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By VM Guy, July 3, 2010 4:17 am

There are many ways how to upgrade ESXi servers, but below, I will compile a list of update steps I am performing.

We only use ESXi Vsphere 4 version with Standard and Advanced type licenses. All ESXi servers are connection to Virtual Center and managed from there.

1.) Download ESXi installable ISO from Vmware.com web site and burn it in CD
2.) Move all virtual servers to other ESXi hosts using vMotion or shutdown servers and use standard migration
3.) Enter ESXi host in “Maintenance mode”
4.) Disconnect FC storage uplinks
5.) Insert CD in CD tray – boot the server and follow the quick installation steps (If you have remote server management console with virtual media support, like ILO feel free to do installation remotely, however I still suggest removing FC storage uplinks)
6.) After the installation connect FC storage uplinks
7.) Boot up the server
8.) Exit “Maintenance mode”

Now, you are fully set and the ESXi hypervisor updated (well actually fully reinstalled to the latest Update/release).

Please keep in mind to update Vmware Tools on all the virtual servers you are hosting on this newly installed box!

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By VM Guy, May 7, 2010 1:22 pm

For quite some time Intel and AMD has released 6 core processors and their cost has gone down. You should evaluate your server infrastructure carefully if you need to buy these new 6 core or more powered servers.

From my own experience, CPU resources are not the bottleneck for most of the applications we are running on Vmware vSphere – it’s performance is great and CPUs are fast nowadays. We are usually running out of the RAM with our vSphere 4 ESXi servers and thus, recommend a minimum of 128GB RAM for Vmware Enterprise license powered servers and at least 64GB for Vmware Standard Edition license powered servers. The more RAM you can get for the servers (please see RAM limitations per server below) the more you will save in Vmware license cost and yearly support plans.

Please keep in mind that Vmware vSphere 4 Standard and Vmware Vsphere 4 Enterprise edition CPU license supports a maximum of 6 cores per CPU. Vmware vSphere 4 Advanced and Vmware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus does support CPUs with a maximum of 12 cores per CPU. There are 256GB of RAM limitation for Vmware vSphere 4 Standard; Advanced and Enterprise licenses and no RAM limit for Vmware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus license.

For reference, I am providing a few 6 core CPU rackmount server models available on the market right now as of May 7th, 2010:

HP: DL580 G5 (6 cores), DL165 G6 (6 cores), DL165 G7 (8 or 12 cores), DL180 G6 (6 cores), DL360 G6 (6 cores), DL360 G6 (6 cores), DL385 G6 (6 cores), DL385 G7 (8 or 12 cores), DL580 G5 (6 cores), DL580 G6 (6 cores), DL785 G6 (6 cores) AMD powered.

IBM: x3650 M3 (6 cores) Intel powered, x3755 (6 cores) AMD powered.

Dell: PowerEdge R805 (6 cores) AMD powered, PowerEdge 2970 (6 cores) AMD powered, PowerEdge R900 (6 cores) Intel powered, PoweredEdge R905 (6 cores) AMD powered, PowerEdge R910 (8 core) Intel powered, PowerEdge R810 (8 cores) Intel powered.

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By VM Guy, February 25, 2010 4:56 pm

We just got a nice “feature” when we migrated two virtual server all disks to a different LUN that use a shared disk for Oracle RAC. Guess what? The shared disk was somehow lost and each of the virtual servers now have a fully dedicated disk in size of the shared RAC disk. The shared RAC disk configuration was lost as well.

I guess we need to delete both these disks from the virtual machines and create a new configuration once again.

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By VM Guy, January 12, 2010 4:16 pm

Just a friendly reminder folks! Do not use Host Update Utility (that easily installs with Vmware client) to update and patch ESXi servers managed by Virtual Center. It may break the config and you may experience problems in the future.

Remember that Vmware supported methods of updating ESXi servers are using vihostudate utility or burning the CD and installing from it.

Non-supported mode (and not recommended thought!) is to use “unsupported” mode and using esxupdate utility. Many folks report great success, but remember I haven’t recommended this method to you

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By VM Guy, December 19, 2009 12:39 pm

If you have Virtual Center U1 installed you may experience ESXi servers disconnecting without a reason. After the host has been disconnected you cannot Connect/Add it back. The most common error when you try to add/connect ESXi host back to Virtual Center is:

Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Unknown installer error

From my very own experience this is a problem with / partition allocated too small. The VirtualCenter tries to upload specific .tgz files (for aam) and there is no free space available to extract the tgz file. I will post a quick fix shortly. Vmware has also posted information that they will be releasing a patch very shortly.

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By VM Guy, November 20, 2009 9:07 am

On November 19, 2009 Vmware has released a new and updated list of new guest OS support and it’s been great news! Now vSphere 4.0 U1 fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, Standard, Datacenter, and Web Server Editions.

The following new guest OS support has been added with vSphere 4.0 U1 (Update 1):

Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional, Ultimate and Home Premium Editions
Ubuntu 9.10 Server and Desktop
Debian 5.0.1, 5.0.2, and 5.0.3
FreeBSD 7.2

Good job Vmware!

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By VM Guy, November 17, 2009 8:08 am

Vsphere is a perfect choice for consolidating servers and to better utilize the hardware. We currently use HP DL585 G5 AMD powered workhorses powered by Vsphere 4.0 ESXi and Virtual Center reports hardware alert (under the tab Hardware Status):

1 Warning: System Board 8 ProcHot out of 111 sensors.

In vSphere 3.5 we easily solved the problem by installing HP ESXi CIM providers for Vmware 3.5. I went to the HP site and found HP ESXi providers for vSphere 4 (file name: hp-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1.zip). I downloaded and used vihostupdate.pl to update the server. Remember that you need to put it in Maintenance mode and then a reboot will be required – make sure you do migrate all virtual servers to a different vmware host.

I installed Vmware vSphere CLI on the Windows workstation – it does come with ActivePerl installation that’s automatically installed as well.

I scanned the remote Vmware vSphere server to make sure the bundle has not been installed before.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl –server vsphere1.ourcompany.com –scan –bundle ./hp-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1.zip

I got the following reply:

The bulletins which apply to but are not yet installed on this ESX host are listed.

———Bulletin ID———   —————-Summary—————–
hpq-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1        HP ESXi Bundle 1.1

I did install (“patch” the Vmware host) downloaded HP ESXi Bundle:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl –server vsphere1.ourcompany.com –install –bundle ../bundles/hp-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1.zip –bulletin hpq-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1

After entering username and password it took a while, perhaps one or two minutes. The update was successful:

The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

I did rescan the box once again with vihostupdate.pl utility:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vihostupdate.pl –server vsphere1.ourcompany.com –scan –bundle ../bundles/hp-esxi4.0uX-bundle-1.1.zip

I got the following response:

The bulletins which apply to but are not yet installed on this ESX host are listed.

———Bulletin ID———   —————-Summary—————–

Update was fully successful! Now let’s reboot the box and see if hardware sensors are fixed…. Ooops, guess what? The Hardware Status tab still shows the same error – the only thing I noticed is that sensors amount changed from 111 to 125. Unfortunately, the warning still persists.

Server type: HP DL585 G5, 4 CPU QUAD core monster powered by AMD 8347 HE. 4x vSphere 4.0 Enterprise licenses. BIOS A07 8.60.

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By VM Guy, November 5, 2009 4:17 pm

Not the first time  I see the following error:  An error occurred during operation: CheckAndAllocateCache when performing fresh Vsphere host update using Host Update Utility. You should ignore the error and rescan the host and patch the host again. Sometimes it works with the second try, sometimes, you have to reboot the box and it will work.

A complete log is attached below:

Patching 10.10.0.2

The patch operation has failed with this error: An error occurred during operation: CheckAndAllocateCache

Patching 10.10.0.2

Start uploading files to host

Metadata and binaries have been successfully uploaded

Scanning the host completed

Start installing patches

Installing patches on 10.10.0.2 : ESXi400-200909401-BG Start rebooting host 10.10.0.2

Start rebooting host Host reboot started successfully, Please make sure the host is successfully booted

Reboot host succeeded 10.10.0.2

Remember not to update Virtual Center managed ESXi servers using Host Update Utility. Host Update Utility can be used to patch/update stand alone ESXi servers.

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By VM Guy, November 5, 2009 12:08 pm

Quite a few folks are running Vmware Vsphere behind the corporate firewalls. We do the same and experienced some problems with Host update utility.

It was quite hard to figure out how to specify the proxy settings so that our Host Update utility can easily check Vmware update servers (for folks who want to open direct access the update server name is hostupdate.vmware.com ) for latest patches.  So we finally figured it out and here are the necessary steps:

Open the VIUpdate folder (in our case: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VIUpdate 4.0 ) and find file named settings.conf

Open it in text editor and do the following config:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key=”RemoteDepot” value=”https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/index.xml” />
<add key=”AskBeforeDownload” value=”True” />
<add key=”ProxyServer” value=”http://10.10.10.10:8080/“/>
<add key=”LocalDepot” value=”C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update” />
<add key=”UserSettingsDirectory” value=”C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update” />
</appSettings>
</configuration>

By default ProxyServer key will be left blank. In my case I set-up a proxy host 10.10.10.10 with port 8080.

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By VM Guy, November 1, 2009 2:48 am

It’s been very recommended to upgrade BIOS 4 to BIOS  7 if you are migrating your Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 servers to Vsphere 4. You will experience much better performance using Vsphere 4 and don’t forget to upgrade BIOS. You can do it by shutting down virtual machine and right-click the mouse on the machine name in the inventory. You will notice a new menu appearing “Upgrade virtual hardware”. You can click it and upgrade BIOS in a few seconds, BUT REMEMBER TO TAKE A SNAPSHOT before doing it or there is no way to return the virtual BIOS to version 4.

We have been migrating over 40 virtual servers to Vsphere 4, but I still do take a snapshot before upgrading the virtual server BIOS and then when I double check everything is working fine I do delete the old and non-wanted snapshot.