I was recently helping a customer with some IBM x3690 hosts running ESXi 4.1 Update 1 that was spontaneously rebooting. IBM suggested that the cause was the MegaRAID SAS driver and that the driver should be updated to the latest release. Given that the customer was not using local storage and it was a priority …
A common question on the forums here is regarding development for VMware ESXi. In most cases users are looking to develop or update a device driver. In other cases a user is looking to integrate a common Linux utility. This page serves to introduce the reader to some of the development resources for ESXi. If …
VMware Compliance Checker is a new utility from VMware that checks the security compliance of your hosts against the vSphere Hardening Guidelines. You can check up to 5 ESXi or ESX hosts concurrently to produce a report about the compliance of the hosts and their hosted guests. VMware Compliance Checker (CC) can be installed on Windows …
One of the changes with the release of ESXi 4.1 was the removal of the vSphere Host Update Utility (HUU) from the vSphere client installation. This tool was especially useful for patching stand-alone hosts. Hosts managed with any version of vCenter can be patched with Update Manager, but for stand-alone hosts the alteratives are the …
Patching ESXi 4.1 with the vSphere Host Update Utility Read More »
When attempting to export the system logs for an ESXi 4.1 Update 1 Embedded host you may generate a missing error as shown in the following image. The error generated by vCenter may be “A general system error occurred: Internal error” and on the host the error may be recorded as “Cannot create a diagnostic …
Log Export Missing Error with ESXi 4.1 Update 1 Embedded Read More »
When troubleshooting console issues, and in particular iSCSI connectivity problems, you may read the documentation that will suggest that you use both ping and vmkping to test connectivity to your iSCSI target. With ESX this is necessary as the service console will handle discovery and authentication to the iSCSI target (and thus you using ping) …
At times you many need to pass an option to the vmkernel when it first boots. To do that during an install, press tab on the initial boot screen and then add the desired option after vmkboot.gz as shown in the 2nd image. If you are booting ESXi after an install, press shift+o on the …
If you start the VI client from the command prompt or with a shortcut, you can add several options to bypass the login screen. If you’re using vCenter server you can use –usePassthroughAuth and –server to login to your vCenter server. Instead of –server you can also use the -s option. C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher>vp xclient –PassthroughAuth –server <vCenter_hostname_or_IP> If you connect to …
If you’ve upgraded to or installed ESXi 4.0 you’ll see that you have an advanced option to pick which virtual machine hardware version to use for your new VMs. As noted in the image below, the virtual hardware version will determine which other VMware products the VM can be run on. Virtual machine version 7 …
I recently upgraded an Asus P5V-EM DO from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0 that had a local datastore, and found after the upgrade that my VMs were all marked as unknown / inaccessible and that datastore1 was now called snap-7ac07d75-datastore1 as shown below. To correct this problem I took the following steps. 1) Right click on …
