A part of my job as a VMware Certified Instructor is to update our lab systems whenever new vSphere versions come out. After upgrading from 5.5 to 6.0 I decided we should change passwords, however I was unable to choose the unsecure password I had decided to use: Weak password: based on a dictionary […]
Book review: VMware ESXi Cookbook
The book I am reviewing is VMware ESXi cookbook written by authors Mohammed Raffic Kajamoideen and Aravind Sivaraman and published by Packt Publishing. It contains 9 chapters totalling 84 pages in e-book version. Disclaimer I have received a free e-book copy of this book for reviewing it from Packt Publishing. There are no requirements […]
Dell releases VMware vSphere ESXi OEM 5.5
I just noticed Dell has released their version of VMware vSphere ESXi OEM 5.5 build 1331820. Here is the direct download link. In case you want to validate your download integrity the MD5 checksum is: b9661e44c791b86caf60f179b857a17d Included in the image by Dell are: The drivers included in this ESXi image by Dell as part of the […]
VMware ESXi Memory HotAdd & CPU HotPlug Guest OS compability
Today while teaching a VMware Fast Track course a student asked which guest operating systems that actually supported memory hotadd and cpu hotplug. This is a great question! Lets dive into some background information. The ability to use these two features depends on three things: Does your VMware vSphere license allow it? Does your […]
EqualLogic reclaim space from VMware ESXi datastore
Today I visited a customer to perform a health check. Their system consisted of VMware ESXi hosts running on EqualLogic SAN storage. The volumes on the EqualLogic were thin provisioned and one of them were running ALMOST full plus a good way beyond the warning limit. As you can see the usage is exceeding the […]
VMware ESXi Storage vMotion fails with error The method is disabled by ‘vm-3556’
This week a customer called me. He was unable to Storage vMotion a VM from one datastore to another in his VMware ESXi 5.1 environment. The error shown was: The method is disabled by ‘vm-3556’ My first suggestion was to perform a regular vMotion to a different host and then retry. Unfortunately this did not […]
VMware ESXi Single VM is not vSphere HA protected
Today a customer contacted me with a system consisting of 3 hosts running a VMware ESXi 5.0 cluster. They were experiencing one, and only one VM, was complaining about configuration issues: This virtual machine failed to become vSphere HA protected and HA may not attempt to restart it after a failure. The customer had already […]
Upgrade of VMware ESXi 5.0 Dell Custom to ESXi 5.1 Dell custom fails
Today I was performing an upgrade of VMware ESXi 5.0 running Dell custom image to 5.1 Dell custom image using VMware Update Manager. The upgrade seemed to run as usual, but after some time I wondered why the host did not come back up after the automatic reboot. I went to the console and saw […]
VMware ESXi Consolidate virtual machine disk files fails due to read-only lock
Last week I had a customer with a VM that required virtual disk consolidation, however when he attempted to perform this from the vSphere client it would run for hours and unfortunately fail: The virtual disk is either corrupted or not a supported format. I waited till we could get a service window on the […]
VMware ESXi 5.1 unable to mount datastore: Lock was not free
Today I had a customer running VMware ESXi 5.1 on three hosts connected to a Dell EqualLogic SAN. The issue at hand was out of 10 datastores on the SAN one datastore could suddenly no longer be mounted. It showed up as (inactive)(unmounted): Obviously the logical solution would be to just try and mount the […]