Yesterday, 2014-12-04, VMware released vSphere 5.1 U3 and one really nice thing is that vCenter Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Another resolved issue is that a storage vMotion operation resets the change block tracking. vCenter Server release notes can be found here ESXi server release notes can be found here You can download …
Category Archive: ESXi
Changes in ESXi Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) behaviour
TPS makes it possible for ESXi to share (read access) physical RAM between virtual machines to increase the virtual machine consolidation ratio. This is to increase security even further VMware will start shipping ESXi without TPS enabled by default according to the following schedule: ESXi 5.5 Update release – Q1 2015 ESXi 5.1 Update release …
New VMware releases 2014-09-09
Today, 2014-09-09, VMware released new versions of many products included in vCloud Suite: VMware ESXi 5.5.0 Update 2 – release notes here VMware vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2 – release notes here VMware vSphere Replication 5.8 – release notes here VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.8 – release notes here VMware vCenter Orchestrator Appliance 5.5.2 – release notes here VMware vCloud …
Upgrade ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 5.5 U1 using HP image fails
Before i start an upgrade i usually run two commands just to verify what build number my ESXi host currently uses and what image my ESXi host currently uses: vmware -v – shows the build number esxcli software profile get – shows the image name and in my case the result before the upgrade was: …
HP HPSA driver 5.x.0.58-1 can cause ESXi 5.x PSOD
A few days ago i received a call from one of my old customers who asked for advice regarding a VMware ESXi 5.5 Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD) situation. He had already created a VMware service request but wanted a chat while waiting for a reply. I quickly searched the HP support center web site …
vSphere NFS and VAAI monitoring
A couple of months ago i did a vSphere implementation where the back end storage system were presented to the vSphere environment via NFS. Since my move to Nutanix this will be more common and basically the only option today when performing vSphere implementations. Nutanix presents storage to Hyper-V via SMB and to KVM via iSCSI so …
vSphere ESXi 5.5U1 and NFS All Path Down patch
As you might know there has been a known issue with vSphere ESXi 5.5U1 where the ESXi host intermittently can lose NFS connectivity and an All Paths Down (APD) is observed. This issue could result in: Blue screen in Windows based virtual machines Read only file systems for Linux based virtual machines. The patch also fixes the …
vSphere VM vCPU to ESXi host pCPU core allocation
There has been quite a lot of discussion regarding resource utilization and resource allocation in vSphere environments lately. There are a lot of tools around doing analysis (some better than others) of your environment and gives suggestions if you need to e.g.: Add more resources (CPU, RAM, Disk, Network) to your vSphere cluster. Down size …
VMware ESX 4.x & VMware ESXi 4.x End of Life
It has now (2014-05-21) been 5 years since the VMware hypervisor release 4.x was released. For those of you still running VMware ESX 4.x and/or VMware ESXi 4.x should consider to perform an upgrade or a clean installation since the product actually reached end of life (EOL) 2014-05-21. R.I.P VMware vSphere 4 – Cloud Operating …
ESXi 5.1 U1 Purple Screen of Death
A few days ago i was contacted by a customer who was running vSphere 5.1 U1 which is about one year old. For various reasons they have not yet upgraded to a later version of vSphere 5.1 or to vSphere 5.5. However, there has been quite some time since i a have seen a purple screen …
vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1 released
Today, March 11, VMware released the vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1 and ESXi 5.5 Update 1 and some new enhancements includes: vCloud Hybrid Service vSphere Client Plug-in, is now available in vSphere Web Client vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012 R2 ESXi 5.5 Update 1 includes support for VMware Virtual SAN. I have …
VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 2 and VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 2 released
VMware released VMware vCenter Server 5.1 U2 and VMware ESXi 5.1 U2 yesterday. I got quite a few customers running vSphere 5.1 and some of the problems fixed in update 2 has been seen in my customers environments so this is great news. One thing i know will be really appreciated, at least among my …
ESXi 5.1 VMFS HeapSize configuration using PowerCLI
There are a few of my customer still running vSphere 5.1 U1 and one of them reported an issue related to the VMFS Heap Size (VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB) configuration a few days ago. Keep in mind that my customer upgraded to U1 from a previous vSphere 5.1 version meaning that the old VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB was retained at 80 MB …
VMware Tools for Nested ESXi released
Running nested ESXi hosts is great for development, education, test and training purposes and i have used it for many years in e.g. vSphere, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and vCloud Director (vCD). One thing that has been a pain while running nested ESXi hosts over the years has been the shut down process. This was …
Determine the VMFS disk space a thin provisioned virtual machine disk consumes
I was asked by a customer the other day how to find out, using the ESXi command line, how much disk space a thin provisioned virtual machine disk consumes. Back in the ESX days you used the du command to query the virtual machine disk and in ESXi, version 5.5, you need to use the stat command. Fot this …
vCenter Server task – Upgrade vCenter Agents on cluster hosts
One customer contacted me a week ago with a question regarding a vSphere vCenter Server problem they have seen after upgrading to vCenter Server version 5.1. I recall i had the same problem back in 2012 when upgrading to vSphere 5.1 and i thought it was worth to create a blog post about it, even …