Just a random quick-tip for labs: Disabling cpu-microcode for better CPU power efficiency – with trade-off being security. By default, ESXi will load the cpu-microcode module shipped with the installation, if it is newer and applicable than what BIOS provides. It is typically updated with regular ESXi updates. This can be disabled.
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TPS (Transparent Page Sharing) is a proprietary functionality in VMware ESX(i) which essentially does deduplication of memory pages used for virtual machines. To put it in other words: Identical memory content across multiple machines only consume memory one time. When you have multiple virtual machines…
This is just a quick note about something I’ve came across a few weeks ago. Here I was facing the following error when enabling enabling Fault Tolerance on one or more virtual machine: As you might see on the screenshot, there are unfortunately no additional pieces of information nor a task with more…
As part of a customer request we were in need to change the swap location to a different datastore, as the current datastore was about to be removed in the near future. This post is meant as a quick note in case someone also despairs changing the datastore for the swap location in VMware vCenter 7.0…
Recently vCenter 7.0 Update 2 was released to the public, with new features and improvements. For me one highlight was the introduction of the "vSphere Native Key Provider" (NKP): a native KMS (Key Management Server), or now also called "Key Provider". This allows using features like VM-Encryption, vSAN…
That post is more a quick note, in case someone ever needs this. There might be few very specific and rare situations where you might need the unique vCenter-Instance-UUID. In this case, you can get the instanceUuid in following configuration file /etc/vmware-vpx/instance.cfg:
Once there was a DRS-enabled cluster with a mystery: When trying to start a virtual machine, the very generic error Insufficient resources appeared. However further checking all hosts in the cluster reveals that there’re enough resources left to start this specific virtual machine. But still, the VM…
Recently I’ve seen more cases where the Lifecycle Manager in vCenter 7 fails syncing updates and pulling depot metadata. In this case you see an error like: An error occurred while downloading depot metadata from https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/addon-main/vmw-depot-index.xml.. Just…
When attaching any kind of USB devices, the service usbarbitrator claims those devices to allow passing through USB devices into virtual machines. This is (one of) the reason you won’t see USB sticks as "Storage Devices" on your ESXi, therefore not allowing you to create a datastore on it. But at this point you have to make a decision, as you can’t have both: Using a USB device as a storage OR having the ability to passthrough USB devices to VMs Just to be very clear: This is NOT officially supported by VMware. You should not use datastores on USB devices in production. If you decide to go ahead…
There was once… a customer who was concernced about the network-wise failover on the ESXi-level, which was not working as he expected it to. To shed some light on the complete scenario… The configuration is pretty simple: The switch is vSwitch0 As Failover order there are two vmnic adapters configured as active. (Let’s say vmnic0 and vmnic1) Load balancing is Route based on IP hash (Static LAG/etherchannel/trunk set on physical switch) Network failure detection is Link status only Notify switches is Yes. Taking above into consideration: When disabling one of the two active vmnic adapters on ESXi using esxcli network nic down -n vmnicX you would expect a failover to occur – don’t you? The truth is: Not necessarily. Let’s go into detail…