Brandon Yap – Page 12

ESXi NIC disconnection issues with the HP NC532i

We’re using HP BL495c G6 blades with ESXi 4.0 U1, and the onboard NICS are disconnecting randomly upon reboot. Sometimes it happens after a single reboot, other times it takes 4 to cause the issue. The server uses the HP NC532i embedded NIC which is a rebadged Broadcom 57711E. In ESXi, the NIC uses the bnx2x driver. Things tried that haven’t worked to date: Broadcom v1.48 and v1.52 drivers on the VMware website Upgrading to Update 2 Turning off auto negotiation and hard coding the speed and duplex of the switchports and NICS Replaced the system board. It’s not a […]

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How to install vib files in ESXi

At some stage while in contact with VMware support, they may give you drivers to try. These drivers will be in VIB (vSphere Installation Bundle) format and will look something like vmware-esx-drivers-net-bnx2x-400.1.52.12.v40.4-1.0.4.00000.x86_64.vib. I don’t know why this is not documented anywhere in the official docs, but here’s how to install these driver bundles into ESXi. scp the file to the ESXi server Run “esxupdate -b <filename>.vib –nosigcheck –nodeps update”. Run “esxupdate query –vib-view” to confirm that the driver bundle is installed. You may need to reboot for the driver to take effect. If you are fiddling with different driver revisions,

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High performance Cacti for large installations

Cacti works fine out of the box for dozens of servers, but when you start to hit the hundreds with tens of thousands of datasources you will start to run into bottlenecks, namely poll cycles exceeding 5 mins and graphs with gaps in them. Sound familair? Then read on. Strangely enough Cacti isn’t optimised for large infrastructures using the default install. You need to make a few tweaks in order to make it perform optimally with hundreds of hosts and thousands of datasources. There are three things you do. Install the Cacti Plugin Architecture, Install Boost, and tune the MySQL

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iPhone and iOS 4’s persistent wifi

Updated 19/05/2011 There’s not a lot of information surrounding the new persistent wifi feature in iOS 4 and how it affects iPhones. I did some experimentation and managed to find something which i’d like to share with those who are seeking the same information. First of all on iPod Touches, persistent wifi works as advertised and stays on wether or not the phone is plugged into the charger. This is so it can maintain a constant data connection for Push Notifications and mail checking. Now for iPhones. Prior to iOS 4.3, persistent wifi worked albeit conditionally and under the following

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Recovering from accidental VMFS Datastore deletion

When you forcefully remove a Datastore while ESXi servers are still connected to it, all sorts of weird and wonderful things can happen. We recently had a team member accidentally install ESXi onto a LUN, blowing away the Datastore that was on it. ESXi servers become unstable, the VM’s that were running from the Datastore go into a zombie state where they may respond to pings but are not fully there because they are still running from memory but the disks have been removed from under them. The vCenter server will exhibit high DB load as the ESXi servers try to

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