Browsing Posts tagged ESXi

Reading Time: 3 minutesVMware snapshots are widely used for different purpose, but the main reason why they exist in vSphere is to help backup programs: using VADP a backup can start a VM snapshot in order to have a frozen file, copy it (or copy only the changed block with CBT and virtual hardware 7 or greater) and then release the snapshot. Other usage are to have a just in point rollback during patches or big changes, but a recommended practice is to release the snapshot as soon as possible. Large snapshots or broken or invalid snapshots are […]

Reading Time: 2 minutesIf you have installed (or upgraded to) VMware vSphere 6.0 and you still use the old legacy vSphere client you may have some false positives about VM snapshots. All VMs seems to have some snapshots, also if they don’t (and using consolidate does not fix it, because there aren’t snapshots to be fixed). But this apper only with the Windows vSphere Client:

Reading Time: 2 minutesRecently I’ve got a strange issue on ESXi 6.0: after an host reboot the ESXi hosts display a false positive warning: Deprecated VMFS volume(s) found on the host. Please consider upgrading volume(s) to the latest version Starting with vSphere 6.0 the VMFS3 version is now deprecated, but in my case all block based datastores were already at VMFS version 5!

Reading Time: 3 minutesAfter an upgrade to VMware vSphere 5.5 on a Dell PowerEdge R710, I’ve got strange occasion issues, where the hosts got completly disconnected from vCenter (with the ESXi/ESX host’s status as Not Responding or Disconnected in vCenter Server) and there was no way to reconnect, also after restarting the management services. Locking in the ESXi console those kind of errors where notable: Bootbank cannot be found at path ‘/bootbank’. The only temporally solution was power-off the VMs and restart the host. But the issue can randomly came back.

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn 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 minutesIn 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 minutesThe new VMware vSphere 6.0 has so much interesting new features and scalability properties that make interesting for each new environment, but also for existing customers (with an active subscription, so that you can also upgrade your 5.x license keys). But like each new version you have to make some consideration first and especially before starting the upgrade procedure, so be sure to start from the vSphere Upgrade Center, the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix, the VMware Compatibility Guide, but also read the following notes.

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