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 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.
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