When vSphere was first released one of the elements observed by many was the differences in CPU core support between the various license editions. As you can see on this page most editions only support 6 cores per CPUs with the exception of Advanced and Enterprise Plus which support 12 cores. This lead to the …
There have been numerous discussions such as this one requesting additional NIC support for more common desktop models. It seems that VMware is listening to those requests. ESXi 4.1 includes a Marvell (sky2) driver and perhaps this signals that VMware will add additional support for other NICs support as the Realtek 8169 series. No Marvell NICs are …
A question that comes up on VMware’s forums occasionally is about the ESXi root account and the possibility of deleting the account. The account should not be deleted, but it is possible to remove the account from the Administrator role that it is granted at the host level. That prevents the root account from being …
Minimum root Permissions for VM Automatic Start up Read More »
If you wish to restrict visibility to the licensing information on your host you need to create a custom role which: 1) Restricts access to this information on the Licensed Features screen2) Disables any changes to the permissions and roles set up on the host The following image shows that the test login is not …
I recently encountered an error on one of my ESXi 4.1 lab hosts trying to make a configuration change to the host. The error image is shown below and the text of the error stack pointed to full root file system: I used the command vdf -h to confirm the error message and as shown …
If you boot a system with two ESXi installations, the following PSOD may be displayed with the this error: “Two Filesystems with the same UUID have been detected. Make sure you do not have two ESXi installations.” This is shown in the first image below. In some cases this error is helpful as it may …
Booting a Host with Two Local ESXi Installations Read More »
I was recently helping a customer with some IBM x3690 hosts running ESXi 4.1 Update 1 that was spontaneously rebooting. IBM suggested that the cause was the MegaRAID SAS driver and that the driver should be updated to the latest release. Given that the customer was not using local storage and it was a priority …
A common question on the forums here is regarding development for VMware ESXi. In most cases users are looking to develop or update a device driver. In other cases a user is looking to integrate a common Linux utility. This page serves to introduce the reader to some of the development resources for ESXi. If …
VMware Compliance Checker is a new utility from VMware that checks the security compliance of your hosts against the vSphere Hardening Guidelines. You can check up to 5 ESXi or ESX hosts concurrently to produce a report about the compliance of the hosts and their hosted guests. VMware Compliance Checker (CC) can be installed on Windows …
One of the changes with the release of ESXi 4.1 was the removal of the vSphere Host Update Utility (HUU) from the vSphere client installation. This tool was especially useful for patching stand-alone hosts. Hosts managed with any version of vCenter can be patched with Update Manager, but for stand-alone hosts the alteratives are the …
Patching ESXi 4.1 with the vSphere Host Update Utility Read More »
