Static DHCP IPs with KVM Virtualization

When building a virtualization lab system, I’ve found that I want static IPs assigned to my guests. You could just assign static IPs in the guest OS, but then you should document what IPs are in use for what hosts. It would be easier to just assign static IP entries in the DHCP server. There doesn’t seem to be a straight-forward way to get this done.

What I’ve found works is to destroy the network, edit it directly, and then restart it.

VMWare Datastore Sizing and Locking

I had a recent discussion with a teammate about VMWare datastores. We are using thin provisioning on a ESXi 4.1 installation backed by IBM XIV storage.

In our previous installation we ran ESX 3.X backed by DS4000 disk. What we found out is that VMs grow like weeds and our datastores quickly filled up. This admin just resized the datastores and we went on our way. A technical VMWare rep afterward mentioned that while it is supported, adding extents to VMFS datastores isn’t necessarily best practice.

TSM Full-VM Image Backup With VStore API

As a request from one of our VMWare admins, I’ve started testing the VMWare image backups. In the past, we’ve installed the regular backup/archive client on each VMWare guest OS. This has let us standardize our install regardless of if it’s a virtual or physical server. This doesn’t allow you to take a full snapshot of a VM, instead you have to rely on your baremetal recover procedures just as if it was a physical server.

Unfortunately, an application admin messed up a server, almost beyond repair. If the VMWare admins had been made aware of the work, they could have generated a snapshot just before the work started, and recovering would have been quick and simple.