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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘ESXi5’ Category

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ESXi and VMware Workstation: quick way of getting Console screenshots in PNG format; some URLs on your ESXi machine

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 image
  • h = the pixel height of the scaled image
  • x0  = the left side of the bounding box to select the image
  • y0 = the top side of the bounding box to select the image
  • x1 = the right side of the bounding box to select the image
  • y1 = the bottom of the bounding box to select the image

Example: https://10.24.145.65/screen?id=vm-162&h=600&w=800

Turn of screen blanking

  • In Windows, look at the Power options, then turn off the screen saver.
  • On Linux text consoles e.g. you can do this with the command “setterm -blank 0”.

VMware Workstation

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.

URLs on your ESXi 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 »

More ESXi5 installation steps

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/10

(note: part of this post is unfinished, but I wanted to make sure all the links are publicly accessible, so I posted earlier and incomplete)

I already did a few ESXi5 postings (they apply to 5.1 as well) of which the most important are:

Time to finish up some additional installation steps (with a big thanks to Matthijs ter Woord):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Hardware, HP XW6600, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, PowerCLI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Wake-on-LAN (WoL), Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Screenshots: Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick with MBR partition table

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/03

A long time ago, I promised steps how to install VMware 5 ESXi using the MBR boot format.

The steps with screenshots are below, but first some background information.

As of VMware ESXi 5, GPT (short for GUID partition table) is the default partition table used by VMware ESXi.

Disks smaller than 2 TB can boot with MBR, but GPT It is a requirement for disks bigger than 2 TB. GPT also needs a UEFI compatible  BIOS.

Some older BIOSes (like those of my HP XW6600 machines: still running strong after many years of fine service) do not support GPT.

Luckily, weasel (the open source Operating System Installer that VMware ESXi uses) can be forced to use MBR using runweasel formatwithmbr.

Forcing MBR is a 2-step process.

  1. Get to the boot prompt: press Shift+O when the progress bar appears
  2. Running weasel with the MBR option: after the “runweasel”, type a space, then formatwithmbr

Below are the screenshots of a VMware ESXi 5.0.0 installation I did this way.

But it works equally well in ESXi 5.1.x

After writing this post, I found out about ESXi 5 Won’t Boot From USB which solves this exact problem for an HP XW8600 configuration (those are slightly larger machines than the XW6600 I have, but the architecture is the same).

Screenshots

Click on the image or link for larger screenshots, or view the series here at Flickr. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, UEFI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 1 Comment »

How To Patch vSphere 5 ESXi Without Update Manager (thanks @ccolotti)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/11

So I won’t forget: How To Patch vSphere 5 ESXi Without Update Manager.

It describes how to:

  1. enable SSH on your ESXi host
  2. download the patches directly from the VMware Patch Portal
  3. copy them to on your ESXi host using an SCP compatible tool (FileZilla or WinSCP will do fine) to a mounted data store (the ESXi image will be tool small for it)
  4. collect to the ESXi console using SSH
  5. run this esxcli command:
    esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/[PATCH_FILE].zip
  6. Remove the patch file from the datastore after patching

Thanks Chris Colotti for publishing this!

–jeroen

via How To Patch vSphere 5 ESXi Without Update Manager • Chris Colotti’s Blog.

Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 3 Comments »

USB drive/stick as DataStore is possible, but not recommended (via: VMware Communities)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/08

A long while ago I blogged about Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick so I could boot ESXi from USB.

Since then, I changed USB sticks to be larger (and faster) ones and thought it might be possible to put a small datastore on it for a small maintenance VM.

The VMware Communities: External USB hard drive detected as… thread on the VMware Communities site shows you can do it for a USB disk, but only from the console or SSH (not from the regular maintenance tools).

The results vary, and don’t sound very stable to me, so it is definitely not recommended.

So I have refrained from going that way.

–jeroen

via: VMware Communities: External USB hard drive detected as….

Posted in ESXi5, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

vSphere 5.1 (ESXi 5.1) can run any hardware level since ESX Server 3.5

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: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Some links on using a LSI MegaRAID SAS/SATA 9260-8i controller with BBU using RAID 5/6 in VMware ESXi5

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/14

So I won’t forget:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows | 1 Comment »

Amended steps for converting a GPT partitioned USB stick to MBR (via Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk – Windows 7 Forums)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/07

Experimenting with ESXi5, I accidentally got a GPT formatted USB stick that no XP systems could handle.

I used Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk – Windows 7 Forums to convert it back to MBR.

I needed to perform these DiskPart steps on a Windows 7 machine, as

  • the disk management UI in Windows 7 wouldn’t list “convert to MBR” (probably it shows this option only on non-removable media)
  • the DiskPart Windows XP doesn’t recognize GPT (should have been obvious to me, but still)

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows 7, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

ESX/ESXi/vSphere BIOS Release Date to version mapping (via: the birdhouse in my soul: Which ESX version am I running on ?)

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 »

Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick (failed at first in HP XW6600, but with MBR partition table it works)

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).

How to create an ESXi5 install on a USB stick

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 »

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