VMware Communities : Thread List - VI: VMware ESXi™ 3.5

ESX server on VMWare Workstation

ContactDP — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:25:39 GMT

Hi all,

I am new to this community. I have a problem with my ESX server installation and need help.
I have installed ESX3 server on VMware Workstation. Also have 2003 server vm running in the same VMware Workstation. Installation was sucessful. Both 2003 server and ESX server are in same subnet. I am able to ping the ESX server from 2003 VM, but i am not able to manage the ESX server using the webbrower console nor through SSH connection using putty. Please someone help me in this regards.

Durga Prasad

Support for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 on ESX 3.5

dfehse — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:11:13 GMT

Hi,

maybe I'm just too stupid to find this information, but will there any official support for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 on the ESX Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Plattform?

Thx for any feedback

Daniel Fehse

Removing files associated with removed virtual machine

martinpg2001 — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:13:31 GMT

Hi, I am running ESXi 3.5 and using VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5. Using VIC, I created a Virtual Machine called ChromeVirtual on a datastore called Disk 3 and allocated 20GB to it. Later, I decided I did not want this VM, and so using the VIC UI, I removed the virtual machine. However, I discovered that this did not release the 20GB of space on Disk 3, and I cannot work out how to safely reclaim this space.

From what I have read, it looks as though I should have selected Delete Virtual Machine, rather than just Remove. But now the VM is not displayed in the VIC UI, I do not have the option of deleting it!

I tried logging into the ESXi server, and at the command line, I can see that there is still a directory called ChromeVirtual in /vmfs/volumes/Disk 3.Is it OK to just manually delete this directory or is this likely to break something? Is there a right way to recover space in a datastore after removing a VM?

Thanks you for any help. Martin

Suggestions/Best Practises for Moving a 1.5TB RAID to Virtual Disk

EddieA — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:11:59 GMT

OK, I'm giving up on the idea of trying to make my 1.5TB RAID show up as either a passthru device, or an RDM, as nothing I've found/tried seems to work. So, I'm thinking of using the RAID as a DataStore and moving the current contents of my RAID to Virtual disks, stored in that DataStore. So, what's the consenus of the best way to set this up.

It's configured as a RAID 5, and currently, the whole 1.5TB is defined as a single Physical Volume, and I've carved out, so far, 6 Logical Volumes, with 1 or 2 more planned in the near future. So, do I either:

Define the complete RAID as a single disk, and contine to use LVM.

Define each Logical Volume as an individual Virtual disk. I know I can still "expand" these, if needed, using the supplied tools.

Or, yet again, do I go down the route of installing a NAS Appliance, in ESXi, and use that to control the data. If so, then the same 2 questions asked above are still relevent, but in a different context.

Any input and/or suggestions would be gratefully received.

Cheers,

Eddie

What are your thoughts on installing ESXi on flash versus local storage

Ubuntu111 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:28:17 GMT

Is anyone installing ESXi on a flash drive instead of local storage? If so what are the pros and cons? Would you use flash for all environments or only smaller ones? How reliable is flash compared to local storage (w// RAID)? Thanks for any feedback.

ESXi datastore also for regular files

ndhert — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:59:10 GMT

Is it true that under ESXi one can not make use of an external USB disk in a Virtual Machine ?

If so, what are the possibilities of the ESXi Datastore ?
One can put floppy images, CD/DVD .iso images and boot from it, but can it also be used for
regular files ?
If you have a unix/linux Virtual Machine, can you upload (via the VIclient) e.g. a unix tar file into the Datastore and then from your unix/linux Virtual Machine, copy it into your unix/linux file system, or even directly access it from unix/linux VM ?

Will changing time on ESX 3.5 Server disrupt VM's?

ezimmerm — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:02:04 GMT

I've never had to worry too much about the time on our ESX box being exactly right since all the VM's are join to active directory and they get their time from the domain time server.

However we're putting a server in a DMZ and now I'd like to make sure the time on the ESX box is correct.

If I use the client, logon to the ESX server and change the time will it affect the availability of the VM's? We generally don't have any downtime so this is critical.

I see a lot of posts about time but couldn't find one specifically for what I was asking.

Thanks!

Shared SCSI Volume

Bjoern.Gies — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:57:15 GMT

Hello VMTN community,

I got two SuperMicro servers, each with an Adaptec 29320ALP-R[1] U320 parallel SCSI controller connected to the same external RAID system.
The RAID system is an EUROstor ES-6600[2] with two U320 channels.
I'm running ESXi 3.5 on both systems, seperated to each other.

The EUROstor RAID system offers the possibility to propagate a RAID volume to both channels - for clustering as they say.
I wonder if the ESXi can handle such a shared volume or if there will be problems when both are accessing the volume. I thought about having some virtual machines stored on that volume but only registered/mounted in one inventory of the two ESXi at a time to reduce possible conflicts. So that I can easily run the virtual machine on the other host, maybe when one physical server fails.

To illustrate it a bit:
RAID system
   System-Volume-1
      Host1 only (SCSI Channel 0; ID 0; LUN 0)
   System-Volume-2
      Host 2 only (SCSI Channel 1; ID 0; LUN 0)
   VM-Volume-1
      Host1 only (SCSI Channel 0; ID 1; LUN 0)
   VM-Volume-2
      Host2 only (SCSI Channel 1; ID 1; LUN 0)
   Shared-Volume
      Host1 & Host2 (SCSI Channel 1&2; ID 2; LUN 0)

I found alot about shared SCSI disks for virtual machines, but not for ESX(i) itself. Found something about "cluster aware" OS, but most of them talked about SAN.

Thanks for any help or tipps, links whatever that might help me on that topic in advance!

Greetings from Germany

Björn

[1] http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/Controllers/Hardware/scsi/entry/ASC-29320ALP-R/
[2] http://eurostor.de/german/ES6600U.D.php

ESXi 3.5 U3 and Qnap stability/performance?

danik11 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:27:42 GMT

Hi everyone

Looking to buy QNAP 809 pro for our current ESXi 3.5 few servers to put all the VMs on QNAP. I had few questions;

1) Can you mount QNAP device to ESXi server as iSCSI datastore? and put VMS on it? or do i have to use NFS?

2) Should i consider other brands? if so which in same price ranges?

3) Just overall your experience with QNAP and ESX environement?

Thanks

StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:16:2:0 status = 24/0 0x0 0x0 0x0

ronaldpj — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:54:13 GMT

Hi all,

We are seeing some information in /var/log/vmkernel that worries us somewhat. We don't have any actual problems, but a lot of messages. The messages occur on 13 hosts in one site which are all connected to the same LUNs. The LUNs exist on iSCSI based storage devices from EMC (AX4 and CX4) and Equalogic. The messages relate to LUNs which exist on all three storage devices.

This is an example message:
Nov 19 10:31:56 lin-ict-esx22 vmkernel: 89:15:31:38.094 cpu0:1024)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:16:2:0 status = 24/0 0x0 0x0 0x0

Every 5 minutes we get somewhere between 10 to 60 messages (depending on the host), targetting different paths. Sometimes one path gives multiple messages in a row (sometimes up to 20). Over all the hosts combined, all LUNs on all storage devices are mentioned, so it is not a specific LUN or storage device which gives this error.
The 13 hosts are all ESX3.5U3. In the same site and connected to the same storage, we also have 2 ESX4 hosts. They do not report anything related to this error.

On another site with roughly the same configuration (hosts are running ESX3.5U2 instead of U3), we don't have anything resembling these messages.

Reading through the forum and on different sites, we see this message being about a SCSI Reservation Conflict.

Can anyone give us some information about this?

ESX 3.5 Slow boot Loading VMkernel qla2300_707_vmw.o

techpaul — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:51:26 GMT

I installed update 4 for ESX 3.5 via Update manager. After installing all required updates the ESX host did the final reboot, but did not come back up. I checked the console and could see it was stuck at the line loading vmkernel qla2300_707_vmw.o. I restarted the offending ESX host a few times but it still would not get past the loading vmkernel message.

There were a couple of articles on the vmware community webpage suggesting that this can take up to 30 mins and just to sit tight and wait. I waited for 45 mins it still was stuck at the same screen.

It eventually boots up after around 1hr 30 mins!

I have installed all the latest firmware updates for the Hardware HP BL460c G1

I also ran the below command after reading an article with a fix. This did not do anything to speed up boot time, still around 1 hr 30 mins.
http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/do-you-suffer-slow-boot-up-with-your-esx-host/esxcfg-advcfg -s 10 /Scsi/ConflictRetries

Has anyone else experienced this problem before? I ran update 4 on all 5 of the DR esx hosts wih out any issues, this is the first ESX host in our prod environment that has update 4 installed.

Thanks

Linux firewall + VLANS

SilkBC69 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:13:56 GMT

Is there any issue with using VLAN interfaces on Linux firewalls in ESXi? The virtual swtich on the ESXi server has a VLAN ID of 21 for our ISP, which corresponds to the VLAN ID on the switch. I am building a Linux firewall to duplicate our current physical one (using a different IP) so I can do some testing without interrupting current connectivity.

Our current physcial firewall's WAN interface (the one with the external IP on it) is called "VLAN21".

On my (duplicate) virtual firewall, interface eth0 os connected to VLAN21 on the virtual switch and can access the Internet just fine. When I configure the "interfaces" file onthe virtual firewall exactly as it is on the current physical firewall (except for IP information), I cannot access the Internet at all, nor ping the ISP's gateway. I have the VLAN module loaded.

Before I dig much deeper, i just wanted to make sure there wasn;t something else I needed to do within VMware to make this work?

Thanks!

How many hosts can I have?

Plumcrazy2010 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:08:41 GMT

I am still quite new to Virtualization, but here's my question:

I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual quad core processors, 8GB RAM, dual NIC's & 1TB HDD space.
I am running ESXi 3.5.
I have 1 Windows 2008 server installed and I selected 2 CPU's, 4GB RAM & my datastore has 500GB free.

How many more Windows 2008 servers can I run on this ESXi box? I have tried to find out how you determine what CPU's & RAM is still available and how I would know when the machine is overloaded but I cannot seem to figure this out.

Anyone able to help me out here?

Thanks,

Virtual Machine slow performance (12 x ESX 3.5 hosts running 200 Win XP VM's)

six4rm — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:14:33 GMT

Hi,

Our environment consists of 12 ESX hosts with 200 Windows XP VM's running across the platform. Each VM has one vCPU and 768MB RAM with no reservations and no limits set.

Our users are reporting very slow performance when logging on in the mornings. It can take up to 45 minutes between entering their user credentials and their first porgram opening, usually IE or Outlook.

All the performance graphs show that our hosts are massively under-utilised when it comes to CPU & Memory. Looking at the throughput to the SAN their is very little data going across the link and the same with the network. It would appear that there is some kind of bottle-neck occuring somewhere within the infrastructure but we just can't figure it out.

We did realise last week that a large amount of our VM's had a 512MB limit on Memory although the VM was actually being granted 768MB. This was causing the VMKernal to limit memory at 512MB, which in turn was causing the VM to use it's VMSwap file. Obviously this wasn't a good situation to be in and we didn't actually realise that the limit was in place. This has since been removed for all affected VM's.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated as we have been scratching our heads over this for some time now.

Thanks in advance.

RAID array events

standus — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:11:34 GMT

Hi,

I have installed ESXi 3.5 at IBM 345. In management client I see ServeRaid and everything looks good. Problem is that I need to receive email when something will happen with disk array. How to do it please?

License for ESXi?

sysjno — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:59:22 GMT

I have one ESXi server that's working fine. A second is complaining about an expired license. I've been looking all oveer the VMware site to try to find out how to get a license. Seems like they've changed everything and made their site 100X more difficult to navigate.

ESXi vs Server 2.0 Performance

SlamDunc64 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:30:50 GMT

I am installing a new DELL T310 server for my business and plan on virtualizing. I am familiar with both products and have used them both. I am debating on which one to install, ESXi vs Server 2.0 on Ubuntu Server. I know the differences of the two, but cannot find any real performance comparisons of the two products. I know ESXi will be faster, but by how much? Are there guest limitations on Server 2.0 that are not stated?

I never see the need for more host machines. Also, is there a better OS than Ubuntu for Server 2.0?

Does ESXi need it's own hard drive for installation?

Chris4Caribe — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:40:05 GMT

I've downloaded ESXi for evaluation and am having problems with installation.
Trying to load it on a Red Hat Ent. Linux v5 server that has one 1TB logical drive.
During the first steps of install, it says that if I continue, data on this singular logical drive will be lost.
Does this mean I have to repartition my raid into 2 logical drives and reinstall Red Hat before proceding with the ESXi?

Please Help,
Chris

Rogue/Orphaned VMDK files

jongery — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:10:54 GMT

Here's the scoop, folks. I have MachineA, that has 4 virtual disks configured for it, up and running and not knowing anything is wrong with the world. I performed a storage migration on it from one storage device to another. In the middle of the migration, it failed due to locked up iSCSI initiator on the storage. I was unable to resume the storage migration, so copied the .vmdk files from the old server and created a temporary machine, MachineATemp. I was able to boot that successfully, so I powered it down and cloned it to the new server name, MachineA. Well, now I have 3 files, on the old storage device, named MachineA-0.vmdk, MachineA-1.vmdk, and MachineA-2.vmdk. They are located in /storagedevice/MachineA/MachineA/ folder. The modified date on these files changes every time the directory is refreshed to the current time. According to the Virtual Center Maps, these files are not associated with any virtual machines, as there are none stored on this storage. I am in the process of cleaning up files to decommission the storage.

My question is this: how do I find out what is updating the modified date on these VMDK files? Feel free to ask questions if anything I stated does not make sense or you need additional information for further clarification.

Unable to connect to MKS:Failed to connect to server x.x.x.x:902

Felix001 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:38:44 GMT

I currently have a Vsphere vCenter Server which is managing one ESX 3.5 server.
The problem is when I try to open the console to one of the virtual machines I get the following error :

Unable to connect to MKS:Failed to connect to server x.x.x.x:902

This seems to be due to my client trying to connect to the internal (actual) ip of the ESX 3.5 Server. Which does work as this address isnt NATT`d at the firewalls and set over the internet.

I have tried adding the vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = "TRUE" setting but this hasnt worked...

Has anyone any ideas on how I can resolve this issue...???

Please note that I have no access to the firewalls or my local host file.

Trouble interpreting log error

n8er — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:48:18 GMT

I have done a snapshot of a CentOS 5.4 guest as I prepared to make some changes. Once the snapshot was done, the guest acted as if it no longer had a hard drive.

The host has the following pair of errors that shows up nearly one hundred times:

VSCSIFs: 441: fd 205520169: status Limit exceeded

Cow: 866: IO to deltadisk handle 478825 failed: Limit Exceeded

The statement is useless to me. I can't find anywhere that defines what "Limit" has been exceeded. I have gone as far as rebooting the host, but there was no change in the guest. Rolling back the snapshot also didn't help.

There are a dozen other guests on this host, and for now they are working. I'm slightly nervouse about doing further snapshots, however. Anybody have an idea as to what is going on?

Nate

Monitoring Drive Arrays

DanSpenge — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:08:31 GMT

Hello. We are an IT consulting firm and we have a little dilemma that I'd like to run by everyone.

We were on-site at a client's location and observed that one of the drives in the ESX server had a red light lit on it. We found that the drive was not actually failed but it had dropped out of the array. The problem is that we never got notification that the drive had dropped out.

I spoke to Dell's ESX support department about monitoring a drive via a DRAC but the tech indicated that it can't do any SNMP traps. We wanted to just install Dell OpenManage but the embeded version of ESX doesn't have the ability to get this installed.

I mentioned the setup (PowerEdge 2900 running VMWare ESX 3.5i and build 110268) and he said that we had to update to a newer build (this is apparently update 2 and we need to go to 4 or higher). From there, we should have no problem. He wasn't exactly sure on how to configure the SNMP traps from there but he assured me that once we updated, we should be able to install OpenManage and away we go.

We can do this but I was just curious if anyone had any methods for monitoring drive arrays in VMWare ESX 3.5i.

Any feedback is much appreciated. Thanks!

Help getting started with pfSense firewall and ESXi

skygizmo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:05:46 GMT

Hello,

I have installed pfSense on a small Atom based server. It has two on board Realtek Nics and two Intel Pro 1000 nics. I have set up the WAN and LAN nics on the Intel. Assigned opt1 and opt2 to the Realteks.

I have a Dell 1950 server. I have vmWare ESXi on it. I assign 36.69.243.121 to vmWare GUI. I run 5 different vm's on it. Each with a static ip. Web servers, email, a couple of custom applications. I have a dozen or so static ips. I use 69.36.243.170 as the WAN. I use the default 192.168.1.1 on the LAN. I use 36.69.243.120 for Gateway. My subnet is 255.255.255.240 or /28. I can access the WebGUI ove the LAN.

Everything is located at a data center. I have physical access to my server.

When I hook every thing up, my servers are unreachable from the web. I have tried all kinds of port forwarding, firewall rules, static rout, and bridging combos. No matter what I try, I can't reach my servers from anywhere.

So, I ask, can anybody get me started? Should I give my vm servers local ip's and port forward? Should I be bridging or static routing? I have configured a few windows firewalls and understand the basics. Just barley it seems. I bought the book. Read the first half. Two weekends into this project and I am still stuck.

NTP not syncing time in ESXi 3.5 u4

jetb — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:21:08 GMT

I have an ESXi 3.5 U4 server and configured an ntp server using the vi client and made sure that the service is running. but it seems that the ntp server is not syncing the esxi's host time with the external ntp server. to check if ntp is syncing or not, i intentionally moved the time backwards for a couple of minutes using the vi client and with the ntp service running and observed that the time is not corrected w/c leads me to conclude that ntp is not working. can anyone point me to the right direction here.

I Would Like a Sample .VMDK for RDM Disks

EddieA — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:38:03 GMT

Firstly, I know what I am attemting to do is totally unsupported.

I have some instructions for manually adding an RDM disk to a 3.5 version of ESXi, but I would like to see if there are any differences in the 4.0 implementation.

So, can anyone post the contents of a .vmdk file, for an RDM disk. If possible, one created with the -r option, and one with -z for comparrison.

Also, the relevent lines from the .vmx file would berequired.

Cheers,

Eddie

Tool to Migrate Nic/Vswitch Config Between ESX Hosts

Damin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:11:31 GMT

Hello.. I am currently running an ESX 3.5 U4 environment, and I am looking for an easy to migrate the Vswitch, Interface and LAN configuration information from one host to the other. On Vsphere this is done using Host Profiles, but I'd like something for ESX 3.5 that will save me the 2-3 hours of manual labor required to create a Vswitch/Vmnic layout when I bring up a new box in our cluster..

Any ideas? Maybe something that can be scripted from the Console?

This is on ESX U4, not ESXi....

Can an ESXi VM directly access a physical NIC?

claystuckey — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:48:14 GMT

My ISP's cable modem will only communicate with the first MAC address that is sees. In my case, it is the MAC of the physical NIC. I need it to communicate with a VM which by default has a virtual NIC and thus a second (ignored) MAC address. I need the VM to use the physical NIC. This NIC will be dedicated to this VM. Does anyone know a way to do this?

Big Problem - need Help - no more space for redo log

pawaq — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:36:23 GMT

Hi!

I have an 3.5 esxi Server Build 153875 running.
One Server (Windows SBS2003) was virtualised. Ther Server has to Partitions. C/E C= 30 GB E=200 GB
Unfortunatly i did'nt had enough space left on the disk so, after I did one snapshot i forgot to delete this snapshot.
In the meanwhile the server is on hold and this Virtual Maschine message occures:

msg.hbacommon.outofspace: There is no mor space for the redo log of xxxx.vmdk

I have 2 options

1 retry , "you are able to continuethis session by freeing disk space on the relevant partition"

or

2 abort to terminate.

What will happen when i press terminate?

Removing the snapshot is not possibel because this option is#nt offered to me by the system.

How can i solve this problem? By attaching one more disk?

I have an raidsystem on a ml350 G4 HP with 5 disks.
the following files are in the datastore:

xxx.local_1.vdmk
xxx.local.vmdk
xxx.local.nvram
xxx.local_000002.vmdk
vmware.log
xxx.local_1-000002.vmdk
vmware5.log
xxx.local.vmx
xxx.local-Snapshot4.vmsn
xxx.local.vmxf
xxx.local.vmsd
xxx.local-218d9a0d.vswp

Is there a possibility to get out of this.........???

Please help

System Requirements for VMWARE ESXi 3.5 client VMs

JerryJ26 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:43:13 GMT

We purchased a Dell PE 1950 G3 back in May, 2 Xeon E5410 processors. 8 GB RAM, 160 GB PERC6i SAS RAID.

Originally installed with windows 2008 Std server 32-bit. Focus of original project changed from Terminal services to Virtualization.

Now using Dell Customized VMWare ESXi 3.5 U4 (because it was free) and wanting to host 2 2008 Server R2 VMs (1DC and 1 Termserv) and migrate 3 XP Pro utility servers (20 GB each) to VMs.

Question is this. Do I have sufficient server resources to support the desired VMs???

I have read the Guest OS Guide and it seems to be OK. Just wanted another opinion since I'm a Noob to VMWARE.

TIA

RAID solution for an old ML110

RadioMarky — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:49:49 GMT

Hi All,

I'm trying to build an ESX box and have an old HP ML110 (first gen). I was wondering if the following card (HP e200i Array Controller) would work in this box. I've done a lot of Google(ing) and my eyes are now square.

Can anyone please tell me if this card will work with my 4 SATA drives.

I'm trying to build this as cheap as possible, there be a recession here in the UK you know

Thanks in adance

Radiomarky

Storage VMotion over FCIP link

Bryan26 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:14:45 GMT

Hello all,

Bear with me as i am just a storage geek and vmware is not my speciality.

I am looking for validation in a data center move project. We will be moving Data Centers which are about 30 miles apart. We have a couple of hundred VM's what need to be migrated to the new Data Center. The team has proposed setting up new ESX servers in the new Data Center and migrating the VM's using Storage Vmotion across a 10gb FCIP link. The data resides on a Clariion and will be moving to a Clariion and the FCIP link is between Cisco MDS 9513 switches.

Now i was under the impression that this kind of remote migration was still a work in progress Cisco and Vmware and there are very strict limitations using Storage VMotion between Data Centers.

Does anyone have experience regarding this type of migration? Pitfalls? Problems anyone sees?

Thanks in advance

there are not enough licenses installed to perform the operation

Argenis Azuaje — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:30:50 GMT

I want to add host on my ESX 3.5 Infraestructure and I can not do, because VC shows me error there are not enough licenses installed to perform the operation

I have 6 Host on my ESX Infraestructure but I read on Internet that I add until 99 Host on my Infraestrcuture...........some help please

Below(Attach), picture with this error.......

Thank You

Unassigning datastore and reassigning it another esxserver.

hishivahere — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:57:56 GMT

Hi All,

I created a datastore in one esxserver say Esx1.

Unassigned the datastore means unassigned the lun from server and rescanned the esxserver datastore disappeared.

Now assigned the same lun to another esxserver say Esx2, will the vmfs volume in the lun exists or not?

Regards

Neela

ESXi Backup Script on Linux

kpc — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:28:01 GMT

I've created my own remote esxi backup script that I run on a standard SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 as a VM with the Remote CLI installed written using bash and vmware-cmd. I wanted a script that would run on a linux server, that didn't use PERL or PHP and didn't require me to manually enter VM or datastore names everytime I added a new VM.

Description:
The script uses vmware-cmd to identify the VM's running on the ESXi server, snapshots the VM if running and doesn't already have a snapshot, then uses SCP to pull the files from the ESXi server to the backup location mounted on the Remote CLI server. It then compresses the files and sends an email with a report. The script will also create a weekly backup.

Restrictions:
The script will not work if the VM already has a snapshot, it will just ignore the VM and move onto the next. The only effective way I've found for backing up a VM with multiple snapshots is to either suspend or shutdown, copy, then restart or startup. Either way you have downtime. Personally I don't like to keep snapshots for any period of time, certainly not in a live environment.

I haven't tested it using VM's with spaces, (generally bad practice anyway).
The VMDK name must be the same as directory name (most are).
Make sure your backup directories exist

Requirements:
I was getting real slow transfer speeds with the vifs so I use SCP and have just setup keys so you don't have to login or enter your password when running any SSH or SCP command - it's very easy to setup and I've outlined the steps below and in the comments secton in the script

Run 'ssh-keygen -t rsa' on RemoteCLI server
Copy /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to /.ssh on ESXi server
Rename id_rsa.pub to authorized_keys
On the ESXi server copy /.ssh to datastore1
Add following line to /etc/rc.local: cp /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/.ssh/ /.ssh -R (This is needed for when you reboot the server, the .ssh directory gets deleted)

Restore:
To restore the VM, just gunzip the files, copy the directory to your ESXi server, browse the datastore using the VI client and Add the VMX file to the Inventory. Leave the VM name blank in the wizard.

The script takes a lot of ideas from other users on these forums (thanks to you all). I'm by no means great at scripting and no doubt there are things within the script that could be improved upon with the right amount of time. I've tested with a number of different VM's and everything seemed to work fine but I give no guarantee, try it out and see if it works for you.

Cheers

ESXi 3.5 VM's have sluggish performance on Dell T7400 setup.

mlb7225 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:45:28 GMT

I am beginning the troubleshooting phase now of why my VM's are running very sluggish.

I am running ESXi 3.5 installed on a Dell T7400, dual quad-core CPU, 32gb ram. I have 2 arrays on the PERC6i controller, 2x 750gb RAID1 for my ISOs, and 3x 1TB RAID 5 for all my VM's. There are 2 physical NICs as well.

My VM's are eith XP or WIN2K. I have running at any given time about 5-7 VM's but there are a total of 19 VM's on this host. Each VM has about 2-3gb of RAM. The XP machines have 2 processors while the WIN2k have only 1 allocated.

The main problem I am having is with our Sieble compile of the .srf file. This process usually takes about 90 min, but now, it is taking well over 3 hours. I am not sure if there is an I/O issue with the RAID 5 on the PERC controller. The compile is doing a lot of writing on the drive. When I configured the PERC card, I kept the standard defaults, 64kb, No Read Ahead, and Force WB.

I was told before I installed ESXi 3.5 that it could handle about 12-16 VM's running on a single host. Is this true? If so, where did I go wrong?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

ESXi 4.0 on a HP Proliant DL120 G5 - Operating System Not Found

pinazinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:37:43 GMT

Hi all!

I'm trying to setup a new installation of ESXi 4.0 on a new HP Proliant D120 G5 with 2 Western Digital 250GB SATA HD and 8GB RAM.

HDDs are NOT set on a RAID Array, and are NOT on Native Mode Operation (as I could read on another posts).

I mean, my BIOS is like this:

Serial ATA - (enable)
Native Mode Operation (Serial ATA) - (Auto)
SATA RAID - (disable)

Installation is successfully. First loads CD and all the required files, I select one of the two HDD's (I select first HDD) and then is performed the installation.

When installation is completed, the setup program tells me that is going to restart the server. It restarts OK, and when it's time to load the First run of ESXi...

IT APPEARS: "Operating System not found"

I don't know what to do because the installation is performed successfully. Could someone help me???

THANKS A LOT!!!

Installing ESXi 3.5 with HP management on top of vanilla ESXi?

Rossgk — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:16:41 GMT

Good afternoon everyone,

I have an HP server that is running ESXi 3.5 already. It is running the vanilla ESXi. As I need to monitor some stuff, I would like to use the version of ESXi that is bundled with the tools from HP.

Can I simply take that ISO, boot it, and hit repair ?

Do I actually need to reinstall and wipe the drive?

Thank you!

ESXi crash - cannot start VM's nor delete files from disk

ysflnm — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:00:01 GMT

Hi

I have a ESXi server which crashed during the weekend with pretty much no warning. Last I checked it had sufficient space (10 gigs of 64), but apperently not.

When I try to power on a VM I get "Could not power on VM: No swap file". So I looked at this post: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/50436

Problem is, going to the "hidden console" and typing "kill -9" and "ps auxfww | grep <vmname>" gives me nothing (I'm assuming <vmname> is the name of my virtual machine for example: "WinXPProSP2". ps + grep returns a new line/console input (nothing found) and -9 is an unknown param. -TERM also.

Before all this I tried to go to the datastore and delete unused machines. This gives me the following error: "General fault caused by file". Most of the VM's I'm trying to delete were not mounted or in use by the server so I don't know why the server would lock them? I tried going into the /vmfs/volumes/datastore-folder to delete the files manually with rm -r but I get this error: "Unable to remove http://... Input/output error". Also tried with -rf. Even the log files.

Someone on another post suggested booting into linux or linux-up mode. I tried to find the grub or lilo conf, but with no luck. I also don't know what to do when I get there and how to reverse my changes so I can boot into VMware again. I also tried booting the server with a Gentoo minimal disk and mount the disk - but unsure which disk sda2 or sda4 to use. Only these had partitions but unknown to fdisk.

Is booting into linux(-up) the way to go, and most importantly how do I do it, or do you guys recommend something else?

Reinstalling is sadly not an option.

Thank you.

Perfomance chart probleme

Drygery — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:56:38 GMT

Virtual center 2.5

VI Client 2.5

ESX server 3i 3.5.0

I've a probleme with HA cluster with two ESXi 3.5 servers

I can't get normal perfomance chart from one of them

As you can see, the charts are broken. The second ESX is ok and the chart is normal.

The chart per VM is same;

The virtual machines are ok

What is the problem?

thanks, and sorry for my english

ESXI 4.0 loss of network connectivity to VM's.

fusioncom — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:35:15 GMT

We are just starting in the Virtualization world so I'm having an issue tracking down this problem. I currently have ESXi 4.0 installed on a Dell PowerEdge with 32GB of Ram, Two NIC's, 750GB of DAS for the VM's.
I have built one VM that was operating just fine until recently. NIC#1 is dedicated to Management, NIC#2 is dedicated to the VM's. Right now the VM just randomly loses network connectivity, or stops responding. Then after a brief delay it will come back. There is no particular action causing this, and I'm not noticing a network connectivity problem in VSphere, it just drops the VM connection. RDP, PING, and the Console view in Vsphere cannot load the VM.

Any thoughts?

Can't access server from Console Tab

jpalm3 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:06:24 GMT

I am running VMware Infrastructure Client Version 2.5.0 / VMware ESX Server 3i version 3.5.0 on two seperate Hosts.
Each Host has 3 Virtual Machines setup on it. 2 VMs on each host run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard 32-bit these run great. I can access the console from the client without issue. However I also have 1 VM on each of the Host Machines that are Citrix Servers and run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise 32-bit. For some reason I cannot access these two servers from the Console Tab in the VI Client. When I select the tab I can see the Screen Saver moving - but when I click on the console screen like I do with the other servers, control is taken from my mouse like normal, but the screen saver keeps going and the login screen doesn't come up. I can access the servers fine via RDP.

To elaborate on this... I have a program that I need to install on these 2 Citrix servers. When I RDP using the /client or /admin option I get an error during the install that states that I have to be on the Console to install. That is why I tried to access the Console from the VI Client, in hopes of being able to install the software.

My main opjective is to get the software installed. But I would really like to understand why I cannot access the consoles from in VI Client.

Thanks

Health Status Critical

Snr_Whippy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:58:45 GMT

Hi I appear to have a critical alert in the Health Status under system.

It is called ABR status 0 for Bios 1 - Unspecified assert.

I am running the same esx version on other servers with eaxt hardware and bios versions without the same error.

IBM 7979BJG

The only difference with this set up is that we are running windows and suse guests on the same box.

Anyone got any clues? I havent found any info from searching the communities or the web.

Screenshot attached

New to ESXi 3.5 - need instructions on proper shutdown and then restart of entire system

mplsstar — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:25:43 GMT

I have a ESXi 3.5 two server cluster (Dell r900's) with a Dell SAN and about 7 servers virtual with a couple of workstations. I am new to this company and the setup needs to be shut down so I can add servers from a smaller rack to the large rack housing the virtual system. This is a server space consolidation and was never completed by the previous admins. So I need to take the ESX cluster offline. I then need to take the 4 other physical server offline and move them to the large server rack housing the ESX environment. Reconnect all power and network cables. Re-initialize the physical servers and the ESX environment. Only reason for the shut down and restart is that there is a sliding door sepperating the two server racks. I need to remove the smaller rack and replace with the large rack. I am doing this on Sunday (11/15) morning and would realy like some advice.

How I am thinking of doing this is;
1. log on to virtual infrastructure client and shut down all servers and workstations from the OS.
2. From the Virtual Inf client right click on each host and selelct shutdown.
3. wait a few minutes and then take the san off line.
4. the License server is physical and then take it off line.

I know I am missing something but not sure what. Could someone please walk me through the proper way to take a virtual environment down and bring it back up. I would really appreciate it

Enable IPv6 on ESXi 3.5?

sysjno — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:48:00 GMT

How do you enable IPv6 on an ESXi 3.5 host? Googling turns up nothing, searching this forum turns up nothing, searching the docs turns up nothing... why the mystery?

Documentation in Italian

marius — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:18:25 GMT

I am not sure this is the right place for my question, but I hope that somebody will help anyway...

Where can I locate a description of VMware ESXi features in Italian? A brochure would be ok...

I need to insert a general overview of VMware ESXi in a project but I want to avoid adding mistakes if I try to translate directly from English...

Regards

Marius

ESXi 3.5 and HP MSA2012i : iSCSI implementation

francois.tiers — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:15:26 GMT

Hi,

Description :
I'm using an ESXI 3.5 build 153875 on HP DL380G5 with an HP MSA2012i for iSCSI storage.

On HP MSA 2012I :
i've created 1 vDisk with 3 volumes (total 2To, 1To for my ESXi separeted in 2 volumes)
2 controlers with on each 1 IP adresse for ESXi

On ESXi :
1 vswitch with a "VMKernel Port" (only for iSCSI) with 2 network card (1Gbits each)
NIC Teaming :
LB : Route Base on IP Hash
Network Failover Detection : Link Status Only
Notify switches : No
Failback : Yes

Connection :
ESXi point-to-point MSA2012i (no switches)

My problem :
1- I'm seeing only one path per LUN.
2- When i'm cut the active link, i'm loosing the LUN
3- When i'm loosing link, i'm also loonsing mapping on MSA2012i

I need help

How do you get a vCPU count?

degunny — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:47:09 GMT

I recently ran into a VI3 environment where they had reached the maximum vCPU count per ESX server. I had them add an additional ESX server to the cluster. As part of this incident I started researching how to go about getting a count of vCPUs on ESX; with no luck. Anybody have a tool or command I can use to address this?

Intel VGT vlan tagging

fgl — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:37:16 GMT

Hello all,

I have any interesting dilemma in which I inherited a VM that is on multiple vlans via VGT vlan tagging within the OS on the VM and the vNic is tagged to a vlan trunk of 4095 which allows it to pass all vlan traffic through and this is fine and working as expected. Now for my dilemma I can not figure out how the previous admin (how is no longer here) setup and define the vlans inside the OS of the VM as there are no vlan interface nor any kind of vlan tab in the properties of the network adapter nor any kind of advance setting tabs that I can find, there is nothing under the start menu nor under device managers and etc... I am at a puzzle on how he setup the vlans in the first place, is there some hidden Intel application I need to run? I have the VGT driver and installer he used "pro2kxp_v14_0.exe" that I can run again but I'm concerning that if I reinstall on top it would wipe out all the existing vlans definitions and there are about 15 vlans which would be bad for me. Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

ESXi 3.5 management network very slow

heikki_m — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:17:44 GMT

Hello,

I'm having problems with ESXi (3.5 U2 latest, both embedded and installable) on three different hosts. Hardware is HP DL380 G5. Both NICs on every server are connected to 1000FDX ports without any duplex issues. ESXi network configuration is the default: both vmnic0 and vmnic1 are used for VM Network and Management Network. Switches show no errors on the ports.

VM Network is not showing any performance problems. I'm getting steady 30-40MB/s to and from guest machines.

Accessing the management network (copying to datastore, converter access, downloading VI client etc.) is painfully slow. Ranging between 100kB/s to 3MB/s - usually around 1MB/s.. needless to say that this is very frustrating when for example converting existing virtual machines to the ESXi hosts.

Any idea where to start looking for a solution?

Service Console Command Line changes do not reflect in Gui.

TariqMC — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:16:57 GMT

Hi

I work in a DR centre where we have to rebuild ESX servers for different customers on a weekly basis. After initial setup I need to run the following commands on each of my 30+ esx servers.

esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Scsi/ScsiRescanAllHBAs
esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /LVM/EnableResignature

(I use putty cli application Plink to do this...plink -ssh <newESXip> -l <ESXrootusername> -pw <ESXrootpassword> esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Scsi/ScsiRescanAllHBAs)

I need the changes I make using the CLI to reflect in the GUI ( I am using the VIC and connect to the VC.

I have tried "vimsh -ne 'hostsvc/storage/refresh'" but I get "file not found" and the gui does not refesh when I look in the advanced config, LVM area.
I have also tried vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/storage/refresh. Still this does not help.

Is there an easy way to get the Gui to sync with ESX after issueing commands from the CLI.

Thanks for you help.
Tariq

Java lockup/performance issues with ESXi 3.5, Ubuntu 8.04, Multi-CPU, and VMI Paravirtualization

mantico — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:38 GMT

We have discovered an interesting issue with a new production system we are setting up, whereby java processes on the VM guest are looping, consuming all available CPU. They are effectively locked up, and need to be killed (with -KILL).

Experimentation has demonstrated to us that this only occurs when the sites are running with VMI Paravirtualization turned ON, with multiple Virtual CPUs assigned to the guest - with paravirt on and 1 CPU, there is no problem. Turning paravirt off, and keeping 4 CPUs also corrects the problem.

We are running Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) - 32-bit - with kernel 2.6.24-24-server. Tested JDK is jdk1.6.0_06, though we are about to check against the latest.

Has anyone else seen major problems with Paravirtualisation like this?

Host Update fails to patch server

EddieA — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:06:51 GMT

Running ESXi 4.0, and trying to use the Host Update Utility to patch it to the latest level. It finds 5 patches to apply, but trying to apply tham fails with: "The patch operation has failed with this error: There is an error during the operation, please refer to the logs for investigation."

Which log do I look in to see what the actual error is.

Cheers.

What is the recover procedure for Uknown (Invalid) VM's?

rbngan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:30:11 GMT

I'm new to using VMware, In fact I'm only in the testing phase to see if is viable for our organization to use. I'm also looking at xen. I have two test servers. I installed a XP VM on one test server and it was up and running fine. The next morning both test servers had "locked up" (not sure why, could have been a brown out, bad ups, any number of things to cause the lock up). I had to pull the plug to reboot. After the reboot, ESXi booted fine. I was able to log into the VMware infrastructure client and one of my Windows XP VM was listed as "unknown (invalid)". An other Windows XP VM I had off at the time works was still listed and works fine.

Accessing the files in the datastore for the VM WinXPProLite, I notice two extra files. They are WinXPProLite-eb982468.vswp and WinXPProLite-flat.vmdk. I already have a file called WinXPProLite-flat.vmdk. Also the log files go from vmware.log to VMware-7.log but is missing VMware-1.log. Right clicking on the vmx file does not allow me to "add to inventory" - it is grayed out.

I've spent all afternoon looking through the blogs for a solution and could not find any. Because the VM was running at the time of the servers "lock up" could it have corrupted these files and if so how are they fixed. I hope this is not a problem with VMware where hardware issues cause the VM's to be easily corrupt. That is one of the reason's I'm testing to see if VMware can be more resilient during hardware/power failures. I've seen a lot of people have this issue, but no one has ever solved it. Lots of ideas but no solutions to this problem. It makes me wonder if I had a couple production servers running at the time of this event I would be up a creek. I've yet to find a resoluton and I've been looing for several days.

How to move from VmWare Server to ESXi and from ESXi to VmWare Server

malvcr — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:06:08 GMT

Good afternoon

I'm checking the ESXi product, and in the office we have VmWare Server Virtual Machines everywhere, so could go into this technology, but I have two very basic questions. Take into consideration I have no ESX or ESXi experience, so the answers can be any level, don't worry, just is information I need to take a decision.

1) How can I move Virtual Machines from general storage (for example a Linux or Windows server with VmWare Server installed) to an ESXi server?

2) How can I move ESXi server based virtual machines to general storage to use in VmWare Server or Player based environments?

The ESXi server would be an stand-alone one, no Virtual Infrastructure tecnology in place for the moment.

Thank you very much.

P.S. Could be very useful to have this type of information in the VmWare web page for people like to try ESXi. As it sounds, it's really impressive.

Yet another ESXi whitebox system $850 (new) - 1TB Hardware RAID

Rob999 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:59:57 GMT

FWIW

Built a new whitebox ESXi system yesterday.

$850, all new hardware, dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, 1TB RAID 1, power effecient

ASUS P5QL PRO motherboard (1 LGA775 socket, Intel P43 chipset, 4 DIMM RAM, 1 - 16x PCIe, 3 - PCI, 2 - 1 x PCIe, up to 16GB DDR2 RAM, up to 1600MHz FSB) $84.50
Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.66G (1066Mhz FSB) w/retail box fan $119
Kingston 4GB KIT KHX8500D2K2/4G RAM $60
Enermax EPR425AWT pro82+ 425w ATX power supply $90
Cooler Master RC-335-KKN1-GP tower case $45
Adaptec 2405 RAID controller (8x PCIe, w/4 head SATA cable) $227
Intel Pro/1000 GT PCI Ethernet adapter PWLA8391GT $30
2 x WD 1TB WD10EACS SATA2 7200rpm "Green" SATA HDDs $199 (for both)

I added a couple parts I already had: CD-ROM (basic IDE), a cheap PCI video card and an Adaptec AHA24x0 SCSI card (not yet in box).

This is running RAID1 in hardware so no fooling around with trying to get drivers in to ESXi, etc. You could do this for a lot less if you bought a cheaper RAM, power supply and no hardware RAID.

Works great!

Virtualizing an NLB MOSS cluster - P2V

proden20 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:43:21 GMT

We have a physical MS Network Load Balanced MOSS cluster with the web storage on a SAN LUN. We want to virtualize it and move it to a 3.5 cluster at another site.

I know I can accomplish this with an RDM LUN, but can I virtualize one of the servers with the current LUN storage being encapsulated into a VMDK, then present the VMDK to the second server in the target VMWare environment?

Thanks!
Dennis.

Dennis Procopio - VCP

Please remember to award points for helpful or correct responses.

Strategy for scaling the configuration of ESXi swap files across datastores

kaizenwerks — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:17:15 GMT

I'd like to get some input and/or documentation that outlines the best practices to scale the configuration of ESXi swap files.

Scenario: 16 ESXi hosts

Options that I see:

1) Configure all the ESXi host swap files on one dedicated datastore
2) Spread the ESXi host swap files across all available datastores
3) Configure all the ESXi host swap files on one datastore with other VMs

Which is the best option and what have others done? Does swap files require Tier I storage or can we get away with Tier II or Tier III storage?

There are a lot of assumptions here but I'd like to evaluate the best option. Thanks!

Is ESXi free?

Maayanay — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:47:34 GMT

i'm trying to figure out is ESXi 3.5/4.0 is really free?

do i need some sort of free license code? where do i get it? do i need different licesnse for every server? do i need t ask license for different amount of CPU?

i download ESXi 4 HP version and i want to start using it.i'm trying to get all the answers before implementing Virtual enviroment in the company I work for.

my machines are HP DL 380 G5 CPU Quadx2 with 8 GB RAM. and i know the server is supported.

on google i found some articles that says that ESXi is free and others says it is only for 60 days then you need a license!

Please help ASAP

CANNOT see the datastore after ESXi host update?

dinnu — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:13:28 GMT

Hi all,

We are using ESXi 3.5 host on DELL PE 2850 with RAID 5 local storage. Today I ran VMware host update utility and updated BIOS and RAID firmware on the host before a system restart. After the restart, the system loads the OS properly and when I check for the storage, the datastore (with critical VMs) is missing. Cannot see that anymore.

Please help me get back my datastore with the VMs in it.

Thanks,
Dinakar

licensing

leeroyrichardson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:01:42 GMT

We are currently running 3 esx hosts with a single virtual centre. I have a couple of esx-i standalone boxes that we use for testing purposes. However, if I wanted to connect the esx-i hosts to the virtual centre rather than manage them through the client would this incur a further license requirement?

I know we have 3 licenses for our existing esx hosts.

Lee Richardson

Virtualized Microsoft Terminal server and working with PDF files

pdowney — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:47:26 GMT

All,

I'm not sure where to place this post. We just virtualized a Microsoft 2003 Terminal Server using vmware esx server 3i. Prior to this migration, the terminal server ran Windows 2000 and was not virtualized.

We work with PDF files heavily on the terminal server using Adobe Acrobat. We ran Acrobat 6 before the migration, and upgraded to Acrobat 9 afterwards. Since the migration when users connect to the terminal server from outside the office , the rendering of PDF files for the purpose of reviewing documents has become much slower, exactly the opposite affect of what we wanted. Could this somehow be due to the virtualization of the server??
Is there something I should be aware of regarding working with PDF files on virtualized terminal servers?? Should extra resources be allocated to the virtualized terminal server to improve the performance when working with PDF files??

I know that terminal servers repaint the screen continually when working with PDFs so the process is somewhat painful. However, it seemed faster with Acrobat 6 prior to the virtualization. I've heard recommendations to go to Citrix, but am concerned that the problem may lie with the virtual environment or with Acrobat 9 and upgrading to Citrix may not resolve it.

I would love any advice from someone on the best way to work with PDF files in a virtualized terminal server environment. In our scenario, which new element likely caused the performance degradion: virtualizing the server, upgrading to microsoft server 2003, or upgrading to Acrobat 9???

Thanks in advance.
Penny

possible to copy thin disk to ESXi standalone?

jffowler — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:46:12 GMT

I have a cluster (ESXi 3.5 U4) where I am using thin disks for several VMs. I need to copy those particular VMs down to a standalone ESXi box(let's call it testbox) to do some testing. The disks need to stay thin because the standalone box doesn't have enough storage to accommodate the full size of the disks (and it's maxed out on drives).
Solutions I've tried:
1. FastSCP - doesnt work because the disks don't stay thin, so I can't fit them all.
2. copy to testbox using datastore browser- doesn't work because testbox isn't managed by vCenter as it's ESXi standalone
3. copy fm shared storage to spare local disk (w/ vmkfstools to keep thin), then physically move that disk to testbox - tried this, but I get a an error "The destination file system does not support large files (12)" when trying to copy a 1 GB (thin) / 400 GB (thick) disk. The local disk is VMFS. Not sure why I get that error. Maybe because the local disk only supports files up to 256 GB and that VM if expanded would be 400 GB?

Suggestions, workarounds? Help!

HA agent on <esxhostname> in cluster <clustername> in <datacenter> has an error Incompatible HA Networks after IP address Migration

Lotus91000 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:29:26 GMT

Hi There,
After Migration a ESX Host in A VI Environment, within the Cluster, I still have this error when I try to reconfigure the HA.

HA agent on <esxhostname> in cluster <clustername> in <datacenter> has an error Incompatible HA Networks:

In the Cluseter, there are 6 ESX Host and I just Migrated IP address for the test, The IP addresses communique.

Does any one here can help me?

Thanks

Looking backup simple for ESX 3.5

quan0509 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:15:53 GMT

Hi there.

I'm looking for the cheap ESX VMware backup solution. So anyone can show me some solotions.

Tks

Using VCB with Server 2008 x64 and ISCSI storage

JBird006 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:05:29 GMT

I have a server 2008 box that I have disabled automount on and scrubbed and the shared disk shows as offline (no drive letter as well). On a server 2003 box the disk shows online with no drive letter. Obviously, I need to have automount disabled or I will corrupt my vmfs iscsi lun, but I want to configure the 2008 box as my VCB proxy. Can I just make the drive online on the 08 box? I believe I need to have it online in order for VCB to work with the shared VMFS store. Basically, I am just really freaked out about putting that storage online for obvious reasons. Has anyone had any experience with this?

Thanks,

Jason

What's the event of ESX server shutdown unexpected ?

quan0509 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:13:58 GMT

I have a simply monitoring system for the esx servers, i want to identify event of system shutdown in an exacthly way. So i don't know to catch any event or log to do it.

So anyone can help me.

TKS!

Dell Optiplex 760 - cann't install ESX sever 3i 3.5.0

jenefa — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:42:33 GMT

Hello All,

I am getting this error when i try to install the Sever 3i 3.5.0

Unable to find a supported device to write the VMWare server 3i 3.5.0 image to.

Please help, i have tried to change the mode of the Sata hard drive to legacy and ata

I tried adding the "nocheckCPUIDLimit" to the boot option.

But still the same error, can some shed some light on this.

Cheers

Jenefa

Emulex HBA goes offline after utilization

pcdave — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:26:28 GMT

I have submitted a ticket about this, but was wondering if anyone else is seeing this.

Using ESXi build 199239 we have had 3 different Emulex LPe11000 HBAs go off line. The issue seems to inconstantly occur when we there is load on the host by copying large amounts of data to a VM located on the SAN

We have tested the communication through from the SAN to the FC switch and the fiber by attaching it to other servers and there seems to be no issue. The only way to get the HBA to come back online is to reboot the host.

The 3 changes that were made is that the servers were upgraded to build 199239 (that included a new Emulex driver); changing the virtual switches to connect to the physical switches with multiple NICs (though in one case only one NIC is enabled to each network); and we enabled multipathing on our SAN

We have been unable to consistently reproduce this problem, but 3 HBA errors in one week are concerning, especially when 2 of the hosts and HBAs have been working without issue for 6 months.

Thanks for any help you might have.
-Dave

Configuration on one of the servers exhibiting the problem

HP DL380 G6 BIOS P64 2009-03-28
ESXi installed on disk, build 199239
Dual L5520 CPUs
Emulex LPe11000: Boot Version: 5.03a0, Firmware Version: 2.72A2, Kernel Version: 1.20a4
HP Smart Array P410i RAID controller firmware1.66
Intel PRO/1000 Quad Port PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Controller

SAN: NetApp 3140v running DataOnTap 7.3.1.1P4
FC Switch: Cisco MDS 9124 NX-OS version 4.1(3a)

Slow Write speeds with DAS

TomD29 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:01:53 GMT

Currently running esxi 3.5, latest build as of 11/13/2009. The server is a HP GL 380 Dual Quad Core 12GB Ram 6x SAS 10000 rpm direct attached storage, p400i controller. The purpose of this machine is for testing only, which is why its not connected to a SAN. The read speeds are perfectly fine, but the write speeds are slow. Installation of software takes forever. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or how I should configure the system properly to used the DAS effiecnly on disk writes. I have also upgraded to esxi 4.0 to test performance. Performance is enhanced but same issue.

about hardware handling in ESX 4.0

cloumzor — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:16:56 GMT

Hi everyone,

today i got a dumb question

i actually have a gentoo linux server installed in a regular way and want to migrate to esx 4.0 to set up a gentoo linux server + a windows 2008 server side by side.

my question is: what about my raid5 array located into my only physical server that will receive esx 4.0 and the 2 server's VM ?
will i be able to see & use it under my future gentoo linux server VM running under esx 4.0 ? or am i forced to send them away on another machine that will act as network storage ?

i hope i made it all clear, thank u very much in advance for ur help.

bye.

Message was edited by: cloumzor

forgive me i just found a topic about it even tho i checked before posting
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1278751#1278751

Importing a vm session

LiamDwyer — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:16:01 GMT

Good morning,

I am fairly new to the ESXi platform so please excuse any ridiculous questions. I currently have ESXi 3.5 setup on a machine. I have an already built vmware server session. I was hoping to be able to import that session on the to the ESXi machine.
Is there anyway that I can do that? I have not been very successful in adding a USB drive to the ESXi machine and unless I am missing it in the infrastructure console I am not able to find anywhere to import the session.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

thank you in advance!

ESX3i 3.5;0u4: free or only for 60 days?

ndhert — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:13:36 GMT

On the webpage of www.vmware.com, it is said: Download VMWare ESXi free
yet, after downloading VMWare ESXi 3.5 from the web page and
installing VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_4.153875.i386,
it says: "... will operate in Evalution mode for 60 days.
After that you must register for a VMware product license."
Is that a wrong assertion, or what?
("free", I guess means "free for ever "...)

Where does ESX Server store the VM configuration?

InforMed Direct — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:40:25 GMT

I thought it was in the vmx file in the folder but obviously not as:

1. Used Veeam FastSCP to make backup of VM folder
2. Modified the memory setting of a VM using "Edit settings" from 4GB to 3.5GB
3. Copied the VM back using FastSCP

Memory setting in VMX file was 4GB but it stayed at 3.5GB, i.e. the VMX setting was ignored.

Cheers, Rob.

PS. Despite the update for this forum software, it's still one of the slowest web sites I use...

What Management Interface should I use for the free version of ESXi

neeper67 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:33:16 GMT

I am planning on implementing the free version of ESXi on a server that has Intel VT technology.

I do need a management interface for my free version of ESXi.

I was told by someone that I need VSphere to manage.

Can I just purchse the VSphere and should be fully compatable with the free ESXi?

If so, What version of VSphere should I purchase?

What are my alternatives to an easy GUI to manage that will not cost too much? ( I am planning to only managing 5 virtural machines on the ESXi server)

Thanks in Advance!

ESX 3.5 Host - obtaining DHCP address on VLAN1 ?

dwhicker — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:17:23 GMT

All

I am going crazy, I have a cisco switched environment and have almost completed the shutdown of interface vlan 1 as best practice basically removing all traffic, ports, communication required off of VLAN 1 for security best practice. For some reason, in my DHCP leases, there are four addresses that have been pulled and when I trace them down by "sho ip arp vlan 1" on Cisco switches, they point back to ports on my Cisco 3750 stacks that my ESX host are plugged into, example on is vmnic0, Mac address is almost similiar except for the last hex character of the physical NIC's in the ESX IBM Server.

I have vswitches with port groups, but they are all set to a specific VLAN, there is nothing in the HOST configured for VLAN 1 that I can find and it is driving me crazy. Does anyone know anything about this or have a clue what this could be. Things I have tried:

I have tried to search DNS
tried telneting to ip
tried browsing to ip
tried anything with ip add you can think of
used typical "ifconfig" commands on ESX host
searched all settings in vCenter

I CANNOT FIGURED THIS OUT

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Downsize a vm

LinuxTux — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:35:46 GMT

I've increased the size of my vm, but I need to reduce this. Virtual center won't let me do this, only lets me increase. How would I go about changing the size?

ESX 3.5 U4 - HA Agent error

davidhaase — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:35:17 GMT

Hi there,

maybe sombody can help me with the following issue in my VI (vCenter 2.5 U4, ESX 3.5 U4 - latest Patches installed)
I have an HA Cluster containing 10 hosts (same hardware, same configuration)

One ESX host (it's always the same server) periodically reports "HA Agent has an error... cmd addnode failed for primary node: Internal AAM Error - agent could not start.". I can fix this using "Reconfigure for HA" via VI-Client. Sometimes I have to try it up to 3 times before the error message is gone. After a short period of time the host reports the same error. Rebooting didn't fix this issue. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
David

Pedo mellon a minno --

ESXi 3.5 "unknown (invalid)" virtual machines

stolenpants — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:21:04 GMT

I logged in to my ESXi 3.5 build 153875 server. I hadn't logged in for a while. I found all of my virtual machines are "unknown (invalid)"

All of the machines are still running, though.

LSI SCSI adapter

773gb3003 — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:14:58 GMT

Does anyone know if ESXi 3.5 U4 will support a LSI SCSI Adapter (Ultra 320, 2000 series)? It's also showing on Device Manager as (w/1020/1030) (StorPort).

Thanks.

Supermico X7DVL-E puzzling Sata issues

kdewitt — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:04:53 GMT

Here's my current configuration; \|\|_Product Information_\|\| \|\| \|Vendor:\|SuperMicro\| \|X7DVL-E:\| \| \|E:\| \| \|\|_Configuration Tested_\|\| \|\| \|VMware Infrastructure:\|ESXi 3.5u2 VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 \|Configuration Tested:\| \| \|Integration Method:\| \| \|\|_Support Information_\|\| \|\| \|Vendor representative?\|no\| \|Configuration Supported?\|no\| \|Support Provider:\|metaflo\| \|Support Provider Contact Info:\|kurt@metaflo.com\| \|Support Provider Website:\|metaflo.com\| \|Support End Date:\|n/a\| \|Known Issues:\|sata controller not working correctly - intel 5000V / ESB2 \| \|Additional Comments:\|see below\| SuperMicro - X7DVL-E (2 x socket 771 64bit Xeon (quad or dual)MB) FSB speed of 1333Mhz/1067 Mhz / 667Mhz - ATX form factor - ACPI - 6 x onboard SATA ports (supports RAID 0,1,5,10) - 2 x Gbit Lan ports-supported by ESB2 south bridge (works 1st time under ESXi!) - 1 x EIDE UltraDMA / 100 bus master I/F. - 1 x floppy (I'm not using this.) - 6 x USB - not using headers, just 2 x onboard on back of system board. - ATI 16MB ES1000 Graphics Controller - Super I/O: Winbond W83627HF - loaded w/ 1 x Dual-Xeon 2GHz cpu in socket location #0 - 2 GB (2 x 1GB) RAM ECC registered memory. - EIDE DVD - Bios - 8Mb Phoenix w/ DMI 2.3, ACPI 1.0, PnP, USB kb support, HW Bios virus protection and SMBios 2.3 - I've been puzzled by this motherboards refusal to work correctly for SATA control for some time now and I'm about at wits end. The motherboard has a Phoenix Bios (perhaps we should be tracking versions??) which does contain most of the same settings I've used successfully on other whiteboxes - i.e.: - Sata Controller Mode - Enhanced - Sata Raid Mode - Disabled - Sata AHCI Mode - Disabled And indeed, this motherboard worked fine the first time I loaded it up w/ a fresh Samsung 1TB hard drive - HD103UJ. However, I had formatted the drive correctly in another machine using Gparted ISO as ESX3. Once I did this, I transferred the drive over to the machine and then booted up ESXi 3.5. Machine came up fine and I was then able to connect to it successfully using the VMWare Infrastructure Client on my windows box. Next, it showed up as a new datastore and I was then able to format it correctly for my system. walaa, it's there. I then went to the ESXi box's console and did a proper F2 shutdown. I added 2 x more GB of ECC registered memory (borrowed from an exact clone of this system - yes, i have 2 systems w/ the same configs And then restarted the machine. The machine now hangs during boot of the ESXi Server at this point. "Starting VMware ESX Server 3i: Loading module ata_piix ... Starting config Script" I then took the drive out of this system and loaded it into a completely different system - an E-machine w/ centron CPU 1.6ghz box running ESXi 3.5 as well. This e-machine recognized the HD and I was able to format it using this box. Then I tried to transfer the fully formatted VMSf drive back to the Supermicro box. the ESXi boot still hangs at the same place.???? Not sure what to try next. any help would be greatly welcome!!!

RAID???

nzkid225 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:10:41 GMT

Hi could someone please tell me if I can do raid with esxi. I have a silicon image 3114 but I heard its raid doesnt work with esxi so if there is someway I could do software raid 0 or merge 2x 250gb hard drives together that would be great

Thanks,
Andrew Hill

VMWare Tools installed and not installed...

ndhert — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:56:05 GMT

ESX3i 3.5.0u4

I created an Ubuntu VM. Then I added the VMWare Tools via Edit Settings / install/Upgrade VMware Tools
(in the 'Status Panel, if reported installing was successfull).
Yet, when I look in the Summary Tab of that Ubuntu VM, it says:
VMware Tools: not installed
why is that (doing a power-off/power-on of the VM does not change it)?

Entering license takes away features?

lasinl — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:23:19 GMT

My 60 day trial is about to run out and when I enter my free license for ESXi 3.5 u4 (obtained when I downloaded it) I get a message saying some features will be taken away. What are those features exactly?

ESXi 4 hardware compatability

iWolf — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:09:29 GMT

Hello
Im hoping someone can give me some direction on hardware compatibility with ESXi server.
I have tried the hardware compatibillity configurator but it only lists the full blow servers which is over kill in this scenario..
In this case we want to use a desktop motherboard and use the Adaptec 3805 SAS controller. I know the 3805 works well.

1) Is the Intels core i7 processor compatible. I see it features Virtualisation Technology but are ther any know issues,
2) Still unsure as to which desktop motherboard is suitable. Can anyone please reccomend one that has worked well for them?

Thanks everyone.

Regards
Wolf

How can i mount the datastore in audit mode after power failure?

moumour — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:43:01 GMT

After a power failure my ESXi server is not booting with mesage "missing operating system". I try to repair the server with the repair option from installation CD and after that the server is booting in audit mode but i can't see the datastore. How can i mount the datastore in audit mode?

try out ESXi 3.5

ndhert — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:04:29 GMT

ESX3i 3.5 is free. Doc says it installs on 'bare-metal' ...

Can one also install it on a separate disk partition (keeping other partitions with already

installed OS-es) and start ESXi 3.5 from a boot-manager as one other "O.S."

ESX Server hang when moving a virtual machine between two ESX Servers

quan0509 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:17:15 GMT

Dear all.

I've just meet a probem with two ESX 3.5 Server System. So i'll describle all the things i'm facing right now.

In my system. I have 2 ESX Server 3.5 is managed by VMWare Center 2.5 with all advanced feature. So cause the less budget, each ESX server has only NIC Card ( i plug the network card *Intel Pro
1000/GT Desktop Adapter)*

In the test reason, i tested vMotion feature with moving a vmware ( vmfs file 's stored in local storage ) from one to one. So when i was moving - the both of my ESX servers were hang. I can't access to them by all the possible ways .

I don't known what are my facing problem ..

Anyone can help me.

Tks for reading !

OOPS! Locked out!

serverstage — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:07:17 GMT

Hello Experts!

I was trying out the roles and permissions on a newly installed ESXi4 and managed to restrict my root account to read-access only. It was easier than you might think- all I had to do was add the localadmin group to permissions on the host object (highest in the inventory tree) and assign the read-only role. Voila!

I've been trying to reverse this in the shell but I'm lacking the insight to do this quick and easily.

It seems there must be a number of ways to fix this, for example:

remove the localadmin group from this object
change the role from read-only to administrator
change the read-only role to have administrative powers
remove root from the localadmin group
create a new user in the root group who can log into vSphere client and reverse the changes

so far I tried 4 & 5 but it seems the shell accounts don't directly affect the roles and permissions in the GUI. No luck yet-

Can offer a clue?

Thanks, Brandon

Host storage maintenance tools

longbeach1 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:14:30 GMT

Hi - I upgraded a ESX host from 3.0 to 3.5 but did not get a chance to clear out a lot of the old data/file backups

What is the best way to go into the host's storage and remove files? With 3.5 it seems there is no command line interface??

vCenter was able to let me delete a lot of the old vms that were not needed, but I see that there is about 200GB unaccounted for which were probably old backup directories

Are there any good tools that show that allow any insight?? I do not have vMotion as a part of this setup yet, so consider it a standalone for this purpose at this time.

thanks!

-Bill

ERROR MAQUINA VIRTUAL EN ESXi

rovinside — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:37:10 GMT

Buenas, tengo un problema después de importar una máquina virtual con SUSE 10 de Workstation a ESXi. La importación me dice que es correcta pero cuando intento arrancar la máquina en la ESXi me da el error que adjunto.

Wrong NIC after P2V

technologist123 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:03:29 GMT

HI Guys

So far I have P2V 10 over servers from my data center and all got VMware accelerated AMD PCnet Adapter after virtualized but I have noticed that for the last 2 servers conversion I got the primary LAN card as AMD PCNET Family PCI Ethernet. This is not normal because this card shows 10 Mbps connection speed and all sort of configuration options in contrast to VMware accelerated NIC.

The workaround is to remove and install another NIC and then all good, but it is very annoying to do this everytime when you p2v any server.
can someone enlighten me why this thing start happening ?

thanks

ESXi 4.0 APC UPS - using lamw and j.holland documents - VIMA issue

cierech — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:06:41 GMT

Hi guys,

I have set up our UPS with our ESXi server according to document (revision 4)

http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1341/version/4

Note
that revision 4 of the document is not the one using lamw's scripts,
but using the ssh hack. Everything works beautifully when I invoke the
script ups_shutdown manually from the ESXi unsupported console:

#!/bin/bash
VMID=$(/usr/bin/vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep -v Vmid | awk '{print $1}')

for i in $VMID
do
  STATE=$(/usr/bin/vim-cmd vmsvc/power.getstate $i | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}')
 
  if [ $STATE == on ]
  then
  
    /usr/bin/vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown $i

  fi

done

sleep 30

/sbin/shutdown.sh
/sbin/poweroff

First of all, right of the bat the first line of the script throws and error (-ash file not found error). So I had to remove that (any idea why??).

When I run this script from the ESXi console (unsupported), everything is fine, all the VMs shut down and at the end, so does the ESXi.
When I run this script from VIMA (ssh to the console, remote script execution), only the VIMA machine shuts down. If I modify the above script to not shut down VIMA, all the VMs (except for VIMA of course) shut down, and so does the ESXi...

VIMA is the first machine that gets shutdown - it has the lowest Vmid. It seems as though this causes the rest of the script to stop executing... How is this possible when in fact it is being executed on the ESXi server?

I'm pulling my hair out on this one (or what's left of them). Does anyone have any idea why this doesn't work...? lamw?

Thanks in advance guys,

Andrzej

Looking for Backup Solution for ESXi 4

kholy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:38:49 GMT

So i am doing some simple 3/4 VM's and i need a solution to back these up... i dont need anything to crazy just some sort of way to be able to backup the vm's.

I am on a very tight budget as we are not getting paid for anything this is just a project. any ideas are helpful. thanks!

License Compliance Scripting

JimO1biPro — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:59:51 GMT

I need to create scripts for windows and linux guests that, if possible, interrogate the machine configuration for software that has been licensed on a per CPU basis.

Is there anything within the guest utilities that would allow interrogation of vm environment settings like sched.cpu.max and min?

VMKERNAL errors "vmhba1:0:23:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0"

itagsurya — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:57:53 GMT

HI All,

one of my ESX I 3.5 u4 server genarating below error. i dont know the problem, could you please tell me what is the problem. please do need full

Nov 10 05:46:01 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.462 cpu2:1510548)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:23:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:01 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.563 cpu2:38732)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:01 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.764 cpu2:1511210)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:17:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:01 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.765 cpu2:1511210)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:01 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.865 cpu2:1514641)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:23:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:02 vmkernel: 5:13:43:30.966 cpu2:1510538)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:17:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:02 vmkernel: 5:13:43:31.067 cpu2:1511558)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:23:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:02 vmkernel: 5:13:43:31.772 cpu3:1511210)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:04 vmkernel: 5:13:43:32.981 cpu4:1511560)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:04 vmkernel: 5:13:43:33.787 cpu4:1511551)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:05 vmkernel: 5:13:43:34.795 cpu4:1511571)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:06 vmkernel: 5:13:43:35.702 cpu4:1514580)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:08 vmkernel: 5:13:43:37.012 cpu2:1511210)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:08 vmkernel: 5:13:43:37.818 cpu6:1511645)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:09 vmkernel: 5:13:43:38.825 cpu6:1511421)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:10 vmkernel: 5:13:43:39.833 cpu4:1511632)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:11 vmkernel: 5:13:43:40.841 cpu4:1511471)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:13 vmkernel: 5:13:43:41.949 cpu4:1511634)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:13 vmkernel: 5:13:43:42.755 cpu0:1511472)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:14 vmkernel: 5:13:43:43.763 cpu0:1519512)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:15 vmkernel: 5:13:43:44.770 cpu0:1511584)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:17 vmkernel: 5:13:43:45.979 cpu2:7357)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:17 vmkernel: 5:13:43:46.786 cpu2:1515638)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:18 vmkernel: 5:13:43:47.692 cpu2:1510539)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:20 vmkernel: 5:13:43:49.304 cpu2:1511626)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:21 vmkernel: 5:13:43:50.715 cpu2:1515638)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:23 vmkernel: 5:13:43:52.126 cpu2:1515642)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:25 vmkernel: 5:13:43:54.242 cpu2:1511210)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0
Nov 10 05:46:26 vmkernel: 5:13:43:55.752 cpu4:1511645)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba1:0:21:0 status = 0/2 0x0 0x0 0x0

Regards

Surya

ESXi 3.5u4 Dell Customized upgrade to 4.0i Dell Customized

Box293 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:35:02 GMT

Last year I deployed ESXi 3.5u4 Dell Customized version on a clients server.

I want to now upgrade it to ESXi 4.0 Dell Customized. Is this just as simple as performing the upgrade as per the normal methods?

Are there any special release notes for the Dell Customized ISO?

Thanks
Troy

VCP3 32846
VSP4 VML-306798

VMware Converter with ESXi 4.0

Floye — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:41:48 GMT

Hi everyone,

Quick question: I'm running ESXi 4.0 enviroment (one host so far). Is it possible to use VMware Converter to convert i.e. virtual machine under Citrix XEN server to virtual machines that I could run in my ESXi 4.0 enviroment? Appreciate clearing this subject up for me.

Cheers,

ESXi 4.0 - Won't Load Windows 2003 R2 64Bit

Domwilko — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:34:34 GMT

As a resonable newbie, I hope I'm just making stupid mistake here.

I've successfully installed ESXi 4.0 on a Dell Poweredge 2850 server with Dual Intel Xeon 3.60Ghz processors, 4GB RAM and 3 logical drives (72GB, 36GB & 36GB).

Following the ESXi installation I was able to successfully install a Windows XP Professional VM.

I then wanted to install a Windows 2003 R2 64-Bit server.

The host server, the Dell 2850, is 64-Bit compatible (it must be as it loaded ESXi 4.0); however when I try and install the Windows server, it reports:

Message from localhost.******.*****:
This host does not support VT. You have configured
this virtual machine to use a 64-bit guest
operating system. However, this host is not
capable of running 64-bit virtual machines or
this virtual machine has 64-bit support
disabled. For more detailed information, see
http://www.vmware.com/info?id=152
info
31/10/2009 16:53:57
root

Is this because I'm using the evaluation version of ESXi 4.0 and therefore the 64-Bit support of VMs is disabled? I've tried searching on the VMware website for answers and have become very frustrated going round in circles without getting any answers, hence I've ended up here.

Hopefully someone can answer this question.

Thanks.

How to add additional storage SATA drive

jfbeck — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:19:43 GMT

I am running ESXi 3.5 on a Dell PowerEdge T300. The server originally had three SATA drives. I have added an additional 1TB SATA drive but I can't get the VI client to recognize it. I did a rescan on the storage adapters but the drive is not being recognized (see attached GIF image).

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Do I need to do something in the BIOS?

Is anyone working with an IBM DS3200 iSCSI Array?

texasjohn — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:45:00 GMT

I am trying to set up some volumes and the
initialization has been running for about 10 hrs. I don't know if
that normal. I am also assuming that is why I can't initialize the
drives on the 2003 standard server.