servers in a cluster will have this role.
To check the role of the ESX hosts in cluster, perform the following command :

cat /var/log/vmware/aam/aam_config_util_listnodes.log

vShield zones

Today’s organizations in the Internet era are increasingly inter-connected for efficiency and productivity, while needing to maintain varying levels of separation and trust that reflect the complexity of their users, data, applications, and regulations. As virtualization permeates growing portions of the datacenter, network security devices require physical chokepoints that fragment shared resource pools and disrupt the vision of a seamless internal cloud. Current and emerging options are partitioning of a VMware deployment into logical organization or trusted network zones for security, privacy, and compliance. An overview of the new VMware vShield Zones can be used to collapse an Internet-facing virtualized DMZ (de-militarized zone), meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) firewall standards for cardholder privacy, create various isolated enterprise security zones or to isolate multiple tenants in the cloud.

VMware vCenter Data Recovery

Enable quick, simple and complete data protection for your virtual machines with VMware vCenter Data Recovery, a disk-based backup and recovery solution. Many backup products are focused on physical workloads or require a lot of work to configure for your virtual environment. VMware vCenter Data Recovery is your first line of defense for protecting your virtual environment. It’s fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server to enable centralized and efficient management of backup jobs and also includes data de-duplication to save on disk storage for your backups.

Extending disk capacity of Lefthand VSA

To be able to test or evaluate Site Recovery Manager Lefthand VSA can be used for storage.
The VSA can be run in VMware Workstation as a virtual machine. The default disksize of 5 GB is too small for storing virtual machines.

To enlarge the capacity, remove the hard disk having device id SCSI 1:0. Create a new harddisk. This MUST have SCSI id 1:0 !!
Adding an aditional disk will not work!

vCenter Server Heartbeat

As an important add-on to vCenter Server, the new heartbeat product vCenter Server Heartbeat addresses a key enterprise customer requirement - ensuring high availability for vCenter Server itself, monitoring and protecting VMware's management platform against network, hardware, OS and application issues. By fully protecting the infrastructure, it helps eliminate barriers to deployment of Tier 1 critical applications on VMware by providing high availability for the entire infrastructure.

Site Recovery Manager book

A very good book on Site Recovery Manager and as far as I know the only book on this toppic is called Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager. The first chapter can be download from the author's site
RTFM Education

Site Recovery Manager in a box

It is diffucult to test Site Recovery Manager when limited hardware is available. To test SRM you need at least two ESX boxes, 2 VirtualCenter servers, two SAN's replicating and at least a virtual machine to test the recovery on.

However, with just one laptop you could setup your own lab to test SRM. See how it is done with evaluation software here:

VMware instructions

Tomas ten Dam wrote a nice instruction as well which can be found here:
TenDam.info

Joep Piscaer describes a SRM in the box setup using Lefthand VSA here:
Virtuallifestyle.nl

Site Recovery Manager resources

Whitepapers


Presentations


Installation Manual

another srm server connection task is already in progress

During configuration of the Connection between the protected and recovery site the error shown below pops up at the SRM on the protected site:
"another srm server connection task is already in progress"
and
Unable to establish reciprocity

Restart of the SRM service at protected site does not help.
Uninstall and install of SRM plus deletion of SRM database at protected site does not help

unable to find any array script files

While configuring the Site Recovery Manager Array Manager the error listed below might pop up:
"unable to find any array script files"

Solution:
None. Reinstall of SRM helped ;-(

Hyper-V seminar the Netherlands

On March 5 VX Company, Microsoft and Proact organize a free Hyper-V seminar in Baarn, the Netherlands.

Sessions on the new features of Hyper-V 2.0 , a casestudy of experience by a large internet provider, demo, high availability an more.

More info on

Intro

On this blogsite you will find information on servervirtualization. Main focus is VMware ESX, VirtualCenter , Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

I will attend VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes and will be live blogging news and info from the sessions