Was surprised this wasn’t here by default, but alas, out of the box vCO does not ship with a workflow to manage an NFS datastore. Thanks to the VMware communities for a bit of scripting, I was able to put one together. First we’ll break out the components, then show you how it runs. Finally
-> Continue reading vCenter Orchestrator – Add NFS Datastore
So this happened. VMware has pulled the ESX Classic binaries from being available as a direct download: While they do provide a download link for ESX classic, it sends a pretty clear message… If you haven’t made migration plans, NOW is the time to do so. Thankfully, they’ve not left folks completely out to dry
-> Continue reading ESX is Dead. Long Live the King.
Amazon posted my 4 star review of Ed Haletky’s (@Texiwill) updated VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise. Let me start with saying I’ve read the first edition of this book and Ed’s Security book and found both to be excellent. As this book was a second edition, I focused my reading on those updated
-> Continue reading Book Reviews – ESXi in the Enterprise
Maybe not in the fall out bunker sense ready, this isn’t Y2K all over again… not yet anyways. Before the hysteria engine cranks up to full speed, I figured it was time to give you some tips to make sure you are ready. Note, I’m only going to cover making sure your ESX hosts are
-> Continue reading The IPocalypse Cometh – Are You Ready?
We’ve covered snapshots here a few separate times in past. However most of these were focused on ESX classic or preforming the work using one API or another. As VMware is making the shift to ESXi, it makes sense that you will need a way to deal with snapshots from the ESXi console (aka TSM/Tech
-> Continue reading Revisiting Snapshots from ESXi (TSM) Tech Support Mode
While this isn’t as big a problem as it used to be, Context Switches in applications can still bring a VM to it’s knees. In this post I’m going to link you to some resources as to what context switching is, how to look for it, and why excessive context switches hurts performance. What Is
-> Continue reading Context Switching, Some Resources
The Problem! Was doing some work with UDA and nested ESX & ESXi installs this weekend and ran into an interesting hiccup: Or on ESXi: What? Can’t format what? But we’re working with nested ESX, it’s a VMDK, format it! I tried any number of things here: Different controller types, disk sizes, partitioning within the
-> Continue reading “Could not Format VMFS” – Nested ESX
There are times when you will need to put a host into, or take a host out of maintenance mode and you wont otherwise have the remote access needed to make PowerCLI or other API methods work. For times like those, vimsh works wonders: This little gem comes from xtravirt: To enter Maintenance Mode, at
-> Continue reading Put ESX Into Maintenance Mode From the CLI
This came up in the comments to one of my other posts, so I though I’d share. Note: The Host Update Utility was depreciated with 4.1, so if you came here looking for that… my apologies. The vSphere Host Update Utility, as far as I can tell is not actually offered as a separate download,
-> Continue reading Installing the vSphere 4.0 Host Update Utility
With vSphere comes the ability for third parties to add hardware to the HCL without having to wait for an update to ESX for their drivers to be included. An excellent move on VMware’s part as this opened up the door hugely for 3rd parties to supply certified & updated drivers as well as provide
-> Continue reading Installing 3rd Party Drivers in ESX
The following is a guide on how to get Oracle 10g R2 RAC installed on ESX 3.5 using CentOS Virtual Machines. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? This was written up by Justin Mungal. In the guide Justin covers every thing needed to get Oracle RAC installed on ESX 3.5 and then some. It should be
-> Continue reading Holy Cluster Batman! – Oracle 10g RAC on ESX 3.5
I mean it. Really. One of my pet peeves is the fellow who installs VMware server on his workstation to run his work provided Windows XP image (or some variant of Linux). The logic behind this usually goes something like: “I needed to be able to create virtual machines and VMware Server is the only
-> Continue reading Stop Using VMware Server! (For Your Workstation Workloads)
Lacking a service console, ESXi needs to be approached differently when performing common troubleshooting tasks. One of these, like the title states, is to find the CPU Ready values for a particular VM. There are more than a few ways to skin this particular cat, but in this case I’ll show you two: The vSphere
-> Continue reading Finding CPU Ready Values on ESXi
Today I was reviewing my post on ESX Crash Dumps and found that well, for vSphere, it is quite broken. How? Well… No /usr/sbin/vmkdump in ESX 4 As referenced in this KB article, vmkdump has been replaced with some additional flags on esxcfg-dumppart: In ESX 4.X, esxcfg-dumppart is now used to extract the logs files.
-> Continue reading vSphere 4 and Core Dumps (vmkdump)
Like the last post, this one also hails from objective 1.1 of the VCDX Blueprint, and is part of my exam prep. Task: Configure an NFS Datastore using command line tools. Solution: [root@ProfessionalVMware root]# esxcfg-nas esxcfg-nas <options> [<label>] -a|–add Add a new NASc filesystem to /vmfs volumes. Requires –host and –share options. Use
-> Continue reading Configure an NFS Datastore From the CLI – VCDX Prep
While this actually requires no special settings, I figure it’s worth noting, if for nothing more than to state that in VMware Fusion 3, ESX 3.5 requires no additional settings to be operational. Basically it works as follows: Download the ESX ISO (vmware.com/download/vi) In VMware Fusion create a new virtual machine, choosing said ISO: The
-> Continue reading Installing ESX 3.5 in VMware Fusion
"Sokath, his eyes opened" or roughly “Understanding”. So what does the Tamarian language have to do with PSODs or Machine Check Exceptions (MCEs)? Well, neither one of them make much sense, and need some understanding in order to translate them appropriately. What is an MCE (Machine Check Exception) A machine check exception, or MCE is
-> Continue reading Using AMD’s mcat.exe to Debug your PSOD MCE (Machine Check Exception)
The last time we touched upon LUN resigning, it was during an odd hour of the night. Looking back now, some interesting VMware KB articles have cropped up around this very topic. First there is KB 9453805, which covers this process for VI3, seemingly from top to bottom, it also greatly expands on my post,
-> Continue reading Revisiting Lun Resigning (Bad things at 2AM)
This one came at me from left field recently. The task at hand was to cold migrate one of a Virtual Machine’s disks from it’s old LUN, to a new one with some more breathing room. Simple enough, no? We’ve all done it a million times. What happened however, was that I received a “Error:
-> Continue reading Migrate Storage – “Failed to Connect to Host”
Walking through the full vSphere ESX install today (Not ESXi like I had been using) I came across what seems to be one of the most awesome new features of vSphere ESX: Custom Drivers! I just don’t have any custom drivers to install right now, but it is gloriously awesome none the less.