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Browsing Posts tagged ESXi

Building a vSphere 5 lab

Reading Time: 3 minutes For people that need to make practice for the VCAP-DCA exam (and the beta of VCAP5-DCA will start soon) a good lab environment is mandatory. But it could also be useful for other reasons, like demo environment. There are several options to build one, but most used solutions are using nested hosts on one physical system with: VMware Workstation/Fusion over a host OS: common for a notebook. ESXi 5 on a server or a whitebox: common if you plan to have a always-on or fixed solution. Actually both solution could be good, but Workstation could […]

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ESXi – How does the dual bank work?

23 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes As written in the previous posts, in the ESXi installation there are two copy of the system image located in two different partitions (see Partitions layout of system disk and More on partitions posts). The actual system image is located on the first 250 MB partition, formatted with plain old FAT16 filesystem, but using a special pseudo-filesystem on it (see VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images). The image itself, s.v00, is a 124 MB compressed file, which is decompressed on boot and contains the hypervisor operating system. Note that the […]

Highlights, VMware

ESXi – More on partitions

20 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes In a previous post I’ve described the partitions used by a ESXi installation (see ESXi – Partitions layout of system disk). Partitions are formatted with a FAT16 filesystem, but the ESXi files are stored into the banks partitions with a specific system that consist in some compressed archives containing the required files or more archives (as also described in the yesterday’s post about the reset of the root password). More details on the filesystem used is on the first number of the VMware Technical Journal, in the paper: VisorFS: A Special-purpose File System for Efficient […]

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ESXi – How to reset the root password

19 April 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes Reset the root password with ESX 3.x was quite simple, just because the service console was a partition writable a live CD… With ESX 4.x it was a little more complicated (the service console was basically a vmdk). But with ESXi things are more complicated, due to the partition layout, that ESXi works in RAM and that all configurations files are stored in the banks it special archive files. The file containing the password hashes is called “shadow” and it is is contained in  a nested structure of archives inside the state.tgz file.

Highlights, VMware

Analysis of different hypervisors

21 March 2012
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Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ve read some posts (see in the bottom of this post for the references) and I notice how the  hypervisor comparison and choosing criteria are still a interesting trend and not only a marketing battle between different vendors (and maybe there will be more interest will be on this aspects with the release of Windows Server 8). But in several cases the comparison is limited to the hypervisor technical characteristics (and I’ve already written something about Hyper-V 3.0, XenServer 6.0 and RHEV 3.0) without considering (except in some cases) that the those are only one […]

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General Availability of VMware vSphere 5.0 Update 1

16 March 2012
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Reading Time: 2 minutes VMware has released the vSphere 5.0 U1 binaries that include the ESXi 5.0 Update 1 e vCenter Center (with his modules) 5.0 Update 1 (build 639890). Detailed information regarding resolved and known issues in the ESXi update can be found in the KB 2010823. For more infor about the update package, the compatibilty and the enhancements see the ESXi 5.0 Update 1 Release Notes. For more info about the vCenter update see vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1 Release Notes. The following information describes some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESXi: Support […]

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Using PHD Virtual Monitor with XenServer and vSphere

7 February 2012
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Reading Time: 4 minutes PHD Virtual Monitor is a comprehensive virtualization monitoring solution that gives you complete visibility across your entire virtual IT infrastructure at all levels including virtual, physical and application. So it not only a multi-hypervisors monitor tool (as described in the previous post), but also a multi-environments tool. This could be really interesting with Citrix XenServer environments where the monitoring feature are quite minimal (and without simple notification in the free edition): CPU and Memory, both for hosts and VMs; and from latest version also networking and disks (but disk only for VMs). Also the graphs […]

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