VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘commands’

If you are planning on re-purposing some of your existing server hardware to run the latest virtualization products or to take advantage of modern hardware optimizations for virtual hosts and machines, you need to be able to determine which of your servers already have Intel-VT or AMD-V features. Here are some utilities and commands you can use to check from both Windows and Linux operating systems.

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VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts. Read the rest of this entry »

A common issue after installing ESX servers that do not have all their NICs cabled is that you can not ping the host. For example, say you have an ESX host with 6 1GB network cards – 2 on board and 4 PCI. You would think that cabling the 2 on board cards would cover network connectivity. Unfortunately the order that ESX recognizes the NICs is not determined in a logical, expected order such as on board and then PCI cards. In fact, if you know how ESX determines how to order the network cards please comment and let us all know! In the meantime, here is how to use a few esxcfg- Console commands to make sure the cabled NICs are linked to the vSwitch that has the Service Console PortGroup (where the ip address is assigned).

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Changing the ip address of your ESX host, or specifically the ip address of the ESX Service Console, can be done on the console using the esxcfg commands. The esxcfg- utilities are the console commands for many ESX configuration options. To see all these commands at the console prompt simply enter “esxcfg-” and hit the tab button.

To change the IP address of the ESX 3.x host, you need to use the esxcfg-vswif command. To see the options and syntax of the esxcfg-vswif command you can enter:

#esxcfg-vswif -?

To change the ip address of the ESX host: Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled upon vmreference.com the other day in a VMware Forum post and was pleasantly surprised. The site hosts the author’s “ESX3 vmreference card” document.

The document is a single source for all the most important ESX administration processes and best practices. It’s a lot of real world knowledge transfer crammed into two 8.5 x 11 pages. What grabbed my attention from the forum post was the following description: Read the rest of this entry »