Changing Virtual Machine Folder Name

If you need to rename a VM, this is simple as you can simply right click it in the vSphere client and select rename.

The only problem with this is that it doesn't change the folder name on the datastore, so you may end up with a virtual machine called test VM - old, but the folder its files are in is called test VM.

So how to solve this?

Simply Migrate the storage of the Virtual Machine to a different datastore, and the Virtual Machine folder on the new datastore will be created with the new Virtual Machines name.

Job done!

Lab Manager 4 Networking

I thought I'd state the bleedin obvious that I didn't get until I had to install Lab Manager 4 and then scratch my head for a day.

When you use Cross Host Fencing, you need to think about the external networking. The network packets between VMs that are residing on different networks don't jump magically get transported without using the physical network - told you it was obvious!!

The way that Cross Host Fencing works is that a Host Spanning Transport Network needs to exist where the traffic will flow across. Each ESX host in the cluster will have a single VM created (don't touch it) named something like

nnnnnn-VMware-ServiceVM-Ixx-YY

where nnnnnn is a number (e.g. 000001), xx is the Lab Manager Installation ID and YY is some letter number combination that is the same for each VM.

As I said, never ever touch these machines. If you are having problems with Cross Host Fencing, you can recreate these machines by disabling the individual hosts from Host Spanning, and then re-enabling it. this removes these VMs and creates new ones, but will obviously break any configurations that are using Cross Host Fencing.

These machines are connected to the VLAN that you have configured as your Host Spanning Transport Network on a Port Group that is created on the dvSwitch that you specified when configuring the Host Spanning Transport Network. The Port Group is named:

dvSwitchx-LMService-yLMxx

where y is a number and xx is the Lab manager Installation ID.

HP Flex-10, Virtual Connect & vSphere

So there are restrictions to how you can implement this configuration. There are some really good blogs that describe it, such as

http://kennethvanditmarsch.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/understanding-hp-flex-10-mappings-with-vmware/

http://frankdenneman.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/flex-10-lessons-learned/

so I won't repeat what has been said before.

However, the restriction where you are unable to present the same VLAN to more than one FlexNIC on the LOM can be got around if you present the VLAN as a native VLAN (i.e. 0) to one FlexNIC, and apply the VLAN tag to the other FlexNIC.

This is really helpful when you have a virtual vCenter as if this wasn't possible, you would have to put it on a different VLAN to the ESX(i) hosts. However, I have configured it so that vSwitch0 on the hosts is presented with the native VLAN, and the vSwitch (or dvSwitch) that vCenter is attached to is presented with the tagged VLAN.

UPDATE: Whilst this configuration works during normal operation. In the event of loss of Virtual Connect module, or uplinks, all management networking will be lost. This is because the LOM to uplink mapping is hard coded, and whilst you can configure the mapping differently, it will break. Therefore always remember the 1 LOM to on uplink rule.