New to VMWare and any type of server virtulization techniques... I am trying to verify

hardward compatibility with the Dell PowerServer SC440 running an Intel E2180 dual core.

The specs from Intel tell me this chip DOES NOT have "Intel Virtulization Technology"

Am I SOL installing ESXI 3.5 on this server?

Thank you - I want to make sure it is not a hardware issue before spending many hours

fighting the configuration and hardware... dcasciato

I have VC 2.5 and ESX3i in a DRS and HA cluster. Whenever i create a Resource Pool it always pulls data from one server, it never pulls it from the other server in the cluster.

So i have a total of 8gigs and 16ghz but when i try to allocate resources it only shows i have 4 gigs.

Any idea of how to fix this?

Hi all,

I have a question that should be easy to answer. We have to power down our building for maintenance on a backup generator. This means all servers have to be shut down including our VMware Environment. This is the first time I've had to do this since we put in our VMware environment. My question is:

After I power down all my VMs should I place my ESXi Hosts into Maintenance mode before powering them off or can I just power off the host without this concern. We have HA enabled and all so I was thinking that if I powered them off without Maintenance mode then HA might see that as some type of error and start to try to migrate everything.

Any suggests anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Friends,

I am new to esx3i.

One year ago I downloaded the esx3i, but only now I go to install.

However, my manual say that I have to use a boot CD.

My question are:

If I burn a CD with the downloaded esx3i, it is possible to install? Or I really need the boot CD?

Thanks for all.

Hi,

Does VMware officially support RedHat Cluster on ESX ? I am particularly interested in cross-box cluster with fence_vmware (fencing with SSH).

Personally I consider this solution as a very weak. Needs SC access and “low level” configuration, cannot be centrally managed, not aware of ESX cluster .In multi-ESX, clustered infrastructure looks like a legacy island. What is your opinion ?

best regards
Martin

Hi all,

I am new to this community. I have a problem with my ESX server installation and need help.
I have installed ESX3 server on VMware Workstation. Also have 2003 server vm running in the same VMware Workstation. Installation was sucessful. Both 2003 server and ESX server are in same subnet. I am able to ping the ESX server from 2003 VM, but i am not able to manage the ESX server using the webbrower console nor through SSH connection using putty. Please someone help me in this regards.

Durga Prasad

Hi, I am running ESXi 3.5 and using VMware Infrastructure Client 2.5. Using VIC, I created a Virtual Machine called ChromeVirtual on a datastore called Disk 3 and allocated 20GB to it. Later, I decided I did not want this VM, and so using the VIC UI, I removed the virtual machine. However, I discovered that this did not release the 20GB of space on Disk 3, and I cannot work out how to safely reclaim this space.

From what I have read, it looks as though I should have selected Delete Virtual Machine, rather than just Remove. But now the VM is not displayed in the VIC UI, I do not have the option of deleting it!

I tried logging into the ESXi server, and at the command line, I can see that there is still a directory called ChromeVirtual in /vmfs/volumes/Disk 3.Is it OK to just manually delete this directory or is this likely to break something? Is there a right way to recover space in a datastore after removing a VM?

Thanks you for any help. Martin

I've never had to worry too much about the time on our ESX box being exactly right since all the VM's are join to active directory and they get their time from the domain time server.

However we're putting a server in a DMZ and now I'd like to make sure the time on the ESX box is correct.

If I use the client, logon to the ESX server and change the time will it affect the availability of the VM's? We generally don't have any downtime so this is critical.

I see a lot of posts about time but couldn't find one specifically for what I was asking.

Thanks!

Is anyone installing ESXi on a flash drive instead of local storage? If so what are the pros and cons? Would you use flash for all environments or only smaller ones? How reliable is flash compared to local storage (w// RAID)? Thanks for any feedback.

OK, I'm giving up on the idea of trying to make my 1.5TB RAID show up as either a passthru device, or an RDM, as nothing I've found/tried seems to work. So, I'm thinking of using the RAID as a DataStore and moving the current contents of my RAID to Virtual disks, stored in that DataStore. So, what's the consenus of the best way to set this up.

It's configured as a RAID 5, and currently, the whole 1.5TB is defined as a single Physical Volume, and I've carved out, so far, 6 Logical Volumes, with 1 or 2 more planned in the near future. So, do I either:

Define the complete RAID as a single disk, and contine to use LVM.

Or

Define each Logical Volume as an individual Virtual disk. I know I can still "expand" these, if needed, using the supplied tools.

Or, yet again, do I go down the route of installing a NAS Appliance, in ESXi, and use that to control the data. If so, then the same 2 questions asked above are still relevent, but in a different context.

Any input and/or suggestions would be gratefully received.

Cheers,

Eddie

Is it true that under ESXi one can not make use of an external USB disk in a Virtual Machine ?

If so, what are the possibilities of the ESXi Datastore ?
One can put floppy images, CD/DVD .iso images and boot from it, but can it also be used for
regular files ?
If you have a unix/linux Virtual Machine, can you upload (via the VIclient) e.g. a unix tar file into the Datastore and then from your unix/linux Virtual Machine, copy it into your unix/linux file system, or even directly access it from unix/linux VM ?

Hello VMTN community,

I got two SuperMicro servers, each with an Adaptec 29320ALP-R[1] U320 parallel SCSI controller connected to the same external RAID system.
The RAID system is an EUROstor ES-6600[2] with two U320 channels.
I'm running ESXi 3.5 on both systems, seperated to each other.

The EUROstor RAID system offers the possibility to propagate a RAID volume to both channels - for clustering as they say.
I wonder if the ESXi can handle such a shared volume or if there will be problems when both are accessing the volume. I thought about having some virtual machines stored on that volume but only registered/mounted in one inventory of the two ESXi at a time to reduce possible conflicts. So that I can easily run the virtual machine on the other host, maybe when one physical server fails.

To illustrate it a bit:
RAID system
   System-Volume-1
      Host1 only (SCSI Channel 0; ID 0; LUN 0)
   System-Volume-2
      Host 2 only (SCSI Channel 1; ID 0; LUN 0)
   VM-Volume-1
      Host1 only (SCSI Channel 0; ID 1; LUN 0)
   VM-Volume-2
      Host2 only (SCSI Channel 1; ID 1; LUN 0)
   Shared-Volume
      Host1 & Host2 (SCSI Channel 1&2; ID 2; LUN 0)

I found alot about shared SCSI disks for virtual machines, but not for ESX(i) itself. Found something about "cluster aware" OS, but most of them talked about SAN.

Thanks for any help or tipps, links whatever that might help me on that topic in advance!

Greetings from Germany

Björn

[1] http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/Controllers/Hardware/scsi/entry/ASC-29320ALP-R/
[2] http://eurostor.de/german/ES6600U.D.php

Hi,

Our environment consists of 12 ESX hosts with 200 Windows XP VM's running across the platform. Each VM has one vCPU and 768MB RAM with no reservations and no limits set.

Our users are reporting very slow performance when logging on in the mornings. It can take up to 45 minutes between entering their user credentials and their first porgram opening, usually IE or Outlook.

All the performance graphs show that our hosts are massively under-utilised when it comes to CPU & Memory. Looking at the throughput to the SAN their is very little data going across the link and the same with the network. It would appear that there is some kind of bottle-neck occuring somewhere within the infrastructure but we just can't figure it out.

We did realise last week that a large amount of our VM's had a 512MB limit on Memory although the VM was actually being granted 768MB. This was causing the VMKernal to limit memory at 512MB, which in turn was causing the VM to use it's VMSwap file. Obviously this wasn't a good situation to be in and we didn't actually realise that the limit was in place. This has since been removed for all affected VM's.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated as we have been scratching our heads over this for some time now.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

I have installed ESXi 3.5 at IBM 345. In management client I see ServeRaid and everything looks good. Problem is that I need to receive email when something will happen with disk array. How to do it please?

I have one ESXi server that's working fine. A second is complaining about an expired license. I've been looking all oveer the VMware site to try to find out how to get a license. Seems like they've changed everything and made their site 100X more difficult to navigate.