Updates for ESXi 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 have been published at the beginning of December. All Updates are now listed at my VMware ESXi Release and… Read More »ESXi Release and Build Numbers - December Update
VMware includes Virtual SAN in their VSPP program. Unfortunately their vCloud Usage Meter, the tool that helps to create a license report, does not support Virtual SAN by now. I wrote a little PowerCLI script to gather the required information.
I recently had an issues where a virtual machine crashed. VM Monitoring (VM HA) tried to restart it, but did not succeed. The virtual machine was greyed out in the inventory and could not be started because it was locked. Unfortunately, it was not possible to identify which ESXi host holds the lock. This post explains how to quickly identify which server is blocking the Virtual Machine.
Read More »Identify Virtual Machine Locks & Find ESXi Hosts by its MAC Address
During a test I used an old disk that has been previously used by Virtual SAN. The disk did not appear during the datastore creation process. I miss a flash drive here:
The problem is that the disk has not been cleared from it's VSAN configuration. It has still valid VSAN partitions, so the ESXi "claims it for VSAN" what makes it impossible to create a VMFS filesystem.
Thin provisioned disks are a great feature to save capacity as you virtual machines filesystem will never use the full capacity. I do not know a single system where you do not have at least 10GB of free space for OS disks. I am not considering databases, applications or fileservers which will grow constantly. Having thin provisioned disk is usually no longer a performance problem so it is a valid design choice even in production.
A common issue with thin disks is that the size will grow when required, but never shrink. When you require the capacity only once you might want to get it back from the virtual machine. This post describes how to reclaim unused space from the virtual machine.
Read More »Howto Shrink a Thin Provisioned Virtual Disk (VMDK)
This post demonstrates various ways to identify the disk usage of a thin provisioned virtual disk.
I have a virtual machine with a 10 GB thin provisioned disk. You can verify the disk type from the virtual machine settings page.
Read More »Identify Disk Usage of a Thin Provisioned Virtual Disk
Instead of using the vSphere Client to mount VMware Tools ISO files, you can also use a repository provided by VMware to download the package. In my opinion, this is much more comfortable. You copy the installation package to your fileserver and install VMware Tools without having to use the vSphere Client.
The download of my vSphere Release History in PDF Format is now available. It includes the latest vSphere updates. The document is a printable Version of… Read More »vSphere Release History PDF Format – November 2014
Hewlett Packard has released Intel Xeon E5v3 (aka Haswell) Proliant Generation 9 server systems. Gen9 Servers are available as Rack Servers, Blades and Towers. Time to have a look at VMware Support for the new series.
HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers with ESXi Support:
On 2014-09-09 VMware released a bunch of new versions, including vSphere 5.5 Update 2. ESXi 5.5 U2 supports hosts with up to 6TB of RAM vCenter… Read More »What's New in vSphere 5.5 Update 2