ESX 4 Archives | Default Reasoning

Configuring software iSCSI Round Robin MPIO on ESX 4.x.

15 October, 2010 3

This is just a quick post about configuring software iSCSI Round Robin MPIO (2:1 mapping) on an ESX 4.x server. Here is a quick overview of the procedure: Create VMkernel ports on a vSwitch Configure the VMkernel ports Assign physical NIC’s to the vSwitch Configure the uplinks on the vSwitch Enable software iSCSI initiator Find and add VMkernel ports to the iSCSI initiator Add an iSCSI target to the iSCSI initiator Rescan the HBA adapter […]

HP StorageWorks P4300 G2 SAN – Lessons learned.

13 October, 2010 4

There are a lot great blog posts about the HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN arrays (formally known as HP Lefthand). I think the articles written by Frank Denneman are one of the most famous 🙂 . Anyway, a few days ago I had a chance to work with the HP P4300 SAN’s myself when I was configuring a new virtual infrastructure for one of our customers. There were 4 HP StorageWorks P4300 SAN arrays, 2 at […]

Console-Setup, it’s menu driven!

12 August, 2010 0

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 […]

Boot ESX 4 from SAN on IBM HS22 Blade Server.

4 August, 2010 5

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 […]

Unload unnecessary modules from your ESX host.

21 June, 2010 0

“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 […]

Monitor VMkernel activity with the tail command.

18 June, 2010 2

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

Configure Jumbo Frames on Hardware iSCSI HBA in ESX 4.

24 March, 2010 1

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! […]

Kill an unresponsive VM on an ESX server.

11 February, 2010 1

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