Hi,

I want to update a stand-alone host to ESXi 4.1 Update 3. I don't have vCenter or VUM in the environment (yet). I've downloaded the bundle  "update-from-esxi4.1-4.1_update03.zip" and have the vSphere CLI installed on my workstation.

I've been using vihostupdate.pl to check the server and the applicability of the patch before I go and install it and it appears to think there is nothing applicable to install.

From what I can tell this is a cumulative update and I haven't read anywhere that I need to install Update 1 or Update 2 as a prerequisite, so why aren't these detected?

Below is the output from the various commands:

vihostupdate.pl --server servername --list --bundle update-from-esxi4.1-4.1_update03.zip
Enter username: root
Enter password:

---------Bulletin ID---------   ----------------Summary-----------------
ESXi410-201208101-SG            Updates ESXi 4.1 Firmware
ESXi410-201208102-SG            Updates the ESXi 4.1 Tools
ESXi410-201208201-UG            Updates the ESXi 4.1 Firmware
ESXi410-201208202-UG            Updates the ESXi 4.1 Tools
ESXi410-Update03                VMware ESXi 4.1 Complete Update 3

vihostupdate.pl --server servername --scan --bundle update-from-esxi4.1-4.1_update03.zip
Enter username: root
Enter password:
The bulletins which apply to but are not yet installed on this ESX host are listed.

---------Bulletin ID---------   ----------------Summary-----------------

I want to take a datastore offline.  I've moved all the devices that my VMs use which are on it, but I don't see a way to configure where the .vmx file is stored.  Is there a simple way to move it, or: where is the list of .vmx files that are associated with a host?

Anyone out there running ESXi 4.1 (vSphere Hypervisor)?  Anyone out there running ESXi 4.1 connected to a NetApp SAN that has their host take for-freaking-EVER to start up?  Seriously - I'm pushing 40 minutes and the host is not up yet.  It sat for a long time (30 monutes) at: "vmw_vaaip_netapp loaded successfully" which is why I'm asking the "NetApp" question.  This host has the disk provisioned, but there are no VM's running on it currently.

By comparison, I have another ESXi 4.1 host connected to the same SAN, but no storage has yet been provisioned (un-masked) for it (it doesn't see any LUNs).  The "problem" host was a host that was running ESX 4.0 U1 which I've reprovisioned under ESXi 4.1.  It never had any guests on it, so I thought I'd save myself the time later and rebuild it now.  And yes, the host was built with the fiber disconnected from the HBA's.  The good news is that the host does eventually come up and participate in the cluster and it sees the disk, but the amount of time it's taking to start up has me baffled.  I'm expecting that when the storage is provisioned to the "happy" ESXi host, I'll see the same behavior.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Hey Guys,

Googled for it but no joy.

1. I know difference between thick and thin but what is a flat disk.

2. What is VM disk in persistant mode mean and what does shrinking of it via vmware tools really do?

3. What is the difference between thin disk, thick disk eagerd and thick disk lazy zero ( i know the diff betwenn thick thin and eagerdzero thick but whats lzy zero?)

Please advise, lay man terms preferred as I am a lay man

RJ

I am troubleshooting an environment generating unicast flooding during vMotion'ing.  The environment isn't exactly best practice (vMotion IP, Management IP and Virtual Machine Networks are all on the same logical subnet).  This will be corrected, but I'm trying to understand how and why the unicast flooding is occurring.

We have Dell blades (M1000e) in a Dell chassis with multiple blade center switches.  Each of these switches uplinks to Cisco gear.  When we do a vMotion between a host in the Blade Center and an external host, things work OK for a few minutes, but then unicast flooding begins.  I can send out an ARP request for the vMotion IP (target IP) from a non-involved host -- this seems to add the corresponding MAC address back to the Cisco's CAM table at which point the unicast flooding stops.

Based on my observations, the MAC address is present in the Dynamic Address List on the Dell switch (equivalent of CAM table).  So why is the Cisco expiring it (presumably after 600 seconds have passed)?

I encountered this post which asserts:

Make sure you have all your vkernel ports on separate subnets e.g.  separate vmotion/management/iscsi. Failure to do this can cause lots of flooding during vmotion as the  physical switch does not learn the MAC address for the vmotion port  correctly. And continuously broadcasts to find it.

Is this true?  Known bug?  Is there any documentation describing this?  My theory was that perhaps the ESXi server acting as the vMotion source has the destination IP in its ARP table.  It hasn't expired when the Cisco prunes on the MAC address from its CAM table and keeps transmitting without sending an ARP request.  The Cisco no longer knows where to send the packet so it Unicast Floods.

Am I way off in the weeds here?

Thanks!

Upon trying to open VpxClient.exe, I get the following error:

"VpxClient has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Please close the program."

My only option is to click "Close the program". I have searched to no avail for a solution and have tried various things. I have tried copying the system.dll file to ..\Launcher\Lib directory, editing the VpxClient.exe XML Configuration file, adding Environment Variables, running Registry cleaners, etc... nothing has worked so far.

I have attached a screen shot of the error. (Not that it provides anything more than I already have)

It worked flawlessly and then one day, randomly, it decided to throw me the error and its been that way ever since. Any suggestions/insight is greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

GJBenzie

I have 10 iSCSI LUNs (all on the same device), each 1.8TB in size which I want to present to ESXi to create datastores.  Are there any best practices for how I divide these LUNs up, or should I just make one giant datastore?  Maybe there are performance considerations to take into account here?

If I were to make 10 1.8TB datastores I can see a potential problem down the road when I need to expand a vmdk but can't because there's not enough free space on the datastore, this would be less of a problem if I had one giant datastore to begin with.

Thanks.

We have a VM that has previously experienced snapshot failures. That problem has been resolved via great advice here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2015057#2015057

Now there are a lot (534) vmname-Snapshot???.vmsn files. If this Virtual Machine currently has no snapshots in the Snapshot Manager on the vSphere Client, is it safe to delete these files?

Copy/Paste from my desktop to the VM console via the vSphere client does not work.  Guest clipboard doesn't ever get into client's clipboard and vice versa.  (See steps to reproduce for details).

ESXi: 4.1.0-260247, vSphere client: 4.1.0-258902

I first noticed this in Lab Manager, but then I verified that its not working through the vsphere client connected directly to the host either.  However, the clipboard does work with the 4.1 client connected to a 4.0.0-208111 vcenter server.

Upgrading the guests' VMware tools & hardware version does not help.  Happens on both windows & linux guests and multiple varieties of windows clients (haven't tried it from a linux box).

Steps to reproduce:

1. On client desktop start notepad

2. type 'desktop' in notepad

3. Select 'desktop' and copy to clipboard (Ctrl+C)

4. Open guest console, start notepad

5. Paste into (guest's) notepad

1. nothing happens ('desktop' should appear)

6. type 'guest' in (guest's) notepad

7. Select 'guest' and copy to clipboard (Ctrl+C)

8. Paste into client's notepad

1. 'desktop' appears (should be 'guest')

hello,

i just installed a new vmware esxi 4 server with the free standalone server license.

i have an apc ups and i need to buy a smart slot ethernet card to be able to monitor ups status in an vm.

after searching around i found out that the ghettoShutDown.pl script does not work because of the restrictions of perl in the free licensed version.

but we are able to enable ssh. it is unsupported but not illegal. i rather have a legal esxi version with no support on it than a supported illegal version.

after looking around in the forums i found out that the available scripts were not that good.

so i made my own....

save it on a vmfs volume. create ssh password less login and let apc daemon on a linux virtual machine fire up this script.

what is basically does: get list of all vm's on machine.

loop through that list to shutdown all vm's. loop will be run at least 1 time. it waits a specified interval to check if all machines are down. of not... power it down the hard way....

have fun using it.....

We’re testing our first soon-to-be production servers with vSphere, and running into some performance issues.

First off, the setup:

- Two-tier Sage CRM system, with one dedicated web server (IIS) and one dedicated DB server (SQL).

- Both servers are running Windows server 2008 R2 64-bit, with their own VMFS volume on the SAN.  Each VM has two virtual disks, consisting of a thin 30GB OS partition, and a larger (50 and 250GB)thin data partition.  Both partitions are ‘VM Aligned’ since Server 2008 starts at 1024K, and the VMFS volumes were created in vSphere.

- No snapshots currently on volumes.

- The DB is SQL Server 2008 R2 64-bit, with 2 vCPUs, 10GB RAM, pvscsi/vmxnet3.  The web server is set up with 1 vCPU, 8GB RAM, and pvscsi/vmxnet3.

- Both are running on the Dell R610 servers, Intel Xeon E5540, dual quad-core 2.53, 32GB RAM.

- iSCSI SAN: Dell EqualLogic PS4000E SAN with PowerConnect 6224 switches, 4x Broadcom 5709 nics running as HBAs with 1500 MTU (to utilize the Dell EL MEM).

Performance of the SQL server is less than ideal.  Executing large queries takes longer on this setup than on our old server (IIS and SQL on the same box with local RAID5 array, dual core Xeon 5130 2.0GHx with 4GB ram).

I would think that it should be blazing fast.  Pretty much a canned install of SQL, but we have the SQL priority boost turned on currently to see if that helps.

What things should I be looking at in terms of finding bottlenecks?  The SAN is fast, the procs are fast, and it’s got plenty of memory, so something seems off.

Thanks a lot for any suggestions!

Aaron

I have an internal NTP server in the LAN (so there's no need to configure any firewall for this matter) but my ESXi 4.1U1 servers are totally out of time (3 to 5 minutes).

I've tried to restart the NTP client n times but the time is still not synch'ed.

Of course, I could manually change the time but what's the point to have the NTP client if we have to do it manually?

Is there any command (through SSH) to trigger the time-sync?

TIA

I keep getting the message: "This virtual machine is configured for

64-bit guest operating systems. However, 64-bit operation is not

possible.  This host does not support VT. Continue with 64-bit support?"

If I answer with NO it then continues to try and boot the vm but then cancels with "The task was canceled by a user" even though I haven't cancelled anything. If I answer YES, well then after posting and attempting to boot the XP iso it says "This cpu is not compatible with x64 mode. Please install a 32-bit X86 operating system."

That's what I get every time I power on a virtual machine where I'm trying to get it to boot an XP 64bit ISO file so that I can install XP 64bit on it.

I'm running ESX 4.1 on a 64bit VM (Redhat Linux 5 64-bit) from VMWare Workstation v7.  I tried Windows XP 64bit and other flavors of

Linux 64bit but same issue with all of them.

My physical pc consists of: Q6600 CPU (which supports VT).  The mobo is P5E-VM HDMI and VanderPool (VT) with XD bit set is enabled in the BIOS.  It is running

at 3.60 GHz.

So I can't install any 64-bit OS because it tells me that my ESX 4.1 VM pc doesn't support VT...I booted into its virtual bios but there are no VT settings there.  Yet, when I boot ESX with the CPU Preferred Mode set to Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI I get a little message on the bottom right saying: "This host does not support EPT. Using hardware virtualization with a software MMU." So I know it sees VT when booting ESX, only the virtual machines created in ESX don't seem to see it.

I've already added the following into my ESX 4.1 vm's .vmx file:

guestOS = "vmkernel"

monitor_control.vt32 = "true"

monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "true"

I also tried adding the above into the XP 64bit VM's vmx file as well.  Any ideas on how I can install a 64bit OS in a virtualized ESX 4.1? Or it just isn't possible?

yorkman.

Hello everybody.

Can someone help me with registration

of free VMware ESXi 4.0? I'm totally confused with the process which I

certainly don't understand.

My aim is to install and use ESXi

4.0 and manage it via vSphere client with free licenses at no charge for

more than 60 dayes. It's possible?

Installation of this products

gone without problems, but registration failed. I've found some

suggestion on other threads, but nothing helped. Give me a hand please,

I will be grateful.

I'll write what I've done:

1. I went to the http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/ website.

2. I've read that I can get free license for VMware ESXi 4 and VMware vSphere Client.

3. Decided to download this software, registered and was redirected to
        the site, where I could download ESXi 4 iso and vSphere Client .exe

4. Installation and basic configuration of ESXi on bare-metal and vSphere Client on Windows XP gone without problems.

5. I am able to create VMs and use it - it's OK, but vSphere Client sais that I have 60 day for evaluation.

6. In the meantime I've recieved e-mail with "Activate your VMware ESXi License".

7. I
        click on the www link from the e-mail and was redirected to the same
        site, where I can download software, but on the top of web page I can
        find "Licensing ESXI" and information "This license key is only valid
        for VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and later". So I suppose it's also valid
        for ESXI 4.0. I'm I right?

8. I would like to register my ESXi 4 installed software and vSphere Client. From
        the vSphere Client Menu I chose: Help -> VMware on the web ->
        Register Now. The site ask me for "Serial Number/License Activation
        Code" so i typed license key. Iassume, that this license key should not be passed here, because web site replay that: "Serial Number/License Activation Code has already been registered". So how to do it?

As I've wrote I'm confused. How to register ESXi 4.0 and vSphere Client properly? What I've done wrong and how to correct it?

I have setup an ESXi server on a test workstation HP z400 before moving on to a bigger server later.

The machine has an onboard Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5764M Gigabit Ethernet PCIe controller and I was able to install it with a modified ESXi 4.1 U1 ISO made with the mkesxiaio script by Varazir here: http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2285

The NIC is using the tg3 driver and reports to support Wake-On-LAN in the Host -> Configuration screen in the vSphere client.

So now I tested some existing Windows XP VMWare hosts created by the VMPlayer and everything is working fine.

Now I want to wake up some of the VMWare hosts on that server sending Wake-On-LAN magic pakets to the ESXi host.

The KB article here tells me that the Wake-On-LAN support is the first step to do that: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003373

What makes me worry is that under Host -> Configuration -> Power Management nothing is listed:

Technology: Not available

Active Policy: Not supported

Now I modifed one of my machines with the paramters that might allow me to wake them up:

ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.networkName = "VMNetwork"
ethernet0.addressType = "static"
ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:00:01:02"
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = "TRUE"
ethernet0.pciSlotNumber = "32"

Currently there is the VMnetwork and the Managment Network on vSwitch0 connected to the vmnic0 that is the Broadcom NIC.

But regardless of what I tried so far I could not start up any of the machines.

In the Virtual Machine properties -> Options -> Power Management I set the type to Standby and activated the checkbox

(o) Put the guest OS into standby mode and leave the virtual machine powered on

     Wake on LAN for virtual machine traffic on

     [X] Network adapter 1 (VMNetwork)

But also after starting up this machine and suspending it I could not wake it up again.

So... Here's the deal. I have a desktop PC I'm using a test box for ESXi. The motherboard is an Intel DG35EC with G35 and ICH8 chipset. Back in the 4.1 U1 days I could install ESXi 4.1 w/ update 1 to direct attached SATA or USB and boot with no problem. Now, trying to move to ESXi 5, I can install just fine. No errors are noticed when installing to direct attached or USB - but, upon reboot of the host, I'm faced with "No bootable device" message for both SATA and USB. I've tried upgrading existing 4.1 installation and starting with a fresh ESXi 5 installation with the same results. Also double-checked that I'm at latest BIOS version for the board and even went to the trouble of downgrading one level, then back to lates just for giggles. I'll probably end up buying a new motherboard with a different chipset soon, but wanted to post a quick note about this to see if anyone else has any suggestions.

Downloaded ESXi 4.1 iso, burned to a CD, booted CD, go through screens, hit F11 to install.  Immediately get the following error:

-

Installation operation failed!

The installation operation has encountered a fatal error:

Unable to find system image to install.  This is due to the image not being mounted correctly or the CD-ROM not being supported.

-

The hardware is a homebuilt system with Intel DQ35JO board, latest BIOS, Intel E6850 CPU, 8GB RAM, 2 SATA drives.  I know this is not on the compatible list but is a "whitebox".  I've installed ESXi 3.5 on it in the past and gotten it up and running, and I've seen other success stories with this board/CPU.  Yes I enabled virtualization mode in the BIOS and powered down/up.   

Here's what I've tried:

-- Redownload VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0-260247.x86_64.iso to make sure it wasn't corrupt (2 copies compared perfectly)

-- Tried a different CDROM drive (IDE)

-- Created a bootable USB stick using uNetBootin 4.7.1 and booted from it

-- Switched SATA setting in BIOS from AHCI to IDE

I keep getting the exact same error.  I've searched here and everywhere and find no reference to this error.

Help -- what do you all suggest for my next step?

Hi,

I'm running ESXI 4.1 (260247), on a DELL R410, with a DELL SAS6/IR SATA Controller, with 2x 500GB SATA Drives.

Everything was running fine, but since one week, after some time, my datastore become inactive.

I can still connect to vsphere, but the datastore is shown as Inactive. VM appears to be still runing (No one is marked as Inactive), but I can't ping anyone, nor reach them using Console or SSH.

The only solution I have found is to restart the host (Which takes 30-40min, as it's trying to save the state of the VM, but seem's he can't, as the datastore is inactive.). Anyway, after 30-40min, the server reboot, and everything is running fine.

The datastore become inactive always during the night. During the night, I have a job that backup my mail server. Maybe, it's because of a high I/O of the disks, then the datastore become inactive, even if it's seems to be weird, as I had this job running for months without any problems.

I don't have anything in the logs, so a little hard to debug.

I tried rescanning VMFS Modules, Refresh Datastore, Scan the controller, but nothing works expect rebooting the host.

If anyone have an idea, it would be greatly appreciated, as I can't sleep to much last weeks, because I have to check if my server is still running every night...

Thanks !

Hi All,

Hi Guys,

I'd like to know what you're thinking about this issue.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/Windows_Server_2008/Q_26259037.html

When you take a look about the solution, it's pretty easy to blame the WMtools.

So, what do think about this?

Thanks!