This post just contains notes and observations of mine about VMware ESXi (v6.5, v6.7). These are completely assorted notes of things that I consider important and didnt know until now.
- Although I knew ESXi is not based on Linux I didnt know it can actually execute Linux binaries (as long these are statically linked) as ESXi supports ELF. I found out this by looking for Supermicro’s equivalent of hponcfg (HPs tool for managing ILO from the host OS) and there was no ESXi version. Very disappointing until I found that the Linux version works on ESXi.
- After migrating a VM from one ESXi host to another by using vSphere the migrated VM will not be started automatically even if on the originating host was configured to autostart and on the new host is marked as VM that should be autostarted.
- After reboot any files copied to an ESXi host will be lost unless they are copied to a datastore. This is because the copied files are in fact copied to a ramdisk the ESXi uses during operation.
- ESXi 6.7 dropped the support of certain CPUs. Meaning my HP ML350 G6 couldnt get 6.7. I opted to install ESXi 6.5. The ISO is no longer available from VMware but the HPE customized versions are. The people are also working on workarounds:
- by means of nested virtualization
- by actually removing the CPU check
- And more about unsupported CPUs on ESXi 7.0
- ESXi will not recreate the partition table when a new datastore is created if the current one does not exist or it is broken. This can easily be fixed with a live distro & GParted.
- If on a VMKernel NIC the vMotion service is enabled and then this host is added to vCenter with vSphere Essentials Kit license it will require vMotion license (. Easily fixed when the vMotion service is removed from the NIC.
- That vSphere has a dedicated UI for managing the Appliance at port 5480. From there the Networking, Firewall and other settings can be managed.
Veselin Kenashkov
Developer at Azonmedia
Loves PHP, frameworks and old computers. Currently interested in Swoole and Vuejs.
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