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
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:
For each powered-on virtual machine, a .vswp file is placed in the virtual machines directory on the datastore. This file is required by VMkernel to swap virtual machine memory to the disk in case of excessive overprovisioning. The swap file size can be calculated with the formula (.vswp File = Allocated Memory - Memory Reservation). As per default, the reservation is set to 0, so the .vswp file size is equal to the amount of virtual memory.
Shell access to an ESXi host provides essential maintenance, configuration and troubleshooting commands. It can be used in cases that cannot be handled through the standard vSphere Client. In my case, I tend to have SSH activated by default. From a security perspective it is recommended to keep SSH disabled, but with the management network behind a firewall I feel secure.
If you are using SSH daily I am sure that you are familiar with the public key authentication. PKI is an authentication method that relies on a generated public/private keypair and enables the login without entering a password. This method is faster and more secure than entering a password manually because every administrator can have his own public/private keypair.
This post explains the methods how to enable and automate public key authentication with ESXi Hosts.
The following error message appears when you try to delete or unmount a VMFS datastore:
The resource Datastore Name: * VMFS uuid: * is in use.
Cannot remove datastore 'Datastore Name: * VMFS uuid: *' because file system is busy. Correct the problem and retry the operation.
ESXi 5.5 has a new feature to store coredumps in a file residing on a datastore. It may sometimes create this file automatically and thus blocking datastores from being deleted. It also creates a vsantraces directory which blocks a datastore.
Read More »Cannot remove datastore * because file system is busy.
Hewlett Packard has updated its widely distributed Microserver Series to Gen8. This extremely affordable server which was initially made for SMB and home servers has become very popular in the virtualization scene. Due to its low price and power consumption, you can find this system in many virtualization home labs. The Generation 8 Microserver (Gen8 or G8) comes with more power, upgraded ports, and an integrated iLO.
The HP Microserver Gen8 is available in 2 versions - G1610T and G2020T. Both models are equipped with a 2-core CPU and can support up to 16GB of RAM. The system is shipped with 4 hard drive trays, which allows the installation of any SATA hard drive. It also has a CPU socket, so you can change the CPU.
Looks like VMware has made a small but momentous change to the vmnic/vmhba numbering with the release of vSphere ESXi 5.5. In previous versions, the vmnic numbering was always determined by the the PCI ID. After adding a new ESXi Host to a Cluster that has been updated from ESXi 5.1 to ESXi 5.5 i noticed that the vmnic numbering was inconsistent although all host were identical. The newly installed host has a different vmnic to PCI ID assignment compared to the hosts that have been updated from ESXi 5.1:
Running an ESXi as Virtual Machine inside VMware Worksation or on another ESXi gets more and more useful for testing purposes. That installation, also called "Nested ESXi", is not officially supported by VMware but some VMware developers are willing to help in the VMware communities Nested Virtualization forum. Up to this point is was not possible to install VMware Tools on a nested ESXi, making the management a little bit cumbersome. During VMworld 2013 in Barcelona the news about an upcoming Fling called "VMware Tools for Nested ESXi" came out. The Fling contains a small vib package that can be installed on a virtual ESXi Host.
Double check your vendors support when updating ESXi hosts from VMware vSphere 5.x to 5.5. There are a lot of systems that are no longer supported. The following servers were supported in 5.x but are no longer supported in 5.5:
With the upcoming release of VMware vSphere 5.5, there are a few neat platform scalability enhancements. The support for physical hardware has been doubled which… Read More »VMware vSphere 5.5 Configuration Maximums