Examining logs is an important way for debugging and troubleshooting a system. There are about ten log files in the ESX server for the hostd agent, which listens API calls, with the same naming pattern as hostd-?.log under the /var/log/vmware directory. The hostd-index file has the number of currently used log files.
The log entry has a similar format to that of VC server logs. Following is a quick sample:
[2008-06-21 07:24:40.769 ‘SOAP’ 64834480 trivia] Received soap request from []: checkForUpdates
The log level can be configured in the /etc/vmware/vpxa.cfg file. Just look for a section like the following. The possible levels are the same as those of VC logs: none, error, warning,info, verbose, or trivia, in an order from less to more detailed messages. Read more... (179 words, estimated 43 secs reading time)
Task management is an important part of vSphere API. It enables asynchronous calls by returning a Task back before the work is actually done at the server side. If a task takes too long (for example, more than 15 minutes to create a virtualmachine snapshot from VirtualCenter), however, it can time out before it finishes. It means you lose tracking of the task.
You can easily fix this issue by changing the configurations. On the ESX server, add the following to the /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg file:
<task>
<timeout>7200</timeout>
</task>
and
<vmomi>
<soapStubAdapter>
<blockingTimeoutSeconds>7200</blockingTimeoutSeconds>
</soapStubAdapter>
</vmomi>
Remember to restart the service: Read more... (159 words, estimated 38 secs reading time)
Most people have the perception that vSphere Java API is for developers. It’s true but actually more than that. Administrators can take advantage of it as well.
Today, William Lam (@lamw) posted a Java version of his vdf tool which was originally written in Perl. For people don’t know William yet, he is a system administrator at Salesforce.com now and Yahoo before. He created and maintains the famous vGehtto script repository that almost every VI Perl developer knows about. William is also a vExpert and the No.1 contributor to the VMware developer community. Having not touched Java for 4+ years, William got his first HelloVM with VI Java API working in less than 5 minutes, and got the code converted in about one hour. Read more... (241 words, estimated 58 secs reading time)
Since the term “vCloud” was made public at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, VMware has been working hard to define and implement its vCloud vision and strategies.
In 2009, VMware announced vCloudExpress with service provider partners such as Terremark. VMware also submitted its vCloud API spec to DMTF so that the industry could benefit from the standardized management of APIs. VMware also acquired SpringSource in 2009. The acquisition attracted a lot of attention, scrutiny and questions.
Earlier this year VMware acquired Zimbra, the leading provider of SaaS collaboration software, and subsequently it also bought RabbitMQ. Both are now part of the VMware SpringSource portfolio. Last week, VMware and Saleforce.com announced vmforce.com which is a joint venture targeting enterprise PaaS cloud. Yesterday VMware announced acquisition of GemStone (pending).
With these acquisitions and announcements, the company’s strategy is clearer than ever. Looking back again, VMware has been building a cloud product and service portfolio under the vCloud umbrella. Some previously misunderstood acquisitions become well aligned in the vision and strategies of vCloud.
vCloud is not the only player in the industry but VMware is well on its way. Given its deep roots in enterprise data center virtualization, no one can ignore the potential of VMware in cloud computing.
To help enterprises better understand vCloud, I offer ten things you should know: Read more... (726 words, estimated 2:54 mins reading time)
I attended a great seminar at Stanford by Haiping Zhao on the open source compiler which converts PHP code to C++ yesterday. Haiping is the tech lead for the open source HipHop project at Facebook.
As many have known, Facebook is a PHP shop with all the front end dynamic pages written in PHP. The upside of using PHP is that it’s very easy to read, write and debug, plus platform independent. The downside is that it’s really slow, probably one of the slowest scripting languages.
Why PHP is slow?
Haiping summarized three reasons, which he thinks are common contributors for slowness of scripting languages in general:
- Byte-code interpreter.
- Dynamic symbol lookups, including functions, variables, constants, class methods, properties, etc.
- Weakly typing. The zval has to evaluate the data type of any variable before any operation. Plus, the PHP array is too generic because it can represent any collection.
Why Should Facebook Care?
When Haiping joined Facebook, new servers cannot catch up the new users. The server farms became so big that any percentage saving could save the company millions of dollars. Like all the big web companies, Facebook does not disclose the number of servers they have. The size of the datacenter is guarded as a secret. One of the professors did an estimate in his questions anyway: 15,000 to 30,000 servers. Read more... (818 words, estimated 3:16 mins reading time)
VMware PM Carter Shanklin (@cshanklin) once gave a great presentation on how to use Onyx with Java development at PEX 2010. I covered it briefly in a previous blog, and left out the “4 rules” hoping Carter would help.
As many of you have already known, Carter moved on to SpringSource division as the PM for tc server. So he has been pretty busy with his transition. With his coverage on both administrator and developer oriented products, he is right on the wave of devops movement. Make sure you follow him at Twitter. Read more... (363 words, estimated 1:27 mins reading time)
Some of you may have noticed that VMware released vCloud API Spec version 0.9 last week. The 9 page document describes all the functions and corresponding REST syntax of version 0.9. Better than I had expected, it highlighted changes from version 0.8. So if you have read previous version, you can just scan for the changes with keywords: CHANGED, NEW, REMOVED.
The vCloud API includes the following categories of functions.
Basic functions Read more... (264 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)
In a previous post, I blogged about a tutorial on using the open source VI Java API in Groovy by Aaron Sweemer. Two weeks later, he wrote a new tutorial Easy vSphere Web Apps with Grails and the VI Java API.
In his new tutorial, Aaron introduced detailed steps in how to use the VI Java API for a simple web application with Grails framework. The web application displays a web page that lists all the virtual machines with the corresponding guest OS names and whether they support multiple snapshots. Read more... (193 words, estimated 46 secs reading time)
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