Where’s my CPU Affinity??

We were having a discussion today over a vendor that said they currently do not support virtualizing their server application because of the “real-time clock” issues with virtualization, but they were working on this.  This led me to go find the VMworld 2008 presentation on Real-Time Applications.  The solution in the presentation was to set CPU Affinity for the VM.  Well, for the next 15 minutes or so, we went looking for CPU affinity with no luck in finding it.  Finally, we stumbled across it….

CPU affinity is hidden in the preferences for the VM when the VM is actively part of a DRS cluster.  For VMs in the DRS cluster with DRS disabled, CPU affinity can be found under the Advanced CPU selection in the resources tab.

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Fixing my Update Manager issue

I recently upgraded vCenter to 2.5 Update 3, and this was my first time using Update Manager to update the hosts at one of my sites to ESX 3.5 Update 3 since the vCenter upgrade.  I migrated all the VMs off my “test” system, and ran an Update Manager scan to see which updates needed to be applied.  And this is when I saw this error message:

VMware Update Manager had a failure.

So I preceded to try again.  Same error.  Restart the service on the vCenter server.  Same error.  I stopped the service to look at the logs, and I see a SQL error regarding a foreign key constraint.  Searching for the error on Google, VMware, etc., I came across KB1007512.  This is the exact issue I had seen.  So following the KB, I had to let all the ESX/ESXi updates re-download.

Fast forward a couple of hours to the completion of the re-download of 5.70GB of updates.  I restart the Update Manager service and rescan my host.  I receive the same error:

VMware Update Manager had a failure.

Stop the Update Manager service once again.  Upon inspection of the log files, I see a different SQL error, this time about duplicate primary keys.  Search Google, VMware, etc.  Nothing.

I really wanted to push this off till the morning, but with the hectic schedule I had the next day, I decided to use my trusty VMware Support.  Gave them a call, and after uploading various log files to the support team, they had a fix for my issue.  In the Update Manager database, there are two tables: VCI_SCANHISTORY and VCI_SCANRESULTS.  The identity value for VCI_SCANHISTORY must be larger than the identity value for VCI_SCANRESULTS.  Running SELECT MAX(ID) FROM for VCI_SCANHISTORY and VCI_SCANRESULTS showed the identity values to be 20 and 134, respectively.  The fix was to issue the following command:

DBCC CHECKIDENT (“VCI_SCANHISTORY”, RESEED, 135)

This command reset the identity value of VCI_SCANHISTORY to 135.  With the identity value reset, I restarted the Update Manager server and successfully scanned my host to begin updating.  Thanks to VMware Support, I was able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

My beef with Update Manager

First, I’ll start off with what caused me to make this post.

KB Article 1007512 – Scan of host fails after upgrade to Virtual Center 2.5 Update 3.

The resolution to this KB article is to rename the hostupdate folder and let Update Manager download all the ESX patches again.  5.60 GB worth!!!  So, without further ado, here are my beefs with Update Manager:

1. Update Manager is not smart enough to know I do not have any ESX 3.0.3 hosts in my cluster.  Furthermore, there is no option to disable downloading ESX 3.0.3 updates.
2. Unlike with Windows hosts where Update Manager only downloads the updates that are needed as per the baselines, Update Manager downloads every ESX update available, even if it’s not needed.
3. Resolution to KB 1007512
4. No ability to schedule reboots when patching a Windows host.  You can schedule when a patch will be pushed to a Windows host, but you can not push patches and then schedule a reboot for a maintenance window at a later time.
5. Unable to have more than one patch repository (would be very useful in networks with one VC server, but multiple clusters located across a WAN).

Now, Update Manager is a really good product for a 1.0 version.  I hope to see some of these changes in future releases of this software.