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ESXi

How to kill an Unresponsive VM (ESXi 5.x)

When a Virtual Machine crashed it might happen that you cannot power it off with the vSphere Client. In that case, you have to kill the VM through the ESXi command-line.

Connect to the ESXi host with SSH. (If a virtual machine crashed in a cluster and you cannot identify where it is running, you have to identify the ESXi Hosts where the VM is running)

Locate the World ID with esxcli vm process list or vmdumper -lRead More »How to kill an Unresponsive VM (ESXi 5.x)

Patch ESXi to a Specific Version with the Command-line

This post describes how to patch an ESXi host to a specific version with the command-line. It is highly recommended to use the vSphere Update Manager (VUM) for patch management, but there are some cases where you need an alternative. It's probably noting you would do in production, but you might need a specific version to reproduce problems or to comply with policies.

In this example, I am going to patch a standalone ESXi 5.5 host with internet access to build number 2068190. The host is currently running ESXi 5.5.0 Build 2302651. (It's a downgrade)

Read More »Patch ESXi to a Specific Version with the Command-line

ESXi 5.5 - ESXCLI Command Mindmap

In vSphere 5.5 the command line interface esxcli has 3 new namespaces. The esxcli is a complete set of commands that you can use for troubleshooting, configuration or kickstart files. I have created and printed a mindmap to navigate through the namespaces more quickly. This post covers only basic namespaces, available on all ESXi 5.5 hosts. If you've installed additional software you might see more namespaces. I've also created a Mindmap for ESXi 5.1 some time ago.

ESXCLI in version 5.5 has 13 namespaces:Read More »ESXi 5.5 - ESXCLI Command Mindmap

Identify Virtual Machine Locks & Find ESXi Hosts by its MAC Address

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

Howto Shrink a Thin Provisioned Virtual Disk (VMDK)

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)