If you have ESXi running on a flash media (USB flash drive or SD Card) you might want to create a ready-to-run backup of your host. This posts describes how you can create a backup of your ESXi hosts and create a media with an identical configuration where vicfg-backup is not a solution.
Read More »Clone ESXi Installations on SD Cards or USB Flash Drives
I recently had strange issues with Hewlett-Packard servers. ESXi hosts randomly have shown a couple of different symptoms:
Call "HostServiceSystem.Restart" for object "serviceSystem-[*]" on vCenter Server * failed.
Power On virtual machine *
A general system error occurred: The virtual machine could not start
VMK_NO_MEMORY
A general system error occurred: Command /bin/sh failed
/bin/sh cannot fork
sfcb-HTTPS-Daemon[*]: handleHttpRequest fork failed: Cannot allocate memory
crond[*]: can't vfork
cpu*:*)WARNING: Heap: *: Heap_Align(globalCartel-1, 136/136 bytes, 8 align) failed.
cpu*:*)WARNING: Heap: *: Heap globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size. Cannot expand)
WARNING: Heap: *: Heap globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size. Cannot expand.
I was asked if it is possible to create an USB Flash Drive that can install ESXi on a server automatically. ESXi has a Scripted Install feature which allows to put all installation parameters into a Kickstart file to run unattended Installations. This post explains how to create an USB Flash Drive that does unattended ESXi installations. You can plug it into a Server, power it on and ESXi will be installed automatically.
Read More »Unattended ESXi Installation from an USB Flash Drive
Intel NUCs are small, silent, transportable and have a very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. Unfortunately ESXi does not work out of the box on these small nice systems. This post describes how you can create a customized ESXi Image for a 4th Intel NUC in about 5 minutes.
4th Generation Intel NUC Models:
VMware Workstation 11 does now support EFI boot configuration in the GUI which enables you to boot from an USB disk without workarounds. You do not have to edit vmx files or use workarounds like mounting USB drives as physical disk or booting with Plop Boot Manager.
For servers without CD drive or remote KVM you might want to use an USB Flash Drive to install ESXi to the hardware. This post explains how to create a bootable ESXi Installer USB Flash Drive in less than 2 minutes. The Flash Drive will work totally identical to an Installable CD.
VMware does only provide installable ISO files for updates (Bold entries of my ESXi Build List), not for patches. This post explains how you can quickly create an installable that contains all patches.
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