Questions tagged [vmware-vsphere]
vSphere is an enterprise level virtualization solution. It acts as the cloud computing OS managing a set of VMware ESXi-based hosts.
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Are VMware ESXi 5 patches cumulative?
This seems basic, but I'm confused about the patching strategy involved with manually updating standalone VMware ESXi hosts. The VMware vSphere blog attempts to explain this, but the actual process is ...
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vSphere education - What are the downsides of configuring VMs with *too* much RAM?
VMware memory management seems to be a tricky balancing act. With cluster RAM, Resource Pools, VMware's management techniques (TPS, ballooning, host swapping), in-guest RAM utilization, swapping, ...
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No space left on device -- but there is space
I'm running an Ubuntu 12.04.1 server in a VMware virtualized environment that has a strange issue. Twice now, at seemingly random times, the machine has suddenly been unable to write to the root ...
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"Unballooning" RAM that's been ballooned by VMware
Given the constrained RAM situation described in this question, what is the cleanest method (manual or programmatically) to:
Identify VMware virtual machines whose RAM has been reclaimed by the ...
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PowerChute for VMware ESX4
I am looking for a free way of installing PowerChute for VMWare. The 2.2.3 and 2.2.4 Linux versions do not support VMWare ESX even though I think prior versions did.
APC is now charging $100 for ...
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vSwitch configuration with 12 uplinks
I have been doing a lot of research on vSwitch configurations, but I think I am more confused now after all of the reading that I have done. So here is my situation 3 ESX Hosts (12 nics each), 1 ...
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How to manage a global VM startup order across the whole datacenter?
Suppose you have a fully virtualized VMware infrastructure: ESXi, vCenter, vMotion, HA, DRS, the whole package.
Inside, you have lots of VMs, which at any given time may reside on one host or another ...
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VMware Distributed vSwitches (VDS) - Design, theory, *real* use cases and examples?
I'm starting to explore VMware Distributed Switches (dvSwitches or VDS) for use in existing and new installations. Assume VMware version 5.1 and newer with Enterprise Plus licensing. Prior to this, I'...
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Disk shrink does not work on ESXi guests
EHLO everyone! My first post on the StackOverflow network :)
We're running some ESXi 5.0/vCenter infrastructure to host mainly Debian 6/amd64 guest systems with ext3 partitions and open-vm-tools ...
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How should I copy my VM templates between vSphere datacenters?
Background/Environment Architecture:
My current environment for $corp_overlords$ is set up in a hub-and-spoke model with a technologically well-endowed home office hub (SAN, bladecenter/bladesystem ...
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Server health monitoring software [closed]
Hey all! I am looking for some software to monitor the health status of our servers. Our environment is a pretty typical mix of HP/Dell running Microsoft Server and VMware vSphere. We are currently ...
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How do I delete ESXi vm snapshots using the least additional space possible?
We have a tree of about 15 snapshots of a virtual machine that runs Win2k8, as you may guessed our datastore is soon to run out of space. My objective is to delete all the snapshots, as it seems it ...
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Transfer large amount of small files
I've to do a migration of two servers with large SAN attachments to our new VMWare environment.
EDIT: I have to supply some additional intelligence as I have good answers regarding VMWare solution.
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How to export a VMware ESXi 5 VM into a file to restore it later?
As I've bought a server it had a RAID controlleer which was not supported by VMWare ESXi 5, so I had to install it in a bare non-RAID configuration. Now as I've bought a supported RAID controller I am ...
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Monitor ESXi hosts with Nagios
Does anyone recommend any methods for monitoring ESXi 4.1 hosts with Nagios? I have looked into SNMP but it seems to be in a pretty sorry state. Net-SNMP does not seem to be included and there is a ...
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Should VMware HA Admission Control be enabled for small (2/3-host) clusters?
Take the following common scenario... A basic vSphere cluster running two or three hosts, shared storage and a token set of virtual machines under Essentials Plus or greater licensing.
Should HA ...
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VMware NIC Teaming - How to gain more than 1Gbit/s copy speed between two VMs?
I have a question about VMware and NIC Teaming. Here is my easy test scenario. I have two VMs. VM1 and VM2. I want to copy 1 big file from VM1 to VM2 because I want to see that I can gain more copy ...
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Identify disks in vCenter to partitions in Linux guest
What I am trying to accomplish is to correlate hard drive in vCenter to the disks in the Linux guest. So here it goes
Opening up settings for the guest in vCenter and moving to hardware tab, shows ...
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VMware - cluster resources utilization
I have 2 hosts in a cluster (running vSphere Client version 6.7).
how can i be sure that when i want to enter one of them into maintenance mode, the other one would be able to hold all VM's resources?
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ESXi 5.1 crashing
I got a ESXi 5.1 installation which is irregularly crashing with a error output like the following:
The server has got the following hardware:
Supermicro X8DTN+ Mainboard
2 x Intel XEON E5606
6 x ...
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Best Practice: vCPUs per physical core
I am trying to find some documentation or best practice guides for virtualization with respect to provisioning vCPUs per physical core (of a CPU). If it matters, I am looking at vmWare for the ...
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Why are snapshots considered as temporary backups not real backups?
I am using VMware ESXi. In our team we use to provide snapshots for long term backup.
Then we faced issues like memory spillover and the server got hang up.
I started reading in VMware knowledgebase ...
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How to crack the 1 Gbit iSCSI limit between ESXi and VNXe
I'm having big troubles with my iSCSI network and can't seem to get it working as fast as it could.
So I've tried pretty much everything to gain full performance from my SAN, having involved ...
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vSphere - copy virtual machine to external usb hard drive
We have an ESXi server standing somewhere else.
I can connect to the server with the vSphere client.
There is an external USB hard drive plugged into the server.
How can I copy a stopped VM to the ...
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VMware ESXi: help downloading large ISO
I'd like to download a large OS install ISO directly to my datastore. I used to be able to SSH to the ESXi terminal and use wget to download large files directly to the datastore, but it seems that ...
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Find all virtual machines with ballooned or swapped RAM in VMware cluster?
If I were to look at a vSphere cluster or resource pool and see a certain level of memory ballooning or swapping, how do I identify which VMs are affected? I know what to do with them once I find them ...
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Is it possible to deploy VMware vSphere 5.5 without Windows?
I ran into an interesting client requirement recently. I needed to perform a greenfield deployment of VMware vSphere 5.5. This was to use the Linux-based VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)...
The ...
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VMWare vSphere and the move from ESX to ESXi
I was working on a standalone ESX 3.5 system last night in order to upgrade to vSphere 4.1u1. I realized that the full ESX download had been deemphasized on the VMWare website. While I've known that ...
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Is there a dynamic inventory for VMware in Ansible?
The documentation for Dynamic Inventory makes mention of so many dynamic inventories, but none for VMware.
I really liked the feature of tagging servers in Amazon EC2 and was hoping to re-create a ...
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Setting a VM boot CD via PowerCLI
I have a sneaking suspicion that this may be a bug, but I'm definitely willing to entertain the possibility that I'm doing things wrong.
I have a VMware virtual machine in $vm, and I'm trying to ...
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Issues customizing a RHEL7 VM deployed from a template on VMware
In compliance with VMWare's VM customization matrix, I am testing this out on vSphere 5.5 Update 2d. I create the template with a RHEL 7.1 DVD and point anaconda to a kickstart that looks like this:
#...
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vCPU performance between 1 or 2 vCPU's
Within virtualisation (Predominantly VMware) is there a performance advantage using either 1 CPU with 4 cores or 2 CPU's with 2 cores? Let's assume the application running on a VM can use two CPU's.
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Migrate a vSphere server without vMotion
Is there a generally accepted way to migrate a virtual machine that runs vSphere from one host to another without vMotion?
I have a small two-machine vSphere installation. There is no shared storage, ...
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Any way to convert qcow2 to ovf?
In our application we are downloading a qcow2 image and after that we are supposed to import that as OVF.
So any way to convert qcow2 --> OVF or qcow2 --> vmdk(using qemu-img convert) --> ...
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Reboot Virtual Machine every 20 minutes
We need to be able to create a way to reboot virtual machines in the lab every 20 minutes automatically.
Is there any way this can be done in vSphere 5?
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Cannot remove passthrough setup on ESXi
I have an ESXi host, but it does not have local hard disk. It use disks which are shared via fibre channel. Afterthat, I setup passthrough for the fibre channel. After rebooting ESXi host, we cannot ...
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Can't use ctrl+c to kill process in VM
We are running several RHEL 6 64-bit VM's in a vBlock infrastructure using vCenter 5.5. If I open a console session through the vSphere web client the ctrl+c keystroke will not work. This is very ...
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VMXNET3 performance on Linux on ESX 5.0
What kind of performance can I expect from VMXNET3 adapter when running two Linux guests on the same VMware ESX private network defined between those guests? I use VMXNET3 adapter for communicating ...
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Does vSphere client restrict the number of cores for VMs?
We just installed it on our new server and have found that using the vSphere client we cannot create a virtual machine with more than 32 cores (Our host has 64). Is this normal behaviour? We haven't ...
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What's using all my memory?
SOLUTION: There's a lot of stuff to read in this thread, so i'll just summarize here to help.
The problem is the VMWare ESX balloon driver which "inflates" the amount of memory "in use&...
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Extremely poor performance with VMWare hosted build server
We are running TeamCity on a Windows Server 2008 as a build server. The build server is hosted in VMWare ESXi 5. (I have very little VMWare experience so my terminology might be wrong).
When we start ...
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Are there any benefits to using a Distributed vSwitch for iSCSI?
I am designing our vSphere farm - we'll be migrating from ESX 3.5 to 4.1. I plan to set up a new farm using ESXi 4.1, and move the Virtual Machines on the 3.5 farm into it by shutdown, then import.
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VMWare Thick Provisioned and Thin Provisioned format
I am importing VMWare images to create new virtual machines. I always choose Thick Provisioned format because I doubt there could be performance hit if I use thick provisioned format. If I use thin ...
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How do you migrate VMWare ESXi (free) installation and datastore to a new drive?
I have VMWare xSphere Hypervisor 4.1 or VMWare ESXi 4.1 installed on a hard drive (sorry VMWare's naming and renaming is killing me, I am using the free hypervisor, I am just going to call it ESXi ...
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How can I deploy template-based VM from Linux?
We are trying to provide our Linux engineers with a CLI to deploy VMWare vSphere VMs using templates.
The vSphere CLI looks promising but the documentation doesn't mention templates.
Does anyone ...
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Enable Flow Control on a VMware vSwitch
I can't figure out how to enable Flow Control on a VMware vSwitch. I've been talking with Equallogic and VMware, and they said we need it on for better performance. I can't find out how to enable it ...
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Scripting VMWare ESXi from a linux server
I’m attempting to use the VMWare command line interface to mount a datastore ISO file in the CD/DVD drive of a virtual machine. An entry elsewhere on serverfault tells me that ‘vmware-cmd blabla.vmx ...
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VMware vsphere essentials plus network cabling
I'm not sure how many NICs I need to use to have vmotion support with my SAN. See the link for a picture, it's laughably crude.
Sketch
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VMWare serial connection between two vm hosts
I am attempting to simulate a serial connection between two VMWare virtual machines running CentOS 6.3; both hosted on the same VMWare vSphere 5.1.0 host (linux based ).
Googling yielded these ...
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vSphere Virtual Machine is orphaned
I have a problem. My vSphere 4 host virtual machine is powered on, but is not accessible via the network (I don't know what is wrong with it, for reasons that will soon become clear).
Because my ...
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