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Archive for the ‘ESXi6.5’ Category

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ESXi: Failed to reconfigure virtual machine… There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation.

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/21

Failed to reconfigure virtual machine W81Entx64-vs2017. There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation.

Searching for “There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation.” memory did not reveal much, so at first I thought I had a memory issue.

A quick look at esxtop in memory (m) mode indicated that was totally fine:

BTW: esxtop is a fantascit tool, with truckloads of information, so you should definitely read these:

Then something occurred to me:

The cause was that I tried to update the memory of an ESXi Windows VM which I thought I had shut-down from within Windows, but actually bumped an error message during the shutdown.

Shutting down properly (shutdown -s -t 0 in Windows), then increasing the memory worked fine:

Virtual machine W81Ent64-vs2017 was successfully reconfigured.

ESXi cannot increase the memory of a live system, hence the license error as per [WayBack] VMware Hot-Add: How and When to Use it:

One of the most common questions I receive on the daily management of virtual machines is if you should turn on hot-add features and why doesn’t VMware turn them on by default. The answer is very clear.

What are the requirements for Hot-add/Hot-plug:

  • Your virtual machines need to run at minimum hardware version 7.
  • Hot-add/Hot-Plug is not compatible with Fault Tolerance
  • vSphere Advanced, Enterprise or Enterprise plus.
  • Only hot-add is possible. You cannot “hot-remove” RAM or vCPUs.
  • Hot-Add/Hot-plug must be supported by the VM operating system!
  • Guest-OS licensing limitations need to be monitored and taken into consideration. You are changing the number of vCPUs/RAM!

–jeroen

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

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:

  1. Shutdown or suspend all VMs
  2. vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config
  3. vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/backup_config
  4. Copy the generated backup from /scratch/downloads (a UUID directory under it)to a safe location
  5. vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
  6. shutdown
  7. Install the same ESXi version on a USB disk
  8. Boot from the USB disk
  9. copy the backup to /tmp/configBundle.tgz
  10. vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/restore_config /tmp/configBundle.tgz
  11. 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:

[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:

OpenSuSE related

Samba/CIFS related

–jeroen

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

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