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Archive for the ‘ESXi6.5’ Category

Always use SCSI for your VM guest disks – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/20

Rephrased from [WayBack] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+:

If you install a virtual machine, ensure the disk controller and disks are SCSI based.

This has many advantages, including:

speed (usually the SCSI drivers can be paravirtualised)
hot addition of new disks

It holds for virtually any virtualization platform including all non-ancient (less than ~10 year old) versions of:

VMware (Workstation, Viewer, but I expect this also to work on vSphere, ESXI, Fusion)
Hyper-V
KVM (and therefore Proxmox)
VirtualBox

Based on my notes in the above link and the links below:

Note this isn’t just for Linux guests/hosts: Most guests (including Windows) can do a SCSI bus re-scan and detect new SCSI devices.

The trick here is that the guest must already have a virtual SCSI controller (adding that will require a reboot of the guest).

Then adding a new SCSI disk on that controller from any host (Windows, Mac, ESXi, vSphere) should work fine.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Fusion, Hyper-V, KVM, Power User, Proxmox, View, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

ESXi Embedded Host Client

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/07/15

This version of the ESXi Embedded Host Client is written purely in HTML and JavaScript, and is served directly from your ESXi host and should perform much better than any of the existing solutions.

Installing went smooth:

# esxcli software vib install -v https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/esxui/esxui-signed-6360286.vib -f Installation Result Message: Operation finished successfully. Reboot Required: false VIBs Installed: VMware_bootbank_esx-ui_1.23.0-6360286 VIBs Removed: VMware_bootbank_esx-ui_1.21.0-5724747 VIBs Skipped:

Source: ESXi Embedded Host Client

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Determining the ESXi installation type (2014558) | VMware KB

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/31

Via [WayBack] Determining the ESXi installation type (2014558) | VMware KB

# esxcfg-info -e boot type: visor-usb

That’s on my X10SRH-CF system which runs from USB.

Values you can get:

visor-pxe indicates a PXE deployment
visor-thin indicates an installable deployment
visor-usb indicates an embedded deployment

If your installation is visor-thin based (running from hard-disk), then you can convert it to visor-usb; the steps are at [WayBack] visor-thin & vsantraces – Hypervisor.fr (in French, but Google Translate is quite OK). It skips a few of the steps mentioned in [WayBack] How To Backup & Restore Free ESXi Host Configuration | virtuallyGhetto, so for saving your current config it’s best to follow these steps:

Shutdown or suspend all VMs
vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config
vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/backup_config
Copy the generated backup from /scratch/downloads (a UUID directory under it)to a safe location
vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
shutdown
Install the same ESXi version on a USB disk
Boot from the USB disk
copy the backup to /tmp/configBundle.tgz
vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/restore_config /tmp/configBundle.tgz
reboot

–jeroen

via [WayBack] How to tell if ESXi is installed to SD card or local HDD? : vmware

Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Some links and notes on ESXi and virtualised NAS systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/27

For my own memory:

sixdimensionalarray/esxidown: A shell script to shutdown VMware ESXi host servers
- https://github.com/sixdimensionalarray/esxidown/blob/master/async.sh (unused, but shows nohup on BusyBox)
- https://github.com/sixdimensionalarray/esxidown/blob/master/esxidown.sh
Spearfoot/utility-scripts-for-freenas-and-vmware-esxi: All-In-One utility scripts for FreeNAS and VMware ESXi
When supported in your VM, always use the paravirtualised adapters VMXNET3 for network and PVSCSI for disk:
[Archive.is] My Dream System (I think) | FreeNAS Community
- via: [Archive.is] BUILD – ESXi Home Server + FreeNAS | FreeNAS Community which has very interesting scripting posts pointing to the above GitHub repositories in pages [A]2/[A]3/[A]4 .
- “If you plan to use the storage for ESXi VMs, your only viable option is mirrors. So either go RAIDZ2 and don’t use the storage for VMs, or go with mirrors and pay the 50% penalty for redundancy.”
FreeNAS on ESXi:
- [WayBack] Virtualised 2017 Home NAS Build – FreeNAS 9 and ESXi 6.5 – Guy, Robot
- [WayBack] FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide | b3n.org
[WayBack] FreeNAS vs NAS4Free – FreeNAS – Open Source Storage Operating System
[WayBack] ZFS/ESXI All-In-One, Part 2 – ; [WayBack] ZFS/ESXi All-In-One, Part 1 –
[WayBack] VM on ZFS in ESXi? : homelab

[WayBack] Best Hard Drives for ZFS Server (Updated 2017) | b3n.org

Best Buy Guides (BBGs) – mux’ blog – Tweakblogs – Tweakers « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

ZFS, dedupe and RAM:

ZFS, FreeBSD, ZoL (ZFS on Linux) and SSDs:

Via [WayBack] Solved – ZFS with only one ssd | The FreeBSD Forums
- [WayBack] FreeBDS: Chapter 19. The Z File System (ZFS)
- [WayBack] ZFSTuningGuide – FreeBSD Wiki
[WayBack] How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love RAIDZ | Delphix (backed with plenty of tables and graphs)
- TL;DR: Choose a RAID-Z stripe width based on your IOPS needs and the amount of space you are willing to devote to parity information.
- Guidance on a choice between:
  - best performance on random IOPS
  - best reliability
  - best space efficiency
- A misunderstanding of this overhead, has caused some people to recommend using “(2^n)+p” disks, where p is the number of parity “disks” (i.e. 2 for RAIDZ-2), and n is an integer. These people would claim that for example, a 9-wide (2^3+1) RAIDZ1 is better than 8-wide or 10-wide. This is not generally true. The primary flaw with this recommendation is that it assumes that you are using small blocks whose size is a power of 2. While some workloads (e.g. databases) do use 4KB or 8KB logical block sizes (i.e. recordsize=4K or 8K), these workloads benefit greatly from compression. At Delphix, we store Oracle, MS SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases with LZ4 compression and typically see a 2-3x compression ratio. This compression is more beneficial than any RAID-Z sizing. Due to compression, the physical (allocated) block sizes are not powers of two, they are odd sizes like 3.5KB or 6KB. This means that we can not rely on any exact fit of (compressed) block size to the RAID-Z group width.
- If you are using RAID-Z with 512-byte sector devices with recordsize=4K or 8K and compression=off (but you probably want compression=lz4): use at least 5 disks with RAIDZ1; use at least 6 disks with RAIDZ2; and use at least 11 disks with RAIDZ3.
- To summarize: Use RAID-Z. Not too wide. Enable compression.
(Unarchived) FreeNAS All SSDs? – Hardware / Build a PC – Level1Techs Forums
[WayBack] ZFS on all-sdd storage | iXsystems Community

I wouldn’t worry so much about the cost of the drives if you have to replace them in a few years. They’re constantly getting bigger and cheaper. If you really need to replace them in 3 years it’s not going to be the end of the world. Just think, a 256GB SSD can be purchased for about $100 today and 3 years ago the same drives were like $400+. To boot, they are faster than they were 3 years ago.

It’s quite possible that by the time you need to be worried about buying replacement drives for your pool you’ll be able to buy a single drive that can hold 1/2 your pool’s data for $100.

Don’t fret it. Buy the SSDs and be happy. Tell your boss you did the analysis and all is well. Just don’t buy those TLC drives. Those seem very scary for ZFS IMO.

…

There are some companies that have forked ZFS and set it up as you describe (separate vdevs for metadata using high-endurance SLC NAND) but there’s nothing like that in OpenZFS at the moment.
[WayBack] ZFS with SSDs: Am I asking for a headache in the near future? | Proxmox Support Forum
- [WayBack] ZFS with SSDs: Am I asking for a headache in the near future? | Page 2 | Proxmox Support Forum
  - [WayBack] FAQ · zfsonlinux/zfs Wiki · GitHub: Selecting /dev/ names when creating a pool
[WayBack] SSD Over-provisioning using hdparm – Thomas-Krenn-Wiki
[WayBack] Optimize SSD Performance – Thomas-Krenn-Wiki

OpenSuSE related

[WayBack] How To Install ZFS On Linux
[WayBack] openSUSE software: ZFS packages
[WayBack] Getting Started · zfsonlinux/zfs Wiki · GitHub
[WayBack]

State of ZFS support on openSUSE from openSUSE

I’ve been using it on Leap 42.2 for a while with no problems. Generally I’d guess it should work fine on Leap since it uses a stable LTS kernel.

On Tumbleweed you’d have problems if the kernel updates before the zfs on linux project has released an update version supporting that kernel. So tumbleweed (or any rolling distribution) + zfs certainly seems rather flaky to me.

…

What appeals to me is the ZFS scrub feature. Nothing else really seems to guard against bit-rot / corruption quite like this.

…
[WayBack] LEAP 15.0 So why every kernel update messes ZFS?
- [WayBack] LEAP 15.0 So why every kernel update messes ZFS? – Page 2
[WayBack]

zfs under kernel 4.18 from openSUSE
It’s not compatible with the new kernel yet. https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/releases

Samba/CIFS related

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Some wizardry: vmkfstools | virtualhobbit

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/24

Some wizardry: [WayBack] vmkfstools | virtualhobbit.

This includes:

finding which VMFS partitions are there the hard way
initialising partitions from known good data
vmkfstools -V (yes, capital V is for VMFS rescan, as lowercase v is for verbose)

Found after reading [WayBack] Datastore not mounted after reboot of ESXi5.5 |VMware Communities

Then found this:

That solved my problem!

# esxcfg-volume --list
Scanning for VMFS-3/VMFS-5 host activity (512 bytes/HB, 2048 HBs).
VMFS UUID/label: 532cd010-6e8c01d1-45be-001f29022aed/Raid6SSD
Can mount: Yes
Can resignature: Yes
Extent name: naa.600605b00aa054a0ff000021022683ae:1 range: 0 - 1830143 (MB)
# esxcfg-volume --mount 532cd010-6e8c01d1-45be-001f29022aed
Mounting volume volume 532cd010-6e8c01d1-45be-001f29022aed

And there it was:

# df -h
Filesystem   Size   Used Available Use% Mounted on
...
VMFS-5       1.7T   1.6T    169.6G  91% /vmfs/volumes/Raid6SSD
...

Note you can mount non-persistent (--mount) or persistent (--persistent-mount) by both UUID and label, so there are four choices for mounting:

esxcfg-volume --mount UUID
esxcfg-volume --mount label
esxcfg-volume --persistent-mount UUID
esxcfg-volume --persistent-mount label

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

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

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Archive for the ‘ESXi6.5’ Category

Always use SCSI for your VM guest disks – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

ESXi Embedded Host Client

Determining the ESXi installation type (2014558) | VMware KB

Some links and notes on ESXi and virtualised NAS systems

ZFS, FreeBSD, ZoL (ZFS on Linux) and SSDs:

OpenSuSE related

Samba/CIFS related

Some wizardry: vmkfstools | virtualhobbit

The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

Subscribe

Archives

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Blog Stats

Meta title

Tag Cloud Title

Top Clicks

Top Posts

My badges

Twitter Updates

My Flickr Stream

Pages

All categories

Email Subscription

Archive for the ‘ESXi6.5’ Category

Always use SCSI for your VM guest disks – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

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ESXi Embedded Host Client

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Determining the ESXi installation type (2014558) | VMware KB

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Some links and notes on ESXi and virtualised NAS systems

ZFS, FreeBSD, ZoL (ZFS on Linux) and SSDs:

OpenSuSE related

Samba/CIFS related

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Some wizardry: vmkfstools | virtualhobbit

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