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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How to [politely?] tell software vendor they don't know what they're talking about

Not a technical question, but a valid one nonetheless. Scenario: HP ProLiant DL380 Gen 8 with 2 x 8-core Xeon E5-2667 CPUs and 256GB RAM running ESXi 5.5. Eight VMs for a given vendor's system. ...
Simon Catlin's user avatar
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57 votes
2 answers
10k views

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, ...
41 votes
7 answers
34k views

Replace VMware vSphere infrastructure with open source alternatives?

We are planning a slow migration from VMware (and third party apps) to open source alternatives (free would be great). Basically, we want to start with some little cluster lab, then migrate the ...
minWi's user avatar
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37 votes
5 answers
13k views

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 ...
29 votes
4 answers
157k views

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 ...
Dr. Watson's user avatar
28 votes
6 answers
13k views

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 ...
Samselvaprabu's user avatar
22 votes
4 answers
25k views

How much contention is too much in VMware?

For a while now I've been trying to figure out why quite a few of our business-critical systems are getting reports of "slowness" ranging from mild to extreme. I've recently turned my eye to the ...
Chuck Herrington's user avatar
19 votes
4 answers
105k views

How to fix "BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 17163091968s"?

UPDATE: I updated the title of the message, because I've recently seen more of these problems with this exact time amount of 17163091968s. This should help people investigating the symptoms to find ...
tuomassalo's user avatar
18 votes
3 answers
130k views

Understanding the VMware ESXi limitations of the free Version

I am running an ESXi Vsphere Client Version 6.0.0 but with all the different documentation and changes I have trouble to understand my limitations. From the official documentation I see that my limit ...
RayofCommand's user avatar
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18 votes
1 answer
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vSphere - Why upgrade VM Hardware Version?

At the beginning of the year we performed an upgrade of our vSphere environment from vSphere 5.0 to vSphere 5.1 U1 Build 1063329 compromised of about a dozen ESXi hosts and a vCenter instance hosted ...
user avatar
18 votes
2 answers
505 views

An unknown tool is wiping our Virtual Machines and we can't ID it

A console view of a Windows 2008 R2 VM, on vSphere is showing the following screen: "Operation 2 of 2" "Wiping disk" Can someone advise on what this program is? Some information on this mystery: A ...
Rqomey's user avatar
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16 votes
3 answers
201k views

Deploying VM from vmdk / vmx file

I have a vmdk file and vmx file (and all the other files from someone elses datastore) copied onto my own data store. If I try to deploy from the vmx file, I get a vm with the name "unknown # (invalid)...
Jeff's user avatar
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15 votes
5 answers
1k views

Choosing a SAN technology for 100s of VM Web Servers

The Problem We have an issue with performance on an existing platform, so I'm turning to the hive mind for a second opinion on this. The performance issue so far relates to IOPS rather than ...
SimonJGreen's user avatar
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15 votes
3 answers
7k views

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 ...
Ryan Hardy's user avatar
14 votes
4 answers
75k views

VMware ESXi - vSphere - Can't exit VM console access

I'm running ESXi 4.1 on a Dell T110 Server I connect to ESXi using vSphere vSphere is running inside a Windows 7 VM The Windows 7 VM is running in VMware Fusion on my Mac OS X system When I'm in ...
caleban's user avatar
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14 votes
6 answers
99k views

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 ...
Anatol's user avatar
  • 349
14 votes
6 answers
44k views

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 ...
ebarrere's user avatar
  • 340
14 votes
2 answers
4k views

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'...
ewwhite's user avatar
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14 votes
2 answers
25k views

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 ...
Massimo's user avatar
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14 votes
1 answer
3k views

Why is vCenter 5.1u1 exiting hosts from maintenance mode?

This vCenter server was just upgraded to 5.1 update 1. I'm going through hosts and bringing firmware up to date, then upgrading them from various versions of 5.0 to 5.1u1. vCenter 5.1u1 seems to ...
Shane Madden's user avatar
12 votes
4 answers
25k views

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 ...
NekojiruSou's user avatar
12 votes
1 answer
20k views

"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 ...
ewwhite's user avatar
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11 votes
3 answers
16k views

VSphere Client - Console missing bottom and right of screen

I just recently installed ESXI on a server for some basic tasks, but now I'm having a problem with my windows VM. The thing is, the bottom and the right-hand side of the screen go beyond what the ...
Eskir's user avatar
  • 213
11 votes
9 answers
46k views

Is there a vSphere client for Linux, or will there be? [closed]

I have searched every corner of the internet (well, I searched really hard...) for a proper vSphere client for Linux, but it seems that the answer is the same everytime: VMWare tells users to use ...
Aron Rotteveel's user avatar
11 votes
2 answers
3k views

Do I need VMWare vSphere?

I'm planning use vmware to upgrade some of very aged server instead replace with all new bunch of server. VMWare vSphere sounds great but because of low budget I can't afford for both licenses and ...
Gk.'s user avatar
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11 votes
2 answers
4k views

Hot-remove memory in a Linux virtual machine

Linux supports hot-adding memory when running as a VM guest, in VMware for example. (Sometimes you need to manually inform the guest OS.) Is there a safe way to do the inverse operation — reducing ...
200_success's user avatar
  • 4,790
11 votes
3 answers
10k views

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 ...
ewwhite's user avatar
  • 198k
10 votes
4 answers
191k views

How to change vCenter server appliance IP from command line?

I have installed a vCenter 5.1 appliance (VCSA) on physical server on a particular network, and assigned it an internal IP. This server (Dell R620) then went to a remote hosting location, where it is ...
Saariko's user avatar
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10 votes
1 answer
5k views

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 ...
Moduspwnens's user avatar
10 votes
4 answers
1k views

Virtualisation management: should Vcenter, Veeam etc be on a physical machine or VM?

I've noticed that a lot of people run vCenter Server on a VM hosted on Vsphere / ESXi. This seems odd to me, because if there is an issue with the host then you will lose both the host and the ...
BlueCompute's user avatar
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10 votes
1 answer
3k views

Linux high RAM usage for unknown reason

after searching around for this and only finding posts of people who do not interpret the "cached" figure correctly, I decided to ask this question. I have some servers at hand, which act strangely. ...
luxifer's user avatar
  • 177
10 votes
2 answers
14k views

From vSphere 5.5 - Deploying Centos 7 from template ignores customizations

I've been having troubles when deploying CentOS7 from template in that the customizations do not take effect. For the VM OS setting - I have selected RHEL7 as the OS rather than CentOS (previously ...
Jeff Burns's user avatar
10 votes
6 answers
19k views

Why is the vSphere console view so slow?

Why is the Console view on the vSphere client so slow? It's a real shame because it's a shame to have to establish an RDP session every time you work on one of the VMs because of the speed of the ...
GurdeepS's user avatar
  • 1,656
10 votes
1 answer
2k views

Configuration for a two machine ESXi cluster using VSA to present local storage to VMs

I'm designing a little vSphere 5 cluster for one of our remote sites. We have some IBM x3650s that have 6x 300GB 10K RPM drives in them, along with dual quad core CPUs and 24GB RAM. Because we use HP ...
MDMarra's user avatar
  • 101k
10 votes
1 answer
3k views

How can I setup vSphere so that VLAN tags are not stripped at the vSwitch?

I am trying to test a VLAN-related networking issue, so I thought that firing up a couple virtual machines would be the easiest and cleanest method to test the problem. On the vSphere server I ...
Peter Grace's user avatar
  • 3,476
10 votes
3 answers
30k views

esxi 6.5 how to turn off autofit window / automatic display resolution change

after I installed VMware Tools on virtual machine its resolution adjusts to the console window size automatically. It is not what I want - I want that the resolution of my virtual machine stays the ...
Tiroue's user avatar
  • 131
10 votes
1 answer
1k views

Vmware - Consolidation is needed, but I want to revert

Last night I took a snapshot of a VM before adding a new disk and running an offline defrag of Exchange (using the newly added disk as the temporary path). When I woke up today the server was offline,...
Gechurch's user avatar
  • 101
10 votes
3 answers
4k views

Combined vMotion and SvMotion via the vSphere Command-Line interface

Since vSphere 5.x we can now request a combined vMotion and Storage vMotion at the same time via the Web Client - but can it be done via the CLI (not PowerCLI)? I've read the documentation for 5.1 ...
Chopper3's user avatar
  • 102k
9 votes
6 answers
50k views

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 ...
HopelessN00b's user avatar
  • 53.9k
9 votes
4 answers
37k views

Can you change the virtual NIC type after building a VM?

When building a VM, you can select which virtual device type you would like a vNIC to be (E1000, VMXNET3, etc). After the VM is created, can you change the type of vNIC in use on a given connection (...
warren's user avatar
  • 18.7k
9 votes
1 answer
5k views

VMware vSphere cluster design for site redundancy

I have a question about the best design for site redudancy when using vSphere clusters. A bit of background info about our situation first though. We are a medium-sized company with two main offices,...
Stefan Radovanovici's user avatar
9 votes
3 answers
10k views

Why would Linux VM in vSphere ESXi 5.5 show dramatically increased disk i/o latency?

I'm stumped and I hope someone else will recognize the symptoms of this problem. Hardware: new Dell T110 II, dual-core Pentium G850 2.9 GHz, onboard SATA controller, one new 500 GB 7200 RPM cabled ...
mhucka's user avatar
  • 689
9 votes
3 answers
15k views

Remotely renaming a domained Win 7 computer

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to rename a Windows 7 computer remotely. This is for automating Win 7 builds in a vSphere 5 environment, and I'm trying to get it as hands-off as I can. So far ...
sysadmin1138's user avatar
  • 134k
9 votes
1 answer
704 views

How would I know if I should be disabling virtual NUMA on VMs running older applications?

From VMware's docs: Virtual NUMA topology is available to hardware version 8 virtual machines and is enabled by default when the number of virtual CPUs is greater than eight. You can also ...
red888's user avatar
  • 4,243
9 votes
1 answer
2k views

iSCSI design options for 10GbE VMware distributed switches? MPIO vs. LACP

I'm working on expanding the storage backend for several VMware vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 clusters at my datacenter. I've primarily used NFS datastores throughout my VMware experience (Solaris ZFS, Isilon, ...
ewwhite's user avatar
  • 198k
8 votes
9 answers
54k views

How do I set a password on an Ubuntu cloud image?

I'm trying to start on .ova with VirtualBox and want to import the same image later in vSphere. Ubuntu cloud images don't have a standard password anymore. I'd like to edit the .ova to configure a ...
Eddy Pronk's user avatar
8 votes
3 answers
10k views

Setup of HP ProCurve 2810-24G for iSCSI?

I have a pair of ProCurve 2810-24G that I will use with a Dell Equallogic SAN and Vmware ESXi. Since ESXi does MPIO, I am a little uncertain on the configuration for links between the switches. Is a ...
3molo's user avatar
  • 4,350
8 votes
3 answers
7k views

Shared storage options for ESXi HA cluster

I am seeking recommendations for shared storage options to support ESXi HA cluster (note I'm NOT asking for product/brand/model recommendation - I know this is against the rules here). I am asking ...
Arthur's user avatar
  • 223
8 votes
4 answers
19k views

How do I copy an image in VMWare?

(I know this is a really noob-ish question, but I'm a noob-ish VMWare user.) I see where there's a function to clone a VM, but that appears to clone its settings (CPUs, memory, disk space). I'm ...
J.T. Grimes's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
3k views

Enabling VMware EVC on Westmere E5645 CPU only accepts "Nehalem" mode

Take the following system, a Supermicro VMware ESXi host with Intel Westmere E5645 CPUs. Part of our deployment process is to set the appropriate Enhanced vMotion Capability (EVC) level for the ...
ewwhite's user avatar
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