Recently I needed to install Citrix Web Interface 5.4 into a Network load balanced cluster on top of VMware vSphere. The installation are configuration went fine however I could not ping the cluster IP from a client machine but I could ping it from the NLB nodes.

The problem and solution seem to be common on the web however but I found most of the pages I looked at were a little confusing or missing some information, so I thought I would create my own.

This post will focus on setting up NLB within VMware and will not cover how to install and configure web interface.

Problem:

Recently I had a need to upgrade our VMware vCenter server from 4.0 to 4.1 and also as the current server was on a 32-bit OS I also needed to migrate to a new server so I started following the belowVMware KB article.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1021635

I was not far into the process when I received the message

SSH and log onto the host and elevate your privileges using

su -l

Enter the password when prompted

Enter below command to open the network config file

vi /etc/sysconfig/network

Press i to enter insert mode

If you even get into a situation where a VM will not shutdown using the vSphere Console then the below steps will show you how to force a VM off using the shell.

Obviously be very carful using the shell on a VMware host you can cause a lot of damage!

Recently after restarting a vSphere host I was greated with the message.

For me the issues was simply resolved by right clicking on the host and selecting "Reconfigure for VMware HA"

We backup a 1TB VMWare File Server using VMWares VCB with Symantec Backup Exec 12.0, everything is connected with 4Gb fibre

Over the last few months our job rate has slowly dropped from around 1600Mb/s to a disappointing 650Mb/s.

For some reason after tring everything imaginable the problem was solved by simply defragmenting the drive being backed up.

I finally tried this after finding a similar story on vmware forum

If you have forgotten to enter the VLAN ID during the VMWare ESX or VSphere installed or you have entered the wrong VLAN ID you will find you will be unable to manage the VMWare host remotely, the only way to resolve this is to change the VLAN ID via the command line shell.

First you will need to log on locally to the server, the username will be root and you will have had to enter a password as part of hte install.

You will then need a couple of bits of information

If you get the below message when tring to use the Console in the Virtual Infrastructure Client it is because the permissions have been lost on the configuration file (.vmx) for that Virtual machine

Restarting the VMware management service can resolve lots of problems mainly problem where the VMware Host cannot be contacted correctly by the vSphere Client, or a Virtual machine will not start or vmotion

Restarting the service does the same things as restarting the host but done properly it leaves the Virtual Servers running!