ESX 4

Troubleshooting Service Console issues has always been a little bit annoying (well, at least to me 🙂 ). However, since ESX4 Update 2, there is a new command that will make your life a little bit easier. Login to your ESX server and take a look at #console-setup command. As you can see, it is menu driven and extremely easy to use. Pressing 1, 2 or 3 will display information about vswif, NIC’s and vSwitch/DVS. Press […]

Wow, it has been a while since my last blog! I’ve been working on a large virtualization project at one of our customers lately, which involved diskless IBM HS22 blade servers with two QLogic QMI2582 Fiber Channel adapters. We configured the ESX host to boot from SAN, which was an IBM DS5300. The procedure below describes how to configure boot from SAN of an ESX 4.0.0 U2 server. It does not cover installing ESX itself. First, login to the IBM BladeCenter with […]

“Turn off what you do not need” is my motto 🙂 . So, if you are not using the VMFS-2 (which you probably aren’t using since ESX 3.x) and/or NFSClient in you environment than you can safely unload these modules from your ESX host. You can list currently loaded modules with #esxcfg-module –q and if you want to disable the modules mentioned above then: Login to you ESX host as root user First, unload the […]

The tail command displays last 10 lines of a file and with the –f (follow) parameter you can see the data appended to it. So, if you want to see what is going on in the vmkernel of your ESX host: Login to you ESX host Type: #tail –f /var/log/vmkernel Watch for new events to appear If you want to terminate the process,  press CTRL + C Nice & simple 🙂 Cheers! – Marek.Z

Before you begin, check the names of the vmhba adapters on your ESX server. From the vSphere Client go to Configuration tab and click on Storage Adapters. Now, to set Jumbo Frame support (MTU 9000) on your hardware iSCSI HBA, follow these steps: Login as Root user on your ESX server. Type: #esxcfg-hwiscsi –j enable <vmhba#> If successful, you should get the “MTU size successfully set to : 9000” message. To verify the change type: #esxcfg-hwiscsi –l  <vmhba#> All done! Cheers! […]

If you want to kill an unresponsive VM on an ESX server and it cannot be turned off with the vmware-cmd stop hard command then try the following: Logon the ESX server as Root and type: #vm-support –x to find the VMID of the unresponsive VM. Next, type: #vm-support –X <VMID> to kill the VM. Answer the questions as desired and wait until the ESX server finishes the job. Cheers! – Marek.Z