myTemplate

VMware announced vCloud Express™ at VMworld 2009. vCloud Express allows for the provisioning of infrastructure on-demand. Unlike conventional hosting, services running inside the cloud provided by vCloud Express services are charged for by the hour. This is paid for by credit card. The credit card details are taken upon registering for a vCloud Express account with a service provider that provides vCloud Express services.

Service providers who will provide vCloud Express services, will display the VMware Virtualized™ logo on the website. This is because VMware vCloud Express™ essentially runs on vSphere and it therefore ensures compatibility with VMware environments on external as well as internal clouds.

With vCloud Express™, service providers can now provide a fast and cost-effective solution for their customers to gain on-demand access to a VMware Virtualized™ environment. Virtual Machines can be easily and quickly be deployed. This is especially useful for application development and testing. As vCloud Express™ runs on vSphere 4, it also supports all the guest operating systems that vSphere 4 supports. From registration to deploying machines, vCloud Express™ is fully web based.

Terremarks’s implementation of VMware vCloud Express™ was demonstrated on stage at VMworld 2009. The demonstration was quick and easy and demonstrated just how easy vCloud Express™ makes it for clients to register for the service and provision a server in minutes.

Although still in Beta, the following service providers are currently offering vCloud Express™ services:

United States and Canada (Amaricas):
Terremark, Hosting.com, BlueLock

EMEA:
Logica

APAC:
Melbourne IT

As I'm trying to get to grips with Hyper-V, I've decided to purchase MS techNet Plus which allows a single user to use any of Microsoft's software products for private use for one year.

A TechNet Plus subscription is normally £234.00 excl. VAT at 21.5% (If you live in the EU, VAT is charged at the Irish rate of 21.5%). This comes to £284.31. However, I found a discount code that gives you 25% off. The total amount for my purchase came to £213.43.

The Promo Code is: TMSAM10

In ESX 3.5, when trying to create a new snapshot, the following error is reported in the VI Client:

An invalid snapshot configuration was detected

Also, when reading the Virtual Machine log file (vmware.log) located in the same location as the VM, you may find references to delta files such as "vm_name-000001.vmdk", but when browsing the datastore, the delta file does not exists. Also, when running vmware-cmd <path-to-vmx> hassnapshot,  "hassnapshot ()= " is returned, which means that the VM has no snapshots in place.

If this is truly the case, why is "An invalid snapshot configuration was detected" returned when trying to create a new snapshot?

VMware records snapshot information about the current VM in a .vmsd file. This file is located with the rest of the virtual machine configuration and VMDK files on the datastore. The file is normally called <virtual-machine-name>.vmsd. This file will contain information, even if your VM has no snapshots in place.

It is possible that in some cases, ESX fails to properly clean up after previous snapshots were removed. The information for previous snapshots may still be recorded in the .vmsd file. The file may indicate that you still have snapshots in pace, although all previous snapshots were removed and the dalta files have been merged. When you then try to create a snapshot, the .vmsd file will inform the ESX host that there is a delta file in place and that it has to create a second or third delta file. When the ESX host interigates the VMFS file system, it's unable to find the snapshot delta files specified in the .vmsd file and therefore errors with "an invalid snapshot configuration was detected."

I came across the following problem a couple of times:

In VirtualCenter, when trying to delete a virtual machine that is switched off, VirtualCenter comes up with:

"Operation failed since another task is in progress"

Also, when trying to use the vmware-cmd command to START, STOP, RESET, SUSPEND or UNREGISTER on the Virtual Machine, the ESX Server responds with:

VMControl error -999: Unknown error: SoapError: ServerFaultCode(1520) : (vim.fault.TaskInProgress)

Yet, when issuing the vmware-cmd <config> getstate command, the ESX Server responds with "Off"

SOLUTION:

The following solution has always fixed the problem for me:

Just execute the following command on the ESX Server:

service mgmt-vmware restart

NOTES:

• No Host Reboot or Downtime Required
• No Virtual Machine Downtime Required