Posted by jpluimers on 2020/08/10
I tried repeating VMware KB: Configuring Network Time Protocol (NTP) on ESX/ESXi hosts using the vSphere Client in ESXi 6.5 using the web-client (the steps are very similar, see [WayBack] How to configure ESXi 6.5 Network Time Protocol (NTP) via Host Client? | ESX Virtualization).
It failed with the non-descriptive “Failed – An error occurred during host configuration.”:
Viewing the details isn’t of much help as you do not get extra information:
Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2020/08/03
When rearranging storage locations, I had to move a few VMs to different data stores.
So I removed them from the inventory, moved them to another datastore, then re-added them as a set.
Besides getting new VM IDs (which I expected), ESXi 6.5 U1 also managed to change the below fields (which I did not expect) without a warning like “did you move or copy” which you get when moving VMs around on VMware Fusion (Mac OS X) and VMware Workstation/Player (Windows).
The bold values were changed from:
uuid.location = "56 4d 6f 23 aa 92 bf 2b-16 d9 9a 4b 95 4d e7 8e"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 02 3c ea 9e dc 12-18 4f a4 64 c1 f7 f0 fe"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f7:f0:fe"
To:
uuid.location = "56 4d 4c e8 a3 81 c6 db-d6 f2 7f 32 0d fe 2e 29"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 4c e8 a3 81 c6 db-d6 f2 7f 32 0d fe 2e 29"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:fe:2e:29"
The bold-italic values correspond to the changed MAC address.
This caused the VMs (which were suspended before the move) to loose their MAC bound static DHCP addresses after the lease time expired: since the new MAC addresses were not statically bound, they got fresh ones causing all sorts of connection problems.
Trying to assign back the original MAC address in the Web UI by hand gets you this error when the virtual machine starts (not when you save the MAC address):
Invalid MAC address specified.
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx is not a valid static Ethernet address. It conflicts with VMware reserved MACs for other usage.
What I did was
For this particular machine, the uuid.location was still changed, but now uuid.bios and ethernet0.generatedAddress were now left in tact:
uuid.location = "56 4d 4c e8 a3 81 c6 db-d6 f2 7f 32 0d fe 2e 29"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 02 3c ea 9e dc 12-18 4f a4 64 c1 f7 f0 fe"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f7:f0:fe"
On another VM that I moved between data stores, after confirming the “I Moved It”, the migration went OK, so I am not sure about the cause. In that case the before/after situation were these (only the bold values were changed):
uuid.location = "56 4d d5 e2 79 b4 a6 76-aa 13 3d 18 e5 4d c0 00"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 38 d7 9c a0 98 24-3c e4 79 00 54 5d 35 ef"
vc.uuid = "52 91 00 37 03 ed 87 34-ec 06 ba 28 f6 85 b4 29"
uuid.location = "56 4d 88 e6 a0 17 bb 01-cb 8c e3 ce fa e8 05 61"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 38 d7 9c a0 98 24-3c e4 79 00 54 5d 35 ef"
vc.uuid = "52 91 00 37 03 ed 87 34-ec 06 ba 28 f6 85 b4 29"
The uuid.bios directly affects the generatedAddress of the network adapters. Initially it is related to the uuid.location, but does not need to be.
When migrating, keep the old data for comparison: compare the .vmx files after starting the migrated machine, and correct the uuid.bios and various ethernet#.generatedAddress values when needed.
Besides the well known 00:50:56:XX:YY:ZZ MAC address range there is also 00:0c:29:XX:YY:ZZ.
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2020/08/03
The short answer is: you can’t use telnet. But you can use alternatives, obviously. For instance, to troubleshoot some iSCSI connectivity problems, you would be used to doing something as this. ~ # telnet 10.0.2.3 3260 -ash: telnet: not found Instead, you can use netcat to test the connectivity. ~ # nc -z 10.0.2.3 3260 […]
Source: [Archive.is/WayBack] Using telnet from the VMware 5.x ESXi shell
The VMware knowledgebase mentions a few other alternatives as well (of which telnet obviously does not work):
–jeroen
Posted in ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »
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:
- [WayBack] ESXTOP – Yellow Bricks
- [WayBack] Interpreting esxtop 4.1 Statistics |VMware Communities (still very relevant)
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
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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:
It holds for virtually any virtualization platform including all non-ancient (less than ~10 year old) versions of:
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 »
