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Hey all, Last weekend my VMWare host crashed out big time - whole network was out on Monday morning - DC's, print servers, everything. Could have been something wrong with the power in the room. Nothing in the UPS logs though! In addition to that, Smoothwall was hung, CCTV and a couple of switches hung. RAID needed rebuilding on a backup NAS. I have no idea what happened and logs don't point me in any specific direction! Nothing consistent except I suspect power problems. A full reboot sorted it, and a reboot/restore of all the guest machines. What I'm getting at is where my VMWare host is concerned is it possible to configure a 2nd host to 'hot' migrate. e.g. if Host 1 goes down, guests are in a 'hot' up to date state to take over ? I know this won't help some of the issues above but I'm planning on implementing a 2nd host at Easter and would like to do this rather than load balance. Is it possible ? We're running Esxi 5.5 Essentials plus (will be upgrading to v6 at Easter) and also using Veeam. Will vMotion do this for me ? Cheers in advance

Hi I am just experimenting with some virtualisation. i have setup a VMWare ESXi 6 host and added a couple of VMs. I have installed vSphere on my Windows 7 station and can connect to the ESXi 6 host with no trouble and administer it. I have downloaded and installed Veeam 8 Free. It is installed on my Windows 7 station and the installation went smoothly and it opens and everything appears to be OK. So, when I try to add a server, it asks me for the DNS name or IP address of the VMWare server. I am assuming this is the IP address of the ESXi host which I am entering. Next, it asks me for the server administrators credentials. Are these the credentials of the ESXi host i.e. the root account or the credentails of the machine where vSphere is installed. I would really appreciate any advice on this. Thanks.

Hi All, I'm having problem in backing up Windows Server 2003/2008 x64 Edition, Even after VMWare tools re-install and restart the VM I've make sure the following services was started and set as automatic running before reinstalling VMWare tools with COMPLETE options: COM+ System Application Distributed Transaction Coordinator after restart then I've turn the following services on and set as automatic running as well: VMware Snapshot Provider Volume Shadow Copy then i got the same error message: Cannot create a quiesced snapshot because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine. and here it is in the Windows VM event viewer log: Event Type: Error Event Source: VSS Event Category: None Event ID: 12302 Date: 21/09/2009 Time: 1:23:31 PM User: N/A Computer: RSA01 Description: Volume Shadow Copy Service error: An internal inconsistency was detected in trying to contact shadow copy service writers. Please check to see that the Event Service and Volume Shadow Copy Service are operating properly. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Data: 0000: 2d 20 43 6f 64 65 3a 20 - Code: 0008: 42 55 45 43 58 4d 4c 43 BUECXMLC 0010: 30 30 30 30 37 32 39 32 00007292 0018: 2d 20 43 61 6c 6c 3a 20 - Call: 0020: 42 55 45 43 58 4d 4c 43 BUECXMLC 0028: 30 30 30 30 37 32 31 39 00007219 0030: 2d 20 50 49 44 3a 20 20 - PID: 0038: 30 30 30 30 31 35 38 34 00001584 0040: 2d 20 54 49 44 3a 20 20 - TID: 0048: 30 30 30 30 32 34 31 36 00002416 0050: 2d 20 43 4d 44 3a 20 20 - CMD: 0058: 43 3a 5c 57 49 4e 44 4f C:\WINDO 0060: 57 53 5c 73 79 73 74 65 WS\syste 0068: 6d 33 32 5c 64 6c 6c 68 m32\dllh 0070: 6f 73 74 2e 65 78 65 20 ost.exe 0078: 2f 50 72 6f 63 65 73 73 /Process 0080: 69 64 3a 7b 37 30 37 34 id:{7074 0088: 31 41 41 33 2d 35 42 38 1AA3-5B8 0090: 39 2d 34 43 44 43 2d 38 9-4CDC-8 0098: 38 32 31 2d 34 35 45 45 821-45EE 00a0: 41 42 31 37 37 41 35 30 AB177A50 00a8: 7d 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 } 00b0: 2d 20 55 73 65 72 3a 20 - User: 00b8: 4e 54 20 41 55 54 48 4f NT AUTHO 00c0: 52 49 54 59 5c 53 59 53 RITY\SYS 00c8: 54 45 4d 20 20 20 20 20 TEM 00d0: 2d 20 53 69 64 3a 20 20 - Sid: 00d8: 53 2d 31 2d 35 2d 31 38 S-1-5-18 any kind of help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, AWT

I have a script that takes a snapshot backup of VMs sitting on an ESXi host on a weekly basis to a backup PC. Since last week I have now come across a spare server that's been donated on a temporary basis and decided I'd set it up as another host just for testing purposes. I copied the backed up VMs over to the new host to see if they boot up; imported it the .VMX's into the inventory and, lo and behold, they don't. I get an error message popping up saying "File not found." I have double checked everything to make sure all files were copied over. I even opened up some of the files in notepad to see if their names had got muddled up, or it was referencing something it shouldn't, and I couldn't see anything obvious. I copied the VMs from a HP ML 350 G5 to a ML 370 G5. Where have I gone wrong?

Hi All, I'm looking for your suggestion and advise in utilizing the empty unused Local SATA-II datastore for my VM. I've got the following ESXi 4.0 build 164009 and a valid license of vSphere Essentials license, therefore I could use VCB but the problem is that using NBD from the SAN into the backup server is way too slow :-| it took 55 hrs to fullbackup the whole 1 TB VMFS partition (D2D over 2 network subnet). and now I'm thinking that rather than using backup solution Is it possible to clone the VM on the fly to more than 2 datastore like clustering service fault tolerance? (in this case to local datastore and the SAN_VMFS) in case there is a failure in the SAN, the VM can run off the Local Datastore, well it doesn't have to be realtime though. or perhaps there is a VCB backup that can copy the VM from he SAN VMFS into the local datastore vmfs ? that is also possible. Note: The reason why I chose this configuration is that direct connection from the SAN into the ESXi servers without anything in the middle, this can eliminate the single point of failure caused by the Switch and also provide redundancy. each color in the iSCSI network is different IP subnet by itself. from the ESXi into the production network i put two cable connected to two different ports and then add those pNIC into same vSwitch for failover Any kind of comments will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hi, VMWare Esxi 5.1 & vSphere client. I have a VM that I use to create disk images for WDS. Each snapshot is a different machine configuration (office, pupil PC's, teacher PC's etc) The base disk size is 32Gb which isn't big enough for me to install all the programs I need to create my latest image. I can't increase the disk size because there are snapshots. I cant consolidate the snapshots because I will lose my different configurations. Can I migrate the .vmdx and snapshots to a new VM with a bigger disk size? If so, how ??

VMwareTV has just released a load of new demonstration videos on vSphere 5 features: vSphere Web Client Demo vSphere Storage DRS Demo vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Demo vSphere Storage Appliance Resilience Demo vSphere Auto Deploy Demo vSphere Storage Appliance Installation and Configuration Really good way of learning how things work ahead of full release They are available at my blog here Or direct from VMware TV here

Not sure how long its been out but they have sorted PowerChute to work with Hyper-V, ESX etc. for free rather than charging a bunch extra for it. Good stuff APC, it took a while but you did fix it. Software / Firmware=

Hi All, I'm looking and wondering if there is any backup solution which capable of doing backup from my iSCSI SAN into the ESXi local datastore that can be automated with the support of file level restore ? the VM is having a RDM LUN so i need to be able to restore a single file in case the VM failed or the RDM LUN got corrupted. Any idea or suggestion in how to do it please ? Thanks.

I have installed ESXi on a Dell server. The server has 420GB of drive space in a RAID5 array with 6 drives (72GB each). I understand that RAID 5 discounts one drive for spare so that leaves 5 drives (approx) worth of space available to the OS (about 350GB). Now, for the problem. I have two virtual machines set up on there, each of which has a 60GB VHD. That adds up to 120GB, so in theory, I should still have 230GB, minus the overhead of ESXi itself but according to the manager, I only have 14GB of space free. How can I get to the rest of this drive? I need to set up a third virtual server on there and had intended to use the remaining space for it. 14GB isn't enough and I need the rest of the drive. What can I do? Thanks Doug

Hi All, I'm confused about the VMDK manual clone concept, I've got 2 x ESXi Servers namely ESXi1 and ESXi2 and also one SAN VMFS datastore which is shared LUN for both ESXi1-2 servers. I have a Windows Server 2003 x64 Std VM with the name Win2003x64_vmws00 as the template, what I usually do is from Veeam FastSCP 1. Copy the whole directory of Win2003x64_vmws00 (from Local SATA Template Directory) into SAN-VMFS datastore 2. Rename the directory into Win2003x64_vmws01 2. Go Inside Win2003x64_vmws01 directory and rename Win2003x64_vmws00*.vmdk into Win2003x64_vmws01*.vmdk 3. Delete any other file except the *.vmdk files 4. Create new VM using Custom Wizard and point the Hard Disk to the renamed file (Win2003x64_vmws01.vmdk) 5. Start the VM and select "I copied" in the dialog box. that is the way I'm doing it now, the problem now is that there are soo many directory around in the SAN-VMFS like: Win2003x64_vmws01_1 --> contains smaller Win2003x64_vmws01_1.log, Win2003x64_vmws01_1.nvram, .vmsd, .vmx and .vmxf files Win2003x64_vmws01_2 --> same as the above directory but different filename the cloned VM is working fine all of them even though the directory naming seems to be confusing for me to manually backup each VM, My understanding is that each VM is contained within one single directory of itself but then when i manually copy the directory and starting it up after renaming process the confusion begin, the same thing goes when I start the VM from the Secondary ESXi Server (for the ESXi failover test), please shed some light on this matter ?

Hi guys, I've been using this forum for a while, and its great! This is the first time I've got round to posting something, but I hope to keep it up now. Basically, we were looking at virtual servers, and decided to implement a basic system over the summer. We are using the now-free VMware ESXi server, hosting a few Windows servers and a Linux LAMP server (the one on virtual appliances is v-easy to setup). I'm loving the VMware software, its all so easy, but the only thing I can't figure out how to do is backup the vmx's and vmdk's. We use Symantec Backup exec 12, and don't want to have to install an agent on each virtual machine (£200+ per machine, not fun!). Does anyone have any experience with this and can you advise please? Thanks in advance, David

So I'm trying to consolidate my home network running all on one ESXi host. Two onboard nvidia nforce gb nic's show up just fine in the network management setup after an install but I can't get any other NIC's to show up, I need a total of 4. I've tried multiple vendors of 10/100 cards and gigabit cards and none show up in the management network setup except the two onboard. I've tried a fresh install as well as putting the cards in after a fresh install, nothing works. Now i've read the compatibility list from VMware, but then I've read other lists and posts on forums saying the cards actually do work people have had no issues with them. I've tried the following 10/100; 3com 905-tx, 905b-tx, 905c-tx. And D-Link (with realtek chipset) cards, trendnet teg-pcitx cards, and other. My question is do only 2 cards show up in the management network setup or should all 4 show up? Where can I check to see if all 4 cards are recognized if the above question is yes? Can we install vendor supplied drivers into esxi as I'm told esxi is a modded 2.4 kernel..? What the hell am I doing wrong? Thanks all

Is anyone out there mirroring there online moodle website with an intranet server? I am just embarking on the process and wondered if anyone had a similar experience. I have a lamp server running on Vmware ESXi and I'm ready to go. My school is part of a managed service so all I am waiting for is an ip address for my 'unmanaged server' to make it accessible to the lan. My plan is to do a nightly sync of the moodle data directory and database. We find our VLE nearly unworkable when trying to run over the net at busy time so hopefully this will provide a sort of offline version. It occurred to me that most vle courses don't change and the 5Mb/s downloads I am getting on the lan may make the pleasant a whole lot easier. Anyway let me know if anyone else is doing the same.

Hi All, I've got 2x Dell PowerEdge 2950-III directly attached with Dell MD3000i iSCSI-SAN and today I had a hard times in upgrading my production ESXi 3.5 u 4 into ESXi 4.0, First is that the upgrade is failed miserably after following this thread: VMware Communities: error on host upgrade: this host is not compatible with this upgrade. with the following Error message: ERROR: Unsupported boot disk The boot device layout on the host does not support upgrade. therefore I did a clean reinstall of ESXi 4 on top of ESXi 3.5 u 4 and lost every single settings on my ESXi host. I'm now stuck in mapping the iSCSI SAN partition after following the guide from: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/AdditionalDocs/cnfigrtnguide/storage_guide.pdf see the following attachment. I wonder how does people do their upgrade into ESXi 4.0 in production system that is running ESXi 3.5 u 4 filled with hundreds of VM ? The reason why I'm using 2x ESXi server connected into single SAN server is that I can just start the VM on the SAN from the other ESXi --> which is fine and tested, but then when i rebuild the failed server, I must delete the whole data inside the shared partition which contains my VMs. So in conclusion after one of the ESXi Server failed, the iSCSI mapping would eventually destroy every single data in the partition ? CMIIW any idea and suggestion would be gladly appreciated

While updataing one of our ESX hosts the updates failed and the host now doesn't boot. The only way to fix it is a fresh install from CD, I've heard that in the next version of vsphere ESX hosts will no longer be supported and this seems like a good opportunity to start migrating. Should I install ESX or ESXi? VCenter is currently at release 4.1.0 258902.