Technolab 2.0 » VMware

Memory hotplug in Linux

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:25:48 +0000

VMware has a nice feature where you can add memory and CPUs on the fly without rebooting the server. It works like a charm in Windows, but it did not work out of the box in Linux. The trick is to load the module acpi_memhotplug so that the Linux kernel discovers the new memory that …

VMware ESXi 5.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:46:44 +0000

A few brief notes on the new VMware ESXi 5.0 release that are probably not covered elsewhere yet. My Asus P8H67-I mini-ITX board is fully supported in 5.0 (it was supported in 4.x as well) Realtek RTL8111E is supported out of the box. I have not yet tried it (I am using an Intel Pro/1000 …

Installing ESXi 4.1 from an USB stick

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:33:56 +0000

As I wrote in the previous post, I recently bought a mini-iTX card with an Intel Core i3 to replace my aging firewall/router. It so happens that it fully supports VMware ESXi as well, so I loaded it up and are running the router/firewall as a virtual machine. Now, installing VMware ESXi 4.1 from an …

Whitebox ESXi

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:13:18 +0000

I remember the first time I got my hands on VMware ESXi. It was the 3.5 version and it quickly became apparent to me that this was the feature. Long gone was the chubby ESX COS which I used before. Of course, having a full COS (Linux) had its benefits, but it did little to …

Breaking the VMware Update Manager

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:12:28 +0000

You should believe that the VMware Update Manager was capable of handling missing files. But no, it does not. I removed a couple of files from the repository by simply pressing delete on them. These files were part of a host upgrade baseline and were no longer needed. After the delete operation, I can no …

Performance monitoring problem

Frode Sandholtbråten — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:16:12 +0000

My new R710 running ESXi 4.0 has one problem: When the CPU load comes close to maximum, all performance monitoring for the host failes. Only a few, random monitoring requests comes through, making the resource graphs in vCenter look pretty ugly. As you can see from the attached image, a lot of data is missing. …

Automatic installation of ESX 4.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:22:27 +0000

Mike La Spina has written a nice post about automatic installation of ESX 4.0 hosts utilizing PXE, kickstart and a lot of scripts. Mike has done a nice job creating configuration scripts, making it easy to copy his ideas for use in your own environment. Auto installation becomes necessary if you need to deploy a …

Feature requests, take two

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:29:32 +0000

It’s been nearly 11 months since I wrote the feature request post where I asked for some features currently missing in VMware. Now, it’s time to see how it went: Live Cloning or backup: Live cloning to either a template or a new VM was added in ESXi 3.5 U2. Storage VMotion GUI integration: New …

Changing host name and IP address of a vCenter server

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:35:16 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of trying to change the host name and IP address of the vCenter server. The old host has two networking interfaces. NIC1 was connected to the Internet while NIC2 was connected to an internal network with IP address 192.168.30.0/24. The vCenter and the plugins were configured to use the internal …

Dell PowerEdge R200 and ESXi 4.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:58:10 +0000

I promised some more details on the R200 and ESXi 4.0. Full hardware spec: Server: Dell PowerEdge R200 Processors: 1x Intel Xeon X3320 2.5GHz Quad Core Memory: 6GiB, DDR2 667MHz ECC Disk space: 1x640GB SATA + 1x80GB SATA Storage controller: Intel ICH9 NIC: 2x Broadcom BCM5721, 1x Intel PRO/1000PT PCI-E Dual Port OS: VMware ESXi …