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Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/23
I had to move a bunch of stuff from an old ESXI 4.1 server to a newer ESXi 5.1 server.
For that I used a Windows XP VM on the new ESXI 5.1 server that had two different 1 gigabit network connections so it could run full speed.
Speed comparison for 60 gigabytes of VMs:
I used both settings for both tools: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows XP | 6 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/11/15
Since it usually is a one-off setting, I find it hard to remember how to configure the startup/shutdown behaviour of VM guests in an ESX(i)/vSphere environment.
Adding to the confusion is that this is a setting on your host, not on guest VMs.
Luckiliy, Jase McCarty and others explained this on the VMware communities, which I sligly edited:
Look under the configuration tab, at “Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown”.
Choose Properties. You can configure the startup/shutdown here.
…
In the VMware Infrastructure Client (on newer installs this is called VMware vSphere Client) I client you’ll want to select the host.
Then click on the Configuration Tab and you should see Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown.
Select that and then click on Properties (this is on the upper right corer, not intuitive).
…
Hi Im using ESXi 4.0 and vSphere client, but the “Edit” button is grayed out or not active in the VM Startup/Shutdown propertiessystem settings. Is this license issue, does ESXi 4.0 doesnt support autostart of virtual machine anymore?
…
Click on the Move Up button to move a virtual machine to Automatic Startup or Any Order.
The trick is twofold:
Click on the screenshot below to see a larger version. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/10/25
On a HP XW6600, you can run ESXi 4 or run ESXi 5, but in yourder to run x64 guest VMs, you need to enable Intel VT in the BIOS first.
So, in the HP XW6600 BIOS, the choose the menu “Security”, then the submenu “OS Security” to get at these two options:
- Intel Virtualization Technology (VTx)—Enables or disables Intel Virtualization Technology to increase workstation performance.
- Intel IO Virtualization—Enables or disables Virtualization Technology to increase workstation I/O performance.
When you enable both VT options, then VMware ESX/ESXi/vSphere can run x64 guests with full VT support (otherwise you will get a friendly warning message when you try to setup or run such a guest VM). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/08/23
Thanks DoubleCloud for the post on Really Easy Ways to Capture VM Screenshot.
It also works for VMware ESXi, and by default is enabled: browse to https://esxi-machine/screen?id=# to get a PNG screenshot of the VM with ID=#.
I’m not sure yet how to get the ID of a running VM, so usually this is a bit of trial and error on a busy system (:
Later: I found out you can get the ID through MOB; see a couple of these links.
For my ESXi the URLs are these:
You can even add parameters to modify this PNG, as per [Archive.is] Capturing Virtual Machine Screenshots in vSphere – VMware vSphere Blog:
w= the pixel width of the scaled imageh= the pixel height of the scaled imagex0= the left side of the bounding box to select the imagey0= the top side of the bounding box to select the imagex1= the right side of the bounding box to select the imagey1= the bottom of the bounding box to select the image
There is no way to take screenshots using URLs in VMware Workstation. But as of VMware Workstation 6.5, you can use Ctrl+Alt+PrtSc both in Windows and Full Screen mode. Like the ESXi screenshots, captures only the screen itself (so not the borders/toolbar/tabs in Windowed mode).
Note that form the vSphere client, you can take a movie as well: Creating a Screen Shot or a Movie of a Virtual Machine.
The above leads us to a couple of URLs on your ESXi machine: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi6, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/17
Last year, I missed this tiny sentence:
So in plain English, any VM that was generated on VMware ESX Server 3.5 or later can run atop ESXi 5.1 unchanged.
Which means it is a snap to move your VMs from older ESX / ESXi / vSphere versions as long as they are ESX 3.x or later.
In fact hardware version 7 has the widest compatibility amongst ESX/ESXi/vSphere/Fusion/Workstation/Player versions (see the table at the bottom).
The free version still has a 32 gigabyte physical RAM limit (people are still confused by the vRAM / Physical RAM distinction, especially since vRAM is not limited any more). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Excel, Fusion, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Word | Tagged: computer, hardware version, hardware versions, machine hardware, physical ram, software, technology, version compatibility, virtual hardware, virtual machine, virtual machines, vm, vms | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/01
It is possible from inside a guest VM to determine the kind of VMware host it runs on by looking at the BIOS information and for instance map the version of VMware Tools to install.
Still need to find out about the 04/15/11 BIOS Release Date, but this should give me a start (vSphere matches ESX/ESXi):
VMware version BIOS Release Date Address (hex) (bytes) ESX 2.5 04/21/2004 0xE8480 97152 ESX 3.0 04/17/2006 0xE7C70 99216 ESX 3.5 01/30/2008 0xE7910 100080 ESX 4 08/15/2008 0xEA6C0 88384 ESX 4U1 09/22/2009 0xEA550 88752 ESX 4.1 10/13/2009 0xEA2E0 89376 ESX 5 01/07/2011 0xE72C0 101696 ESX 5.1 22/06/2012 0xEA0C0 89920
–jeroen
Via:
Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/30
Installing and booting ESXi 5 from USB allows you to keep your storage exclusively for VMs and separately make backup of your boot configuration and data configuration (note you cannot put the DataStore on your USB stick).
A small stick (minimum 1 gigabyte) will suffice, and works on many systems, but at first not on my HP XW6600, despite the latest BIOS version 1.36a. You get a nice “Non-System disk or disk error” message.
Both methods I tried failed at first. I thought they failed because the BIOS on the HP has limited USB boot support. It did boot from single partition USB sticks, but seemed not to boot from multi-partition ones, no matter if they are removable or HDD (with the removable bit flipped).
The ESXi5 installer is a single partition one. The final ESXi5 installed image is a multi-partition one. That’s what got me thinking into the multi-partiton direction.
Since the problem is similar to the impossibility of booting VMware workstation VMs from USB stick, (this fails even from the BIOS), I tried Plop since Plop works for VMware Workstation. The Plop USB boot manager failed too. My final thought was to install Plop on a FAT formatted USB stick(which does boot) and continue from there to the ESXi5 one: that failed too.
Boy I was wrong: the failure was not caused by the multi-partition setup, but because of my “Google blindness”: I searched in the wrong direction with the wrong keywords, therefore not getting the right links as search results.
A VMware Communities forum threads on “No bootable device” after successful ESXI5 installation on Intel DG35EC desktop motherboard” and No boot after clean install finally got me in the right direction:
As of ESXi5, the default partition table type is GPT (GUID Partition Table), not MBR (Master Boot Record) any more (thats why an ESXi4 install will work fine).
Booting from GPT is in the EFI standards (now in its second generation UEFI or United Extensible Firmware), allowing – among others – to boot from disks bigger than 2 terrabyte. You need a BIOS that is compatible with GPT to do so, and the HP XW6600 BIOS clearly isn’t compatible with GPT.
Not all is lost, as while installing ESXi5, you have an option – though well hidden – to force it to use MBR boot. That worked, and I will blog on the steps later.
The good news: it now works on my HP XW6600 workstations (that support both VT-x and VT-d, which means I can do PCI pass through).
First things first though: creating the USB stick in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, UEFI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/15
If you use NTP for syncing your time, then choose pool.ntp.org as your time server:
The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.
I use it for instance to synchronize the time on my ESXi servers.
Note: when you run Windows VMs as ESXi guests; let ESXi time-sync them through the VMware tools, and disable Windows’ own time syncing. I didn’t disable it, and my Windows VMs were consistently off by over 30 minutes.
–jeroen
via pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers.
Posted in *nix, ESXi4, Power User, VMware, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/13
James Clements explains how to resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks.
You can resize the disks live when using ESXi/ESX/vShere 4 and up.
When using Windows Vista or 2008 and up, you don’t need special tools for resizing the partitions on those disks: the built-in disk manager can do it.
When using Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP or less, then you need the EXTPART tool from Dell as explained by GeekSeat:
All you need to do now is provision the extra space to the VM, then run the tool at the command line and follow the wizard:
C:\>extpart.exe
ExtPart - Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4)
(c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003
.
Volume to extend (drive letter or mount point): c:
Current volume size : 66285 MB (69504860160 bytes)
Current partition size : 76285 MB (79990815744 bytes)
Size to expand the volume (MB): 76285that’s it – job done . . zero downtime (watch out of course . . this works differently if you have a clustered disk to extend – see: http://geekseat.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/replacing-clustered-storage-for-a-sql-cluster-emc-ce-ms-clustering/ )
Note the “Size to expand” is actually the number of MB you are adding to the volume as Redelijkheid explains.
Sometimes you need to do this in multiple steps as diskmgmt.msc does not always give the free partition space in megabytes.
There is no need to reboot after expanding using ExtPart.
Edit: 20111222; you can download ExtPart through the DELL web-site; there are also direct http downloads of the EXE and README, and direct ftp downloads for the EXE and README.
If you don’t trust ExtPart, there is always the GParted way as explained by BleepingComputer.com.
–jeroen
via:
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/22
Since you do this only once per server, it is easy to forget (I do) where to specify the hostname of your ESXi server.
vm-help.com describes in Change your host’s network name how easy it is in ESXi 3.x (and also how to change the DNS information and SSL certificate).
ESXi 4.x is very, but not completely, similar Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ESXi4, Power User, VMware | 1 Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 