VSphere
VMware Cloud on AWS (vSAN) utilizing Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is an interesting one. Being able to independently increment storage in the VMC without adding compute nodes is a feature that has been missing, until now.
Another VMworld, another vSphere announcement. As all new releases, vSphere 6.7u1 comes with a bunch of new features and capabilities — yay, finally feature complete HTML5 client!
If you boot your ESXi hosts from SD-cards or USB you might have run into this issue. Suddenly your host(s) displays the following under events: “Bootbank cannot be found at path ‘/bootbank’.”
Usually this means that the boot device has been corrupted somehow, either due to a device failure or other issues. Normally the host continues to run, until it’s rebooted that is…
While at a customer site, migrating an old vSphere 5.5 environment to 6.5, several hosts suddenly crashed with a PSOD during the migration. Long story short, we got hit by this: VMware KB 2147958: ESXi 6.5 host fails with PSOD: GP Exception 13 in multiple VMM world at VmAnon_AllocVmmPages (2147958)
Photo by Sonja Langford
Just a quick post about something I experienced at a client, with ESXi 6.0 hosts, today:
If you have trouble performing VMware snapshots, and see a msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCINGERROR error, check the host time settings and NTP.
The ESXi Embedded Host Client Fling got an upgrade today, and in addition to new features it now works properly on ESXi 5.5. In addition to this, it’s also available as an offline bundle so you can distribute it with Update Manager.
Since I’ve spent most of my day in esxcli, here is a quick post on how to perform the upgrade from a local http repository hosting the .vib file.
I was recently involved with consulting for a Norwegian shipping company who has quite a few remote vSphere installations, most of them with a couple of ESXi hosts, but no vCenter and hence no Update Manager. While looking at methods for managing these installations, in particular how to facilitate patching and upgrading scenarios, I remembered that way back in 2013, I posted Quick and Dirty HTTP-based Deployment which shows how to use the Python to run a simple http daemon, and serve files from it.
I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I saw William Lam announcing a new VMware Fling called ESXi Embedded Host Client. Finally the day when we can get a local vSphere Web Client on a standalone host is here, and it’s not a moment too soon. This feature has been missing since ESX 3 and it’s VMware Infrastructure Web Access. For now, this is a Fling (which means unsupported and so on), but I really hope that this ends up being built-in to ESXi very soon – even on the free vSphere Hypervisor.