S-002

Summary
Comments

It take a little long to make a new post, During these times I had checked a various area and read about multiple subjects, so this is the summary:

  • ThinApp .DAT files
  • ESXi Notes
  • Network Notes
  • Resources Notes
  • Misc Notes

ThinApp .DAT files:

Ok, Just as I thought, it’s a container for all files which we need in order to run a specific program (package/suite).
for example, as you install office on your system, it will install some .exe file and bunch of files with other extension.
For running an application (i.e. Word) you must run it’s exe file and it will connect to its related file which install along with it (in office folder(s)).
So when we virtualizes a program (using VMware Thinstall) it will put .exe file aside and put all other stuff (from registry, dll, …) in the container which it name it “abc.DAT” which abc would be the package name and .DAT is the default file extension for container.
There’s some info about the packages:

  1. each package can have only one container
  2. for only one file program (only have one exe file), you may not see this .DAT file as it build the whole package in one .exe file
  3. you don’t have to just use “abc.DAT” as the name of container, you can change to whatever you want like “Sohrab.kasraeian” or “Kasraeian.vWorld” or …
  4. Windows XP has an EXE size limitation of 512MB.
  5. Windows Vista (and potentially Win 7) has an EXE size limitation of 2GB.
  6. ThinApp can package 32-bit applications as well as 16-bit applications (both 16-bit Win and 16-bit DOS apps).

NOTE: 16-bit applications cannot be executed on 64-bit platforms due to an OS limitation. ThinApp does NOT support 64-bit apps at this time.

ESXi Notes:

This notes taken from “ESXi Lesson Learned” from “Yellow Brick” site, ….

  1. As VMware ESXi user may know, there is special partition specific to ESXi only and that’s “Scratch” partion, as I read about it, we can chose to make it or not during installation, it will affect the vm-support output, so you must decide to implement it or not. (If not, ESXi will use your host memory in order to make vm-support output)
  2. VMware ESXi is not supporting Automatic deployment (scripted/unattended installations) [at least now]
  3. Now ESXi 4.0 support Jumbo Frame for the VMKernel network interfaces.

Network Notes:

When working with your ESX/ESXi hosts using CLI/Console you can use the following information to get the following information:

  1. esxcfg-nics –l

    2. Using the above command will get you information about your NIC Name, NIC Connection status, Duplex, MTU and …

  2. esxcfg-vswitch –l

    3. Using this command will get us the information about Number of vSwitches, Uplinks for each vSwitch, Number and Name of port groups in each vSwitch.

Resources Notes:

These notes are about CPU and memory allocation for VMs and RPs.

  1. Reservation at RPs level will apply immediately
  2. Reservation at VMs level will apply only when the VMs are powered on.
  3. When the resource is used in reservation, that amount of physical resource will not count in available resources.
  4. Memory reservations are activated at startup, yet physical RAM is only allocated as needed. Unallocated physical RAM may be used by others.
  5. Once physical RAM is protected by a memory reservation, it will never be reclaimed by ballooning of .vswp-swapping even if the corresponding virtual RAM is idle.

Misc Notes:

We have 2 alarms for power status of VMs, one for VMs which is inside DRS Cluster and one for non-DRS Cluster, So it’s better to be careful when creating alarm for powering on VMs.

Sources:

  1. http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2010/02/data-containers-entry-points-and-dats—oh-my.html
  2. http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2009/12/top-10-questions-on-thinapp.html
  3. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/03/esxi-lessons-learned-part-1/
  4. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/10/esxi-lessons-learned-part-2/
  5. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/19/esxi-lessons-learned-2-revised/
  6. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/22/esxi-–-lessons-learned-part-3/
  7. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/01/09/esxi-–-lessons-learned-part-4/
  8. http://www.vladan.fr/basic-vmware-esx-cli-networking-commands/
  9. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/03/03/cpumem-reservation-behaviour/
  10. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/03/09/vm-powered-on-alarm/

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