Posts under ‘ESX’

It’s been a year since I blogged about my script to perform an unattended upgrade of the HP management agents 8.1.1 on ESX 3.5 U3. After HP upgraded their management agents to version 8.2.0 some things changed. The installation procedure is now a 2 step process. First there’s a PreInstall_Setup.sh script which modifies some startup [...]

I just noticed that VMware released a couple of critical ESX3.5 fixes on December 29th, shortly after releasing ESX3.5 Update5 on December 3rd. Wading through the patch details I stumbled upon some severe issues addressed by the ESX350-200912401-BG patch. I quote some issues that caught my eye: 

ESX hosts might get disconnected from VirtualCenter Server. This issue [...]

When running some storage test on an ESX 3.5 environment lately, I ran into a problem where a dead storage path disappeared after a rescan. While this was as expected, the storage path didn’t return after fixing it in the SAN and running a rescan again. After a reboot of the ESX server, the new [...]

Nowadays more and more companies have or are considering a 2nd datacenter in another site. Mostly the main reason for this 2nd datacenter is for disaster recovery purposes. There are 2 ways to utilize this 2nd datacenter. First one could choose for an active-passive setup, where in the 2nd datacenter bare-metal servers are waiting to [...]

In part 1, I explained the virtual machine settings that are available to us regarding to memory, in part 2, I explained how the ESX kernel assigns memory to a VM and in this part I will dive into ESX memory reclaiming techniques.
The ESX kernel uses transparent page sharing, ballooning and swapping to reclaim memory. [...]

In part 1, I explained the virtual machine memory settings that are available to us. This caused quite some controversy on what would happen when a limit is hit that’s configured lower than the actual allocated memory.
Scott Herold did an excellent follow-up on this. Be sure to read his article too, because it contains valuable [...]

I receive a lot of questions lately about ESX memory management. Things that are very obvious to me seem to be not so obvious at all for some other people. So I’ll try to explain these things from my point of view.
First let’s have a look at the virtual machine settings available to us. On [...]

Probably old information for insiders, but Ken Cline recently finished his trilogy on “The Great vSwitch Debate”. In his vSwitch trilogy he addresses everything you allways wanted to know but were afraid to ask about vSwitches. In part 1 of his series he introduces the concept of a vSwitch, in part 2 he talkes about the security [...]

VMware has released ESX(i) 3.5 update4.
Do not forget to read the release notes here or you can go to the download page here
While going through the release notes these things caught my attention:

vCenter 2.5 U2 or higher is required before upgrading to ESX(i) 3.5 U4 according to the Compatibility Matrix
If you are in a managed (enterprise) [...]

A while ago I received a request from the storage department to move a whole ESX cluster to another storage I/O-Group. This would be a disruptive action.
I was wondering if storage VMotion would help me out here if they assigned me some new storage on the other I/O-Group instead of moving the current LUNs.
If you [...]