vsphere

You’ve turned on SSH, and even enabled the firewall profile for SSH. But for some reason you still can’t SSH into the ESXi server and get a “Connection Refused” message back when hitting port 22. You’ve also checked your corporate firewall and that’s it’s not blocking comms. Have a look in Tasks and Events to see if the server’s ramdisk for root is full. There’s a good chance that it is. This is a problem i’ve encountered with vSphere 5.1 recently and is preventing SSH from starting properly. The cause of the ramdisk filling up is ESXi not truncating /var/log/wtmp …

Unable to SSH into ESXi server Read More »

Say you deploy a new SAN, and you’re in the process of migrating all your VM’s from the old datastores to the new. When you go to add the new datastores, ESX sets the incorrect pathing policy so now you have to go change it on each and every datastore, on each and every ESX server. I’ve had to go through this and it’s a pain in the bum. Here’s a small PowerCLI script I wrote that will save you the hassle of doing it by hand. Connect-VIServer SERVER $esxservers = Get-Datacenter “DATACENTRE” | Get-VMHost foreach ($server in $esxservers) { …

PowerCLI script for changing pathing policy en masse Read More »

Lately i’ve run into a strange issue where an ESXi server gets into a state where VMs running on it are not able to be migrated to other ESXi servers. This is the error that comes up when you try to vMotion the problematic VMs. A general system error occured: Virtual machine must be running in order to be migrated. I’ve contacted VMware support and they tell me there’s no other way to fix this than to shutdown and powerup the VMs. Simply rebooting them does not work as the problem seems to be linked to their registration with ESXi …

Virtual machine must be running in order to be migrated Read More »

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 …

ESXi NIC disconnection issues with the HP NC532i Read More »