VMware ESXi is the Type 1 “Bare Metal” Hypervisor offered for free as “The VMware Hypervisor” or as part of the vSphere platform under a wide variety of licensing arrangements.
I thought I would revisit scripted ESXi installation for my lab. It’s been since 5.0 or prior since I actually went into depth on this and there are some significant changes for 6.5. The example script draws heavily from other sources and it is now working.
The Open Virtual machine Format (OVF) originally came about in 2007 as the result of a proposal by vendors (VMware, HP, Dell and others) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF), the goal being to create an open standard for interchangeability (portability) of Virtual Machines between hypervisors. VMware was an early and enthusiastic adopter of
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In many situations it is desirable to patch your ESXi host(s) prior to being able to install or use VMware vSphere® Update Manager™. UPDATED 4/18/2016: HP has a new URL for HP Customized VMware ISO’s and VIB’s For example: Prior to installing vCenter in a new cluster Standalone ESXi installations without a vCenter Server Hardware
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In the following steps, I am going to show you how to set all of the VMFS Volumes (LUNs) on an ESXi Host to use the PSP known as Round Robin, using only the ESXi Shell and/or SSH. This is clearly the simplest and most direct method of changing the PSP for existing volumes, and
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Timekeeping on ESXi Hosts is a particularly important, yet often overlooked or misunderstood topic among vSphere Administrators. I recall a recent situation where I created an anti-affinity DRS rule (separate virtual machines) for a customer’s domain controllers. Although ESXi time was correctly configured, the firewall had been recently changed and no longer allowed NTP. As
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Immediately after installing an ESXi Server, you may or may not have any storage at all. Most ESXi servers today are diskless, with the ESXi installation living on some sort of flash-based storage. In this case a fresh installation of ESXi will present with no persistent storage whatsoever, as you can see in the example
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One of the most common oversights in vSphere deployments is a failure to use the Paravirtual drivers that VMware has provided us for networking and storage. On a physical platform, one chooses supported device(s) for networking and storage, and then installs the correct driver(s) to support those devices. For example; on a physical system, you
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We are going to install ESXi 6 on a physical server using HP’s IPMI interface known as iLO to perform the install. iLO is considered best-in-class for IPMI consoles, but still can take some getting used to. IPMI out-of-band interfaces collectively have the advantage of allowing users to: Power servers on and off Connect to ISO
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