Sometimes in home lab environments you don’t have access to resources like vCenter to look at the guest VM status via console. Fortunately, you can modify ESX to enable VNC to a guest VM and use any computer to get KVM access. Pre-requisites: Network connectivity from your client to the ESXi host Root SSH access … Read more
If you have SSH access to your ESX server, smbiosDump has some very useful information. If you look in “OEM Strings: #14”, you can see some very useful information: [root@ucs-test1:~] smbiosDump | grep “OEM Strings: #14” -A 4 OEM Strings: #14 $SPI:rack-unit-13 <- Server ID $SPT:hx-nodes <- Service Profile Template $SYS:test-fi1 <- Fabric Interconnect This … Read more
Virtualization has made our lives easier. We can spin up new resources for applications, dynamically add more disk space, migrate them, etc. In vSphere, we can dynamically add additional memory and vCPU to a guest VM without any downtime (assuming its been enabled prior to powering on). Now in Ubuntu 12.04, I had two production … Read more
Ever wondered how do you find out what vCenter server is managing (or if there is any) a ESXi host? I’ve struggled for a while since there is no way via command line to see this information. vim-cmd, esxcli or esxcfg commands show nothing. I normally resorted to my Windows VM, launch the vSphere C# … Read more
Ever tried deploying an OVA but the VM version is not supported by your ESX host? Heres how you can modify the vmx file to make it compatible with your host Uncompress the OVA archive. It can be done with a compression utility like 7-zip. You should now have three different type of files: .mf … Read more
My colleague Ashish Hanwadikar wrote a quick post on Linkedin on discovering ESX servers in the same subnet. Here is the post: “VMware ESX servers have SLP (Service Discovery Protocol) enabled by default making it easy to discover all ESX servers in a given subnet through any SLP client. For example, on linux, running the … Read more
With a lot of servers in my lab, I run into my fair share of ESX boot medium issues in the lab. Typically this exhibits weird issues where the ESX host is online, VMs are incredibly slow or completely hung and ping-able. The quickest way I would determine of the boot media (USB, SD card, … Read more
This is a cool thing I’ve found out: You can see the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) via SSH! Normally you can see this yellow/gray console via monitor into your physical ESXi host, connect via IPMI/iDRAC/iLO, or via console when running a nested ESXi VM. There is not much real practical use out of … Read more