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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

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VMware ESXI: creating an eagerly zeroed thick disk

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/30

For my memory to create a 40 GiB (gibibytes, i.e. sizes in powers of 2 bytes):

# vmkfstools --createvirtualdisk 40G --diskformat eagerzeroedthick ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA.vmdk
Creating disk './X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA.vmdk' and zeroing it out...
Create: 100% done.

People tend to abbreviate it into what for me reads gibberish:

# vmkfstools -c 40G -d eagerzeroedthick ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA.vmdk
Creating disk './X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA.vmdk' and zeroing it out...
Create: 100% done.

It will create a descriptor file and flat data file, of which the last is exactly 40 gibibytes size (as 42949672960 / (1024 * 1024 * 1024) == 40):

# ls -l X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA*.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     42949672960 Nov 16 16:54 X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           471 Nov 16 16:54 X9SRI-3F-W10P-EN-MEDIA-DATA.vmdk

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Converting an existing XP machine to a VMware ESXi  Virtual Machine and having boot issues?

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/02

A while ago I wrote about Stop 0x0000007B after converting an existing XP machine to a Virtual Machine (ESXi, Hyper-V, or other).

After this, the machine still had boot issues (a grey or black screen after boot, unless booted via Grub from a rescue CD).

The solution in retrospect was simple, but I only figured out after the fact what the solution had done.

Of course this gave me a facepalm moment, as back in the days, this was exactly the warning I gave everyone when installing Windows XP on ESXi anyway: use a SCSI buslogic based virtual disk, not an IDE or SATA virtual disk.

The reason is that Windows XP does not like the IDE/SATA disk that VMware provides. Windows Vista and up are less of a problem.

This is indeed what my practical solution did:

  • VMware Converter 4.x creates a VM with an IDE/SATA disk (as it cannot talk to the more recent ESXi versions at all because of API changes)
  • VMware Converter 6.x creates a VM with a buslogic SCSI base disk (and it can create it directly on your ESXi rig, though it will use a directory in the root of your data store, even if you prefer it somewhere deeper in the directory tree)

References:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Hardware, Power User, SAS/SATA, SCSI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

VMware ESXi: How to Kill an Unresponsive (Stuck) Virtual Machine | Windows OS Hub

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 »

ESXi: various ways to find and view the log files

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/20

For my link archive:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Run ESXi from a USB Flash Drive: A How-To-Guide

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:

  • how the partitions on USB/SD devices are built as compared to HDD devices, and how they even differ depending on USB/SD sizes
  • how to backup/restore the USB/SD boot devices (so you can stock them in case of failure)

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

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