For my link archive: [Wayback] VMware ESXi: How to Kill an Unresponsive (Stuck) Virtual Machine | Windows OS Hub
Commands covered:
esxcli vm process list
esxcli vm process kill --type=[soft,hard,force] --world-id=WorldNumber
esxtop
ps
kill
–jeroen
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/21
For my link archive: [Wayback] VMware ESXi: How to Kill an Unresponsive (Stuck) Virtual Machine | Windows OS Hub
Commands covered:
esxcli vm process list
esxcli vm process kill --type=[soft,hard,force] --world-id=WorldNumber
esxtop
ps
kill
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/13
Guessing the [Wayback] Run ESXi from a USB Flash Drive: A How-To-Guide by just the abstract does not show the value enough:
A USB flash drive can be used not only for installation media – you can also run ESXi from USB flash drives or SD flash cards and boot from these devices.
In fact, the article shows way more, including:
This is very important, because every now and then, these USB and SD devices fail (see for instance [Wayback] Solved: Remount boot filesystem on a running system. – VMware Technology Network VMTN), so knowing what to do then is key and helps handling errors like this one:
Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage.
A every useful article for my link archive!
Related: ESXi: storing an ISO 8601 time-stamped backup tarball locally
Posted in ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/12
An interesting set of scripts from [Wayback/Archive.is] No Joke IT: Graceful shutdown of an ESXi 5.1 host and guest VMs (free edition) using the shell/command line/scripting (UPS friendly).
If all ESXi virtual machines support running of VMware Tools, then the solution is a plain /sbin/shutdown.sh && /sbin/poweroff
(see [Wayback/Archive.is] No Joke IT: Shut down ESXi 5.1 guest VMs and the host (free edition) via SSH – the easy way!).
Code is in the repository at [Wayback/Archive.is] sixdimensionalarray/esxidown: A shell script to shutdown VMware ESXi host servers, with these two main files:
#!/bin/sh # Runs a shell command asynchronously. if [ "$1" != "" ]; then nohup sh $1 > /dev/null 2>&1 & fi
# exit maintenance mode immediately before server has a chance to shutdown/power off # NOTE: it is possible for this to fail, leaving the server in maintenance mode on reboot! echo "Exiting maintenance mode..." if [ $TEST -eq 0 ]; then esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false -t 0 fi
Note: the No Joke IT web-site has vanished, so only the [Wayback] and [Archive.is] links of it still work. The github code was still there at the time of writing.
Via: [Wayback] Solved: Read only Files – VMware Technology Network VMTN
Related: Some notes on replacing parts of a text file with template text using sed on a Busybox system.
–jeroen
Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, ash/dash development, Development, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/16
In ESXi: on the console/ssh, when a moved VM pauses during power-on: show which VMs have messages waiting, then answer them, I searched for [Wayback] “vim-cmd vmsvc/message” – Google Search in order to see which messages were available.
That search revealed a lot more links, so here are the ones I found most interesting:
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/15
This post amends the post last week on rsync backup of your ESXi box: How to make a statically linked rsync binary « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
Two weeks ago, I posted about Source: ESXi: searching for “vim-cmd vmsvc/message” lead me to the “Managing ESXi Without VI Client” series of blog posts.
It got me looking more deeply in the VM-Help site, and I found [Wayback] Developing for VMware ESXi – Virtual Machine and VPS Tutorials, for which I have materialised the links below and checked their WayBack machine status.
Compiling Utilities for ESXi
Given that ESXi is not based on Linux you won’t find any installer which you could use to install any Linux components that you might want to add to ESXi. However, ESXi does make use of a number of Open Source packages such as OpenSSL, Python, and Openwsman (WS-Management). The key to compiling a utility for ESXi is creating a statically linked version of the tool. With a statically linked version, there are no dependencies on other libraries that may not be present on ESXi. The downside to this method of compiling is that the utility may be larger than a dynamically linked version. With a dynamically linked version the utility assumes that other libraries are present and can rely on subroutines within those libraries.
Compiling rsync – [Wayback] How to compile a statically linked rsync binary for ESXi
Compiling Busybox – [Wayback] How to compile Busybox for ESXi … kind of Part 1
Discussion of compiling UNFS – http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2280&p=10185&e=10185 (not archived in the WayBack machine nor available on-line)
Notes on compling binaries – [Wayback] Stjepan Groš – HomepageCompiling Drivers for ESXi
Given the common misunderstanding that ESXi is Linux based, a new user often inquires about the process of copying a Linux driver to their ESXi install. This is not possible. ESXi includes a Linux driver compatibility module. This allows for Linux source code to be used to compile drivers for ESXi, but the drivers are still specific to ESXi. The following links provides some samples and notes for compiling drivers for ESXi.
Compiling a Silicon Image 3132 driver – [Archive.is] Wayback: Adding Driver Support to VMware ESXi 4 | Tip’s Notebook
Compiling a Marvell sky2 driver – [Wayback] Using a Marvell LAN card with ESXi 4 – KernelCrash(Note: This post was initially written when ESXi 4.0 was available. As of late 2010, ESXi 4.1 has been released, and it does actually include a sky2 driver that may or may not work with various Marvell LAN chipsets. The post is still relevant (especially the comments) if your particular Marvell chipset does not work with the sky2 driver in ESXI 4.1. Also, the post is relevant if you’re interested in porting other network drivers to ESXi)
Open Virtualization Drivers development notes
Being from the ESXi 4 and 5 era, the links seem to hold up remarkably well. Despite ESXi 3 being Linux based (see [Archive.is] VMware ESX Server – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), as opposed to ESXi 4 and up that run a microkernel, Linux based tools still can be used to develop tooling and drivers.
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »