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

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Archive for the ‘VMware ESXi’ Category

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USB drive/stick as DataStore is possible, but not recommended (via: VMware Communities)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/08

A long while ago I blogged about Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick so I could boot ESXi from USB.

Since then, I changed USB sticks to be larger (and faster) ones and thought it might be possible to put a small datastore on it for a small maintenance VM.

The VMware Communities: External USB hard drive detected as… thread on the VMware Communities site shows you can do it for a USB disk, but only from the console or SSH (not from the regular maintenance tools).

The results vary, and don’t sound very stable to me, so it is definitely not recommended.

So I have refrained from going that way.

–jeroen

via: VMware Communities: External USB hard drive detected as….

Posted in ESXi5, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

vSphere 5.1 (ESXi 5.1) can run any hardware level since ESX Server 3.5

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/17

Last year, I missed this tiny sentence:

So in plain English, any VM that was generated on VMware ESX Server 3.5 or later can run atop ESXi 5.1 unchanged.

Which means it is a snap to move your VMs from older ESX / ESXi / vSphere versions as long as they are ESX 3.x or later.

In fact hardware version 7 has the widest compatibility amongst ESX/ESXi/vSphere/Fusion/Workstation/Player versions (see the table at the bottom).

The free version still has a 32 gigabyte physical RAM limit (people are still confused by the vRAM / Physical RAM distinction, especially since vRAM is not limited any more). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Excel, Fusion, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Word | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Some links on using a LSI MegaRAID SAS/SATA 9260-8i controller with BBU using RAID 5/6 in VMware ESXi5

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/14

So I won’t forget:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows | 1 Comment »

Amended steps for converting a GPT partitioned USB stick to MBR (via Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk – Windows 7 Forums)

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/07

Experimenting with ESXi5, I accidentally got a GPT formatted USB stick that no XP systems could handle.

I used Convert GPT Disk to MBR Disk – Windows 7 Forums to convert it back to MBR.

I needed to perform these DiskPart steps on a Windows 7 machine, as

  • the disk management UI in Windows 7 wouldn’t list “convert to MBR” (probably it shows this option only on non-removable media)
  • the DiskPart Windows XP doesn’t recognize GPT (should have been obvious to me, but still)

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows 7, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Found back my WinImage license (still going strong: What is WinImage)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/10

Every once in a while I need some disk imaging software. After all these years, WinImage is still my tool of choice.

This time, I needed it to create a Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick.

Usually I only need it for a day or two, and most of the times I have reinstalled my system between uses. Not this time, so I needed to enter the license, which I knew I had, but had to search for it.

Luckily, I have installed the Lookout search tool for Outlook (which – even though you cannot officially get it any more – is so much better than the integrated search).

It found back the below message, from 1997.

1997! And the license is indeed perpetual: it still works on the most current WinImage build (which now supports x64 as well as x86, a lot more disk image formats and disk types, etc).

The WinImage site references some very old tools back from the days when you had BBS, Fidonet, ARPANET, Simtel, and Compuserve (the latter both hosted on PDP-10 machines, 1970s based technologies still ruled many of the computing world).

But I digress.

Back then, the only disk image supported were floppy disks, and most tools were DOS based. Like the FDFormat tool from Christoph H. Hochstätter which allowed you to add 300 kilobyte of extra space on 3.5 inch 1.44 megabyte floppy disk.

You can still see that in the WinImage binaries: Bootsector from C.H. Hochstatter

The email:

From: Gilles Vollant [mailto:——@winimage.com]
Sent: 07 December 1997 13:02
To: ‘——@xs4all.nl’
Subject: WinImage registration notification

Thank you a lot for registering WinImage 4.00 Professional

Your code of registration is:
J——s
—————

Note there is now french, english, italian, portugese, spanish and german version of WinImage.
I send you a floppy with WinImage 4.00 and my freeware Extract. I hope you’ll be happy with WinImage !

Don ‘t hesitate to upload it on BBS and give to your friend !

Only two question : Where did you find WinImage and do you Windows 3.1, Win
95 or WinNT version, or both ? (you can answer in french or english)

For getting more information, you can connect on my web site at :
http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm
and at http://www.winimage.com for information and downloading other tools (including related to WinImage)

Regards,

Gilles Vollant

–jeroen

via:

Posted in BBS, FidoNet, History, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, 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 »

ESX/ESXi/vSphere BIOS Release Date to version mapping (via: the birdhouse in my soul: Which ESX version am I running on ?)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/01

It is possible from inside a guest VM to determine the kind of VMware host it runs on by looking at the BIOS information and for instance map the version of VMware Tools to install.

Still need to find out about the 04/15/11 BIOS Release Date, but this should give me a start (vSphere matches ESX/ESXi):

VMware version BIOS Release Date Address (hex) (bytes)
ESX 2.5 04/21/2004 0xE8480 97152
ESX 3.0 04/17/2006 0xE7C70 99216
ESX 3.5 01/30/2008 0xE7910 100080
ESX 4 08/15/2008 0xEA6C0 88384
ESX 4U1 09/22/2009 0xEA550 88752
ESX 4.1 10/13/2009 0xEA2E0 89376
ESX 5 01/07/2011 0xE72C0 101696
ESX 5.1 22/06/2012 0xEA0C0 89920

–jeroen

Via:

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Creating vSphere 5 ESXi embedded USB Stick (failed at first in HP XW6600, but with MBR partition table it works)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/30

Installing and booting ESXi 5 from USB allows you to keep your storage exclusively for VMs and separately make backup of your boot configuration and data configuration (note you cannot put the DataStore on your USB stick).

A small stick (minimum 1 gigabyte) will suffice, and works on many systems, but at first not on my HP XW6600, despite the latest BIOS version 1.36a. You get a nice “Non-System disk or disk error” message.

Both methods I tried failed at first. I thought they failed because the BIOS on the HP has limited USB boot support. It did boot from single partition USB sticks, but seemed not to boot from multi-partition ones, no matter if they are removable or HDD (with the removable bit flipped).

The ESXi5 installer is a single partition one. The final ESXi5 installed image is a multi-partition one. That’s what got me thinking into the multi-partiton direction.

Since the problem is similar to the impossibility of booting VMware workstation VMs from USB stick, (this fails even from the BIOS), I tried Plop since Plop works for VMware Workstation. The Plop USB boot manager failed too. My final thought was to install Plop on a FAT formatted USB stick(which does boot) and continue from there to the ESXi5 one: that failed too.

Boy I was wrong: the failure was not caused by the multi-partition setup, but because of my “Google blindness”: I searched in the wrong direction with the wrong keywords, therefore not getting the right links as search results.

A VMware Communities forum threads on “No bootable device” after successful ESXI5 installation on Intel DG35EC desktop motherboard” and No boot after clean install  finally got me in the right direction:

As of ESXi5, the default partition table type is GPT (GUID Partition Table), not MBR (Master Boot Record) any more (thats why an ESXi4 install will work fine).

Booting from GPT is in the EFI standards (now in its second generation UEFI or United Extensible Firmware), allowing – among others – to boot from disks bigger than 2 terrabyte. You need a BIOS that is compatible with GPT to do so, and the HP XW6600 BIOS clearly isn’t compatible with GPT.

Not all is lost, as while installing ESXi5, you have an option – though well hidden – to force it to use MBR boot. That worked, and I will blog on the steps later.

The good news: it now works on my HP XW6600 workstations (that support both VT-x and VT-d, which means I can do PCI pass through).

How to create an ESXi5 install on a USB stick

First things first though: creating the USB stick in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BIOS, Boot, ESXi4, ESXi5, Hardware, HP XW6600, Power User, UEFI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | 4 Comments »

VMware ESXi 5 and 4.1: serial COM port pass through (via: Serial Port handling in ESXi 4.1 | ESX Virtualization)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/06

Almost 2 years back, I wrote that ESXi 4.1 supports USB pass through:

Recently I needed serial pass through as well, and surprise surprise, serial port pass through too was introduced with ESXi 4.1 as Vlatan Seget posted about a year ago:

in ESXi 4.1 since with this release of VMware Hypervizor now you have the possibility to attach and use the Serial port of the physical host.

Even better: it still works in ESXi 5 (:

–jeroen

via: Serial Port handling in ESXi 4.1 | ESX Virtualization.

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

Synchronize your NTP time using pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/15

If you use NTP for syncing your time, then choose pool.ntp.org as your time server:

The pool.ntp.org project is a big virtual cluster of timeservers providing reliable easy to use NTP service for millions of clients.

I use it for instance to synchronize the time on my ESXi servers.

Note: when you run Windows VMs as ESXi guests; let ESXi time-sync them through the VMware tools, and disable Windows’ own time syncing. I didn’t disable it, and my Windows VMs were consistently off by over 30 minutes.

–jeroen

via pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers.

Posted in *nix, ESXi4, Power User, VMware, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

Resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks (via JJClements.co.uk)

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/06/13

James Clements explains how to resize your VMware ESXi/ESX/vSphere disks.

You can resize the disks live when using ESXi/ESX/vShere 4 and up.

When using Windows Vista or 2008 and up, you don’t need special tools for resizing the partitions on those disks: the built-in disk manager can do it.

When using Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP or less, then you need the EXTPART tool from Dell as explained by GeekSeat:

All you need to do now is provision the extra space to the VM, then run the tool at the command line and follow the wizard:

C:\>extpart.exe
ExtPart - Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4)
(c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003
.
Volume to extend (drive letter or mount point): c:
Current volume size : 66285 MB (69504860160 bytes)
Current partition size : 76285 MB (79990815744 bytes)
Size to expand the volume (MB): 76285

that’s it – job done . . zero downtime (watch out of course . . this works differently if you have a clustered disk to extend – see: http://geekseat.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/replacing-clustered-storage-for-a-sql-cluster-emc-ce-ms-clustering/ )

Note the “Size to expand” is actually the number of MB you are adding to the volume as Redelijkheid explains.

Sometimes you need to do this in multiple steps as diskmgmt.msc does not always give the free partition space in megabytes.

There is no need to reboot after expanding using ExtPart.

Edit: 20111222; you can download ExtPart through the DELL web-site; there are also direct http downloads of the EXE and README, and direct ftp downloads for the EXE and README.

If you don’t trust ExtPart, there is always the GParted way as explained by BleepingComputer.com.

–jeroen

via: 

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi | 2 Comments »

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