ESXi regular maintenance

[optymal]

Hello to everyone!!

We have a HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 server with an ESXi 6.7. We want to know if there is a procedure or a cookbook that contains regular maintenance recommended practices for ESXi, because we haven´t find anything about it on Internet. Especially procedures about disk consolidation.

Thanks in advance.

[a_p_]

It's basically up to you to be compliant with your company's guidelines.

It may not be necessary to apply each patch once it becomes available (depends on what has changed, see release notes for the patch), but regular patching should be done anyway. Keep in mind that HPE usually supports firmware (SPP) updates only if you didn't skip updates for too long.

Please clarify what you refer to with "Especially procedures about disk consolidation."

André

[continuum]

> Especially procedures about disk consolidation.
Disk consolidation are only necessary if you allow your automatic backups to run out of control.

If you monitor your automatic backup tool regularly and fix issues when they appear no regular consolidation actions are necessary.

[scott28tt]

Check all your VMs to make sure they are not left with snapshots for any longer than is necessary (snapshots are usually only needed during backup or patching/upgrade operations)

[JafarTavana]

HP Blade BIOS Policy

The following BIOS settings are recommended for HP Blades running ESXi:

Enable Turbo Boost
Enable Hyper-threading

Verify that all ESXi hosts have NUMA enabled in the system BIOS. In some systems (for example, HP Servers), NUMA is enabled by disabling node interleaving. Please consult your server hardware vendor for the applicable BIOS settings for this feature.

Enable advanced CPU features, such as VT-x/AMD-V, EPT, and RVI.
It is a good practice to disable any devices that are not used as serial ports.

Set Power Management settings from the default Balanced to Custom.
In Advanced Power settings, change Memory Performance from Balanced to Maximum Performance.

http://jamesdelaney.co.uk/blog/2018/09/03/bios-settings-for-esxi-on-hp-hpe-servers/

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installing HP NMI driver to , ESXi automatically halts the server when an NMI occurs and show PSOD with this massage :

0. Panic requested by 3rd party NMI handlers 

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Enabling 44-bit Address mode for >1 TB memory support in VMware ESXi