Alistar's Accepted Solutions

Then simply do a kill -9 20156 and you're all set - this kill the world and will forcibly shut down the virtual machine and your locks will be free
Hi there, you should be totally fine with just re-estabilishing a new vCenter from scratch and connecting the ESXi hosts back again, and then just creating a cluster and putting them in there ... See more...
Hi there, you should be totally fine with just re-estabilishing a new vCenter from scratch and connecting the ESXi hosts back again, and then just creating a cluster and putting them in there along with the right configuration for the DRS/sDRS/EVC, etc. This will not affect running Virtual Machines in any way - but just to be safe I recommend doing this out of business hours The only stuff you will lose is: Resource Pools VM Annotations Custom Folder Organization The rest is kept within the hypervisor itself - if the VMs were on standard vSwitch, you are fine. If they were on Distributed vSwitch, you will want to export the configuration from a current ESXi host and then apply it vCenter-wide via export-import again. Some useful links on that: VMware KB: Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web client and : Distributed vSwitches and vCenter outage, what's the deal?
Hi there, since ESXi is intelligent in its partition layout on storage, feel free to just create a RAID5 out of these disks and install ESXi on it - the local datastore partition is separate f... See more...
Hi there, since ESXi is intelligent in its partition layout on storage, feel free to just create a RAID5 out of these disks and install ESXi on it - the local datastore partition is separate from the system one - you will have the most space available this way.
Hello, is there any possibility that something has changed in the NFS Exports? What solution do you use for the storage? Can you browse the files/folders you need access to from the storage it... See more...
Hello, is there any possibility that something has changed in the NFS Exports? What solution do you use for the storage? Can you browse the files/folders you need access to from the storage itself?
Oh wow, didn't see this one for a long time - as for my analysis it seems that your Trend Micro Security Software is going haywire in your system. Your OS crash was caused by OVERLAPPED_MODULE... See more...
Oh wow, didn't see this one for a long time - as for my analysis it seems that your Trend Micro Security Software is going haywire in your system. Your OS crash was caused by OVERLAPPED_MODULE: Address regions for 'TmXPFlt' and 'TMEBC64.sys' overlap. Where "TMEBC64.sys" belongs to Trend Micro's "Early Boot Clean Driver" and TmXPFlt seems to be some form of core library for the security suite. The threading somehow touches an invalid memory the OS enters a kernel panic. I suggest either finding another security solution or patching up to the latest available version - application and OS. Roland, can you send us your dumps so we can take a look as well?
Aloha You were right, that magical file is called state.tgz: VMware KB: Locally restoring an ESXi configuration from state.tgz backup
Hi, are uplinks that are connected on the switch set up to trunk the VLANS on the ports?
Unfortunately it seems NUMA is disabled hardware-wise. You can only enable it via BIOS setting.
OK let me rephrase it: Sysprep is useful before the conversion to template because it allows for the VM to be in a "clean" state. That means even if it should go through sysprep again, via a c... See more...
OK let me rephrase it: Sysprep is useful before the conversion to template because it allows for the VM to be in a "clean" state. That means even if it should go through sysprep again, via a customization wizard (the menu where you define your IP etc.) / customization specification, ( screenshot here: http://www.alexwho.com/.a/6a0133f4036f7f970b019b00093755970b-pi) But you can also choose to plainly "re-deploy" the template just with plain "do not customize" option in Deploy Template. In short, sysprepping any VM for template use is best practice that cleans up the system for its subsequent cloning - it gets rid of unnecessary clutter.
Hi there Alex, is it possible for you to create a DNS Hostname (A) record for this relocated ESXi host, and then adding it to vCenter using its FQDN rather than the IP?
Hi there, it is an interesting notation from that document, but general rule of thumb is size the Virtual Machines as you see fit on single-processor systems favoring "Cpu Socket Count" while ... See more...
Hi there, it is an interesting notation from that document, but general rule of thumb is size the Virtual Machines as you see fit on single-processor systems favoring "Cpu Socket Count" while setting vCPUs. NUMA nodes come into play with multi-processor systems where the hypervisor needs to schedule CPU/memory touching for nodes. This is set automatically via vNUMA when you still maintain the ratio 1:1 Sockets/Cores while setting the vCPUs. This per-socket core-ratio comes into play you are constrained by the OS licensing - for example you want 8 cores on a Windows Server Standard license which only supports up to 4 sockets and you have 2-CPU system, you would set 2 Sockets (because you physically have those) and 4 cores for each - this way the hypervisor will schedule it to (ideally) run on each socket with 3 cores, each touching its memory node. This gets more complex with many-noded systems. The worst thing you can do is overprovision your VMs because the ESXi CPU scheduler needs to have the amount of total vCPUs you have specified all at once on the physical CPU. This means the CPU would never co-schedule VMs in parallel, but rather serially - one VM in one clock cycle, which would have a negative impact on performance - in my opinion. Start with 1vCPU on non-intensive and 2vCPU on intensive workloads and see how your performance is, if you have time and resources to test the performance out. Also, keep in mind that shares come into play only when the ESXi host is facing resource contention.
Adding to vuzzini's answer - if you happen to run out of space on the datastore, set a Memory Reservation for the VMs so that their significant part fit in the memory, or just enough so that a sw... See more...
Adding to vuzzini's answer - if you happen to run out of space on the datastore, set a Memory Reservation for the VMs so that their significant part fit in the memory, or just enough so that a swap file can be created on your designated storage. The amount of reserved memory is subtracted from the .vswp file. If the host has 60GB Memory in total, you will need 2,6 GB Mem free for the hypervisor, plus additional 1270MB - let's say 1,3GB RAM to avoid memory reclamation techniques from engaging. In total, leave at least 4GB free for the hypervisor and spread out the 56GB remaining memory as reservations. This would be 18GB reservation/VM. Let us know how it turned out
Oh, I am sorry this wasn't clear to me from the get-go. No, you do not need any certification whatsoever, only knowledge is required
When you take a look at the link where the metrics are explained, you will see that Granted is a metric of: Amount of machine memory or “physical” memory that is mapped for a virtual machine or... See more...
When you take a look at the link where the metrics are explained, you will see that Granted is a metric of: Amount of machine memory or “physical” memory that is mapped for a virtual machine or a host. On a host: Sum of all granted metrics for all powered-on virtual machines, plus machine memory for vSphere services on the host. So this is the memory VMkernel has granted (in its own physical constraints aka the memory sticks) to have everything running - various Daemons ("services" in Windows terms) inside the VMkernel (CIM Providers, HA agent, management agents, remote GUI and SSH console sessions...), Virtual Machine Worlds (world is a group of processes bound together in VMware terms), VMkernel resource scheduler itself - there are many cogs and spinning (and dynamic, at that) and literature would be your best stop to see each and every component the VMkernel is actually composed of. You can take a look via esxtop in an ssh session.while performing tasks in vCenter or in the VM itself to see how everything moves around. And well, free memory is memory that can be allocated on-demand to any component mentioned above. Its resource management. Just go around, experiment and read on the matter - it is truly a work of art
Hi, check the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown menu in the Configuration Tab of the ESXi host - you can define when a startup of the next VM triggers. It is feasible to leave it "when VMware t... See more...
Hi, check the Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown menu in the Configuration Tab of the ESXi host - you can define when a startup of the next VM triggers. It is feasible to leave it "when VMware tools start". I do not recommend starting multiple VMs at once if your storage can't handle it though, one host by one can be in some circumstances booted up faster than when a bootstorm occurs.