Browsing Posts tagged ESXi

Reading Time: < 1 minute According with Product Lifecycle Matrix and KB 89305, VMware has officially declared, vSphere 6.5.x and vSphere 6.7.x will be End of General Support by October 15th 2022. To maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 7.

Reading Time: 3 minutes If you try to install VMware ESXi 7.0 in a nested VM inside VMware Workstation (but same apply also for Fusion and Player) you are not able to start the installer phase. The ESXi 7.0 installer start correctly but then will hang on this error message:

Reading Time: 5 minutes The VMware ESXi partitions layout on the system disk has remained almost the same for several years. VMware ESXi 6.x partitions layout was the same from previous 5.x versions and there ware only some exceptions with bigger disks (with two different diagnostic partitions. Starting with ESXi 7.0 the partions layout is now totally changed.

Reading Time: 5 minutes During the VMworld US 2018, one of the announces was the VMware ESXi for ARM porting, specific for the embedded and edge IoT systems, so not like a general purpose solution for all ARM servers (but an interesting move to increase the possibility for bringing the virtualization on ARM). VMware demonstrated ESXi on 64-bit ARM running on ARM hardware built to common industry standards; note that VMware demonstrates not just virtualization, but also resilient operations and ease of management at the Edge, via FT-protected 64-bit Arm VMs and vMotion in a high-availability DRS cluster…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Four years ago I’ve written a post about the Virtualization with ARM based servers when some vendors announce the possibility to have new server’s series based on the ARM processor. Now seems that there are more than rumors with the announce, during the latest VMworld US 2018, of VMware vSphere for ARM. To be honest, not exactly vSphere, but just ESXi… anyway an interesting announce. But to be clear, limited to embedded and edge IoT systems, so not like a general purpose solution for ARM servers.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Seeams that there is an issue in CPU hot-add on Windows Server 2016 running in VMware vSphere 6.5, but it’s something hard to reproduce this issues on a different systems. Because on most systems it works correctly, but, at least in a case, the CPU hot add does not work as expected.

Reading Time: 9 minutes This is an article realized for StarWind blog and focused on the pro and cons of an upgrade to vSphere 6.5. See also the original post. VMware vSphere 6.5 is the latest version of the enterprise server virtual platform from VMware, but the new beta it’s already there for testers. Actually the next version it’s (in the beta) and you can register at https://secure.vmware.com/43478_vSphere_Beta_Reg.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Now that the PSOD on vSphere 6.5 and 10 Gbps NICs issue is finally solved seems that vSphere 6.5 critical bugs are closed, but it’s not totally true. During an upgrade from a vSphere 6.0, I’ve found a really strange iSCSI storage issues where all the VMs on the iSCSI datastore were so slow to become un-usable. First I was thinking about drivers or firmware, in the hosts and in the NIC (1 Gbps) or the firmware on the storage.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Several people are disabling IPv6 support in ESXi for different reasons: because of the minimum privilege principle (if you are not using a service, why you have to keep it enabled?) or simple because they don’t want any IPv6 address in the network. On Linux and Windows systems is become very difficult disable it and Microsoft itself does not recommend disabling IPV6: ” We do not recommend that you disable IPv6 or its components, or some Windows components may not function.” (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929852)

Reading Time: 3 minutes As you probably know VMware vSphere 6.0 had a critical issue con its Change Block Tracking (CBT) implementation that can impact all incremental backup with “VMware native” backup program (all agent-less implementation using the VMware VDAP API). This issue occurs due to an issue with CBT in the disklib area, this causes the change tracking information of I/Os that occur during snapshot consolidation to be lost. The main backup payload data is never lost and it is always written to the backend device. However, the corresponding change tracking information entries which occur during the consolidation task are missed. […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes In previous posts (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk and ESXi – More on partitions) I’ve described how are handles the partitions table on the destination installation media of ESXi 5.x (both in the case of a hard disk or a SD/USB disk). With the new ESXi 6.0 the partition tables is similar in the case of a 1 or 2 GB destination device (like a previous SD media), but has some changes in the case of larger devices. Core partitions remain the same with standard size:

Reading Time: 2 minutes In previous post we have already see how add custom drivers to an ESXi installation ISO and how use ImageBuilder to make custom ESXi ISO, but in other cases you may need to define some custom settings during the installation or add custom vib files. Booting from CD is not the only way, but custom ISO could be used also for boot from USB or for boot from virtual devices (like the iDRAC or ILOE). In case you need to build custom ISO with custom option this post could help you: How to Create Bootable ESXi […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes If you plan to build a lab for vSphere 6.0 you can use all the approches for vSphere 5.x (see also Building a vSphere 5 lab): usually using a nested environment (or three physical systems, if you have) as a common platform. Of course, the other way to test new products it’s just use the VMware Hands on Labs that you can also “broke” or use in a different path compared to the one suggested by the guide. But having a local environment permit more flexibility and more time for testing or learning. The big […]

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