The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘VMware ESXi’ Category

Some links about VMware ESXi, SSD and TRIM/UNMAP support

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/13

These posts seem to describe the current state of the art about ESXi and SSD support, especially with respect to TRIM/UNMAP:

Oh: many people boot their ESXi server from USB as it gives them more flexibility:

–jeroen

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

VMware Front Experience: How to make your unsupported SATA AHCI Controller work with ESXi 5.5

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/12

Interesting: VMware Front Experience: How to make your unsupported SATA AHCI Controller work with ESXi 5.5.

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

Interesting start of a new bi-weekly “Wahl Network’s Tech Blast” series: Tech Blast #01

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/12/22

The new bi-weekly “Wahl Network’s Tech Blast” seems to be centered around virtualization with lots of information about vSphere, ESXi and integrating cloud stuff like the *aaS acronyms.

But it also has an interesting link to Fasting to Mitigate Jet Lag: Surprise! It Works!.

And I’m surely going to read these two links as well:

I’m going to watch this for a while to see if it stays this good.

–jeroen

via: Tech Blast #01.

Posted in Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

ESX(i) AutoStart virtual machines: how to change the VM startup/shutdown settings (via: VMware Communities)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/11/15

Since it usually is a one-off setting, I find it hard to remember how to configure the startup/shutdown behaviour of VM guests in an ESX(i)/vSphere environment.

Adding to the confusion is that this is a setting on your host, not on guest VMs.

Luckiliy, Jase McCarty and others explained this on the VMware communities, which I sligly edited:

Look under the configuration tab, at “Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown”.

Choose Properties.  You can configure the startup/shutdown here.

In the VMware Infrastructure Client (on newer installs this is called VMware vSphere Client) I client you’ll want to select the host.

Then click on the Configuration Tab and you should see Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown.

Select that and then click on Properties (this is on the upper right corer, not intuitive).

Hi Im using ESXi 4.0 and vSphere client, but the “Edit” button is grayed out or not active in the VM Startup/Shutdown propertiessystem settings. Is this license issue, does ESXi 4.0 doesnt support autostart of virtual machine anymore?

Click on the Move Up button to move a virtual machine to Automatic Startup or Any Order.

The trick is twofold:

  • there are 3 sections (a bit hidden in the documentation: Automatic Startup, Any Order and Manual StartupManual Startup is default)
  • the Move Up and Move Down buttons move VM guests not only within a section, but also across sections.

Click on the screenshot below to see a larger version. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

HP xw6600 Workstation – The Computer Setup F10 Utility: enabling Intel VT so you can run VMware ESXi or vSphere on it

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/10/25

On a HP XW6600, you can run ESXi 4 or run ESXi 5, but in yourder to run x64 guest VMs, you need to enable Intel VT in the BIOS first.

So, in the HP XW6600 BIOS, the choose the menu “Security”, then the submenu “OS Security” to get at these two options:

  • Intel Virtualization Technology (VTx)—Enables or disables Intel Virtualization Technology to increase workstation performance.
  • Intel IO Virtualization—Enables or disables Virtualization Technology to increase workstation I/O performance.

When you enable both VT options, then VMware ESX/ESXi/vSphere can run x64 guests with full VT support (otherwise you will get a friendly warning message when you try to setup or run such a guest VM). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 3 Comments »

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 »

VMware ESXi 5.1 Complete Update 1 is out (via: VMware KB: VMware ESXi 5.1, Patch ESXi510-Update01)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/29

Time to start planning the patching process: VMware KB: VMware ESXi 5.1, Patch ESXi510-Update01: VMware ESXi 5.1 Complete Update 1.

You can also download the fresh installation ISO at Download VMware vSphere Hypervisor for Free.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a 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 »