vsphere

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, […]

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

We’ve been having this weird problem for a while where if sitting idle for a day or two, a VM would disconnect from the network and otherwise be unavailable until after a few minutes if you try to vMotion it. But after you reboot it, it worked fine. Networking checked out. Storage checked out. What could be wrong?? Turned out the culprit was memory overcommitment on our ESX servers. Who would have thought! We had more memory allocated to VMs than there was physical memory, even though the green memory indicator said otherwise. A bit of background as to why