VMware Front Experience

About the VMware Tools of ESXi 5.0 and why you should install them on vSphere 4.x

2012-02-20T21:30:00.002+01:00

There is a rather new VMware KB article available that describes an interesting problem with the VMware Tools version of ESX(i) 4.1 Update 2: If the clock resolution of a Windows VM has been changed from the default then the VMware Tools service will continually consume 15% CPU performance (in a 1 vCPU VM, for 2 vCPU VMs it will be 7%, etc.). We have seen this problem on few of our VMs, it looks

vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup 2

2012-02-19T10:27:00.000+01:00

Since the release of ESXi 5.0 on August 24th 2011 VMware and 3rd party hardware vendors have updated and added lots of device drivers that can be downloaded in the Drivers & Tools section of VMware's vSphere 5 download center. These drivers are not included in the original ESXi 5.0 installation ISO. However, at the same place you can download something that is called the vSphere Hypervisor ESXi

[Release] ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools v1.0

2012-02-12T22:00:00.004+01:00

I just released the first version of my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools. These are two scripts: tgz2vib5.cmd (to convert a TGZ file to a VIB file, formerly included with ESXi-Customizer) vib2zip.cmd (to combine one or more VIB files into an Offline Bundle ZIP) These scripts can be used by Community developers (who provide e.g. drivers for unsupported Whitebox hardware) to package their software

QUADStor delivers Storage Virtualization and VAAI - for free!

2012-02-05T20:03:00.001+01:00

Are you a VMware ESXi small business (or even home) user and do you enviously look at Enterprise and high budget customers who can afford fancy high performance SAN boxes with storage virtualization features and VAAI support? Stop being envious and have a look at QUADstor's storage virtualization software. It is currently in beta and offered for free. And it has all the features that are normally

Feature request: Add sudo to ESXi to make AD integration a success story

2012-01-26T21:06:00.001+01:00

Recently I posted about (undocumented) improvements in the area of AD integration, but it looks like I missed a very important point: You can log on to a local or remote console using an AD account that has administrative rights, but you won't have root privileges in this session, e.g. you cannot edit any configuration files, restart services etc. To gain root rights you need to use the su

How to use ESXi 5 as an NTP server - OR - How to permanently add custom firewall rules?

2012-01-25T21:17:00.003+01:00

Recently my attention was caught by a question posted to the VMware Community forums that sounds odd at first sight: Is it possible to configure ESXi 5.0 to act as a NTP server? I wondered why should you try to do this? On the one hand it is not recommended to use ESXi for anything else than the task that it was designed for: being a hypervisor. On the other hand it is not recommended to run a

Top VMware and Virtualization Blog voting 2012 now open

2012-01-24T11:20:00.000+01:00

Just a short note: Eric Siebert has just opened this year's voting for the Top VMware and Virtualization Blogs. This blog is listed in the categories "Independent Blogger" and "New Blog" (and among "all" of course). Make yourself heard and vote here!

Hard to find HP tools: The Offline Array Configuration Utility (ACU)

2012-01-18T18:33:00.006+01:00

If you have ever looked for a solution to a specific problem or the download page for a certain tool on www.hp.com then you probably know: Searching (and finding) something is a pain on these pages, and the more desperate you need it the longer it will take you ... So maybe I will even make a series of "Hard to find HP tools" posts. Anyway I will start with the Offline ACU tool today. So, what

Undocumented parameters for ESXi 5.0 Active Directory integration

2012-01-13T22:49:00.002+01:00

Since vSphere version 4.1 it is possible to integrate an ESXi host into a Microsoft Active Directory (AD). After the host is joined to the domain you can assign permissions to AD groups and users by connecting directly to the host with the vSphere client. Instructions on how to do this (with ESXi 5.0) is available e.g. here in the VMware Online Documentation. I first looked at AD integration

How to do an Online Virtual Connect firmware upgrade

2011-12-21T21:21:00.001+01:00

Okay, this is a follow-up to my previous post ... I was finally able to find out on my own how to do this. The answer is in HP's white paper "HP Virtual Connect Firmware Upgrade Steps and Procedures". This is a must read for anyone being concerned with the VC firmware upgrade process, I will try to summarize the most important points here. You must use the Virtual Connect Support Utility (VCSU).

HP Virtual Connect firmware update - can you do this online?

2011-12-15T20:57:00.002+01:00

I don't know the answer to this question, but I'm trying to find this out ... We have two HP c7000 enclosures with Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules to connect to external Cisco Ethernet switches and Brocade FC switches. Both enclosures are fully loaded with 8x BL620c G7 blade servers running ESXi 4.1 Update 2. Right now we are still able to completely evacuate an enclosure if we want to do

ESXi-Customizer 2.6 and Tgz2Vib5 1.0

2011-11-17T22:09:00.003+01:00

I just published the new version 2.6 of my ESXi-Customizer script. What's new: With this version you are able to optionally create an (U)EFI-bootable ISO file for the installation of ESXi 5.0. (U)EFI stands for (Universal) Extensible Firmware Interface. This is going to replace the current BIOS firmware interface on modern PCs. Please note that the original VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO is already

vSphere 4.1 Update 2 released - What's in it for me (and you)

2011-10-30T20:28:00.001+01:00

VMware released Update 2 for vSphere 4.1 on Oct 27th. It includes numerous bug fixes for the vCenter server and client (see VC resolved issues) and ESXi (see ESXi resolved issues). I will list some of the fixes here, because I personally welcome them very much, and I'm sure that others will feel the same: The vSphere client performed badly with Windows 7, because of frequent screen-redraws when

Update: ESXi 5.0 on HP G7 blades, now a Go!

2011-10-27T20:48:00.002+02:00

About three weeks back I reported on Emulex firmware problems that prevented the use of ESXi 5.0 on HP G7 blade hardware. This was fixed now, somehow... HP has now updated the advisory that describes the issue and published an updated firmware that fixes the VLAN handling problems with ESXi 5.0 if it is used together with the be2net driver 4.0.355.1. Be sure that you read the release notes of

VMware finally released the Open Source Code of vSphere 5.0!

2011-10-26T21:12:00.000+02:00

Great news! Today VMware finally made the vSphere v5.0 Open Source code archives available for download. Why is that important? Since the release of VMware's ESXi 5.0 (Aug 24, 2011) many people are asking for the development of drivers for hardware devices that are not supported by ESXi 5.0 out-of-the-box. ESXi device drivers are based on Linux device drivers (which lead to the persistent

HP Virtual Connect profile not applied ...

2011-10-12T10:35:00.000+02:00

When I recently rebooted one of our BL620c G7 blades with ESXi 4.1 installed on it I found that the server had suddenly lost network connectivity after the reboot. A quick check on the console revealed that the Virtual Connect profile that was defined for that blade had not been applied to it. I realized that because the MAC addresses of the NICs had not been overwritten with the virtual

Currently a No-Go: ESXi 5.0 on HP G7 blades

2011-10-01T20:56:00.003+02:00

Back in May I reported on problems with ESXi 4.1 and the Emulex OneConnect CNA that is built into HP's G7 blade servers. If you now try to install ESXi 5.0 on such a hardware you will have a strong déjà vu: The be2net driver that is available right now for ESXi 5.0 is not really functioning due to "VLAN tagging issues". HP has published an advisory on this stating that an updated driver (that

Unable to assign license after installing a server with the HP ESXi 5.0 ISO

2011-10-01T20:39:00.000+02:00

With the availability of vSphere 5.0 HP published a customized ESXi installation ISO for HP servers. There have been reports that this build includes an annoying bug: HP has included a license file that has wrong permissions set. That potentially causes errors once you want to assign an own license to the host. You can fix this by removing the offending license file with the following commands (

[Announcement] ESXi-Customizer 2.5 ...

2011-09-29T21:21:00.001+02:00

... is out now. See the prior post for what's new. Download it from the project page!

VIB files, Offline-Bundles and ESXi-Customizer 2.5

2011-09-28T21:48:00.003+02:00

The current version 2.0 of my ESXi-Customizer script is able to add OEM.tgz-style driver packages to ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.0 installation ISOs. Tgz (short for tar.gz) is the format that is used to distribute all community-developed drivers for ESXi 4.1 (and prior versions). So these can currently be added to ESXi 4.1 with my script. However, for ESXi 5.0 you cannot use the driver packages for ESXi

How ESXi-Customizer supports ESXi 5.0 - FAQ

2011-08-28T20:32:00.000+02:00

I got a lot of feedback after posting the new ESXi-Customizer (with support for ESXi 5.0) and the "anatomy"-article explaining its technical background. It looks like I haven't been clear enough on some points and need to provide some additional information. So here is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ), I might update it from time to time, so stay tuned. 1. Can I use existing drivers (

The anatomy of the ESXi 5.0 installation CD - and how to customize it

2011-08-25T20:31:00.002+02:00

1. Introduction With vSphere 5 VMware introduced the Auto Deploy Server and the Image Builder that allow to customize the ESXi installation ISO with partner supplied driver and tools packages. The Image Builder is a Powershell snapin that comes with the latest version of the PowerCLI package. It allows to add software packages to a pre-defined set of packages (a so-called ImageProfile) and even

How to throttle that disk I/O hog

2011-08-23T22:13:00.003+02:00

We are in the middle of a large server virtualization project and are utilizing two Clariion CX-400 arrays as target storage systems. The load on these arrays is increasing while we are putting more and more VMs on them. This is somewhat expected, but recently we noticed an unusual and unexpected drop of performance on one of the CX-400s. The load on its storage processors went way up and its

[Update] ESXi-Customizer 1.2 - another bugfix release

2011-08-10T20:30:00.003+02:00

If you used the Advanced edit mode with ESXi-Customizer 1.0 or 1.1 and got a "Corrupt boot image" message in ESXi (either when booting the customized ISO or after having installed with it) ... this was caused by a corruption of the OEM.tgz file while re-packaging it. It was very hard to find a Windows version of tar that produces tar archives which are fully compatible with ESXi. But (I hope) I

vSphere 5: release date rumors and licensing changes

2011-08-06T16:35:00.003+02:00

From what I have heard the originally targeted release date for VMware's vSphere 5 was August 5th. Now this has passed and it did not happen. There are now rumors ongoing that it will be released on August 22nd (see source)... I don't know why it is being delayed. One possible reason is the change in licensing that was announced on August 3rd (see VMware's Power of Partnership Blog). With the