Provisioned Space and Used Space show 0KB

Ran into this issue earlier today when I was trying to get sizes of VMs in vCenter. A half of my machines were showing 0.00 B for their Provisioned and Used Space.

The solution was simple enough after scratching my head for a little bit. Select the server in vCenter and go to Configuration Tab. Select the Storage Adapters under Hardware. In the top right hand corner you will see Rescan All... click that and click OK at the next screen. vCenter will now fires off a rescan of your HBAs and your VMFS volumes and does a "Recompute Datastores Groups". Once that is done it should now show your Provisioned and Used Space without issue.

Sometimes it is the simple things that drive you crazy!!

ZOMBIES!!!! BRAINS.....

So I was running through the patching schedule with one of our other admins, when I decided to opened up RVTools and started looking at the vHealth tab. I was shocked to see :

As hard as we try to keep our environment clean, this was unexpected. What in the heck is a Zombie file? What are they doing? What the heck is causing them, and how can I get rid of them?!

Turns out a we had several different kinds of Zombie files. Our first kind was in our normal vSphere 5 Server environment, a snapshot that was not being shown in snapshot manager. Bizarre right? What they were doing is sucking our brains! Eh, ok so it was only eating up storage space on our LUNs, because they were not being cleaned off, and were causing the VMDK files to grow out of control. Same difference right? The second Zombie files that we had were being caused by our Horizon View VDI environment. These were different. These were old copies of our Virtual Desktops that hung around after we did recomposes.

The cause of the first set of Zombie files was a leftover snapshot from our EMC Avamar. Still investigating what happened here as this is not normal behavior but we do know it did it to a bunch of our VMs. The fix is fairly easy although it is tedious. Go to the VM take a snapshot, sometimes the new snapshot will fail but once it has failed it shows the old snapshot in the Snapshot Manager, other times it will succeed and you will now see two snapshots in the Snapshot Manager. Either way the solution is the same, select the Delete All in Snapshot Manager and wait for the snapshots to clear out.

The second set of Zombies, the VDI Zombies, were a little different. We had to go through the DataStores that we have assigned to Horizon View and check the dates on the files. Since we are using Dynamic Pools our VMs are recreated everyday, so we knew that if the files in the folder did not have today's date on them we could delete them. This was caused by creating "new" images. What we actually did was cloned our old golden image in an attempt to flatten out how many snapshots we had on it. Since it is technically a new Golden Image, the old folders that had the VDIs stayed out there, and the new ones were created as well. Again, another storage waste!

Now I know this probably all sounds very novice, but as I couldn't find anything on this with a "quick" 20 second look on the web so I figured I would share. Better policing of our DataStores is obviously needed! We are getting ready to implement (or at least demo) vCOps. Hopefully that will give us some more insight into these things, but still a HUGE shout out to RVTools !!! I love that tool! Great place to see little things in your environment that might not be right. It certainly saved my bacon!

Martin

VMWorld 2014!!

I am registered !!! Looking forward to seeing everything that has changed and being immersed again in all that is VMware!

I think I am going to take a crack at my VCP5-DCV while I am there. I haven't cert'd in a while so while I still can without having to take another class I guess I will get to it!

Hope to see you all there!

Final day of VMWorld

I have not won any thing, I have not gone out drinking every night, and I have hardly done any networking, but I have had the most amazing experience here at VMWorld 2013. Yes, some sessions were lame, yes Microsoft was an annoyance, but all in all I have so much new information. So many new things to look at. I have gotten to take a look at the issues that the industry is facing. I can logically talk to some of the issues our uses will be facing if we just try to recreate the standard standalone desktop. 

What an amazing general session! The innovations that those men are putting out are AMAZING!! MakeyMakey, Romotive and Makerbot. These guys are my new idols, they are taking the bull by the horns and they are doing something new and fresh. These are the true leaders of the future.their ability to look at things in a fresh new light and make it come to life is nothing short of amazing. The uses for their tech is almost endless. Congrats and hats off to you!

This year I have been more focused on our Horizon environment. With a couple of other things splattered in just for good measure, but that is what my life is right now. 

A Big Thank You to VMWare for doing such a great job. You have been on point on everything in my mind. I am not one of the IT elite that get to travel to every event and I truly appreciate all the effort that was made to help us have the most pleasurable experience we could have (next year busses back to our rooms after the show please?). 

Thanks to my company for investing in me. I do appreciate it. I will do my part to make things work the best I can for us back home with the new knowledge. A special thanks to my wife for keeping everything running back home, I wish you were here with me honey.

Day 3 continued....

Wow the PCoIP class was awesome! Dude really knows his stuff! I picked up so many good tips. He was clear, and to the point. Banging out useful information throughout the whole session.

QOS - set PCoIP right under your  VoIP or your Telepresence.

Make sure your network latency is not high already.

Beware your "Burstable Networks"! Anything that is over your purchased bandwidth, it can be marked a discardable and this will definitely affect your performance. You are only guaranteed what you have purchased.

Interesting thing to note, Zero Clients will not really use the improvements to PCoIP. If you run desktops or thin clients that run the View Client they take advantage of the new improvements. This is a complete bummer to me. We as an organization are try to get rid of the damned desktops so we don't have the extra layer to troubleshoot. Ah well....we can hope they will be included someday.

There was a ton more but those were my highlights. Like I said that session rocked! 

Now the Technical Deep dive that I am in right now .....OMG! Wow....hard to understand monotone- and has mainly been bars and graphs. 

But he is starting to get to the meat of the session with the best practices....too bad half the folks have left during his death by PowerPoint!

Day three....

I have yet to have coffee this morning so my head is still fuzzy. Before you ask, NO, I did not go to any of the parties last night. I have given up on the networking part of this little adventure. I am not a party person, I don't like to drink that much so I will leave that for the others to do. 

Most of the sessions that I have taken have had some great knowledge, some ...eh not so much. I got over here nice and early, skipped my coffee and came into a Mirage 201 class. Honestly I should have slept. I didn't realize Mirage 201 would be nothing more than you need to do good project management and have a good infrastructure. Gee do I need to wipe when I am done too? Bah! Ok so it was a management track class I guess. I don't think it was advertised that way but whatever. 

On a positive note, VMWorld Party tonight, at AT&T park. Looking forward to that. I know, contradicts what I said earlier, but this is different. I get to see Train and Imagine Dragons. I will be there to take pictures and to rock out. 

Well off to PCoIP "sizing for success", should be an interesting session. 

Day two continued...

Holy crap! What an incredible presentation by VMWare's President and his staff! Or was it their CEO ...I can't keep that kind of stuff straight. What I can keep straight though is the amount of automation that VMWare is bring to business and the dynamic ways in which users will be able to be empowered to create their needs within a structure that IT defines! 

I am beginning to feel a touch like they are trying to put me out of a job! But I guess someone has to be able to put all that infrastructure in and define what the users can and can't do. Products like the VMWare Automation Center, vSAN, Virtual networking, and more working together seamlessly to give the users the immediate responses that they want. 

Next up Distributed Switches...brain is going to hurt as much as my feet after today.