Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

esxi

Online compatibility guide

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VMware’s John Troyer revealed on Twitter a couple of hours ago a “search-able hardware compatibility guide” for VMware ESX and VMware View:

This online Hardware Compatibility Guide web application was released on December 10, 2008. To learn more about benefits and usage of this tool, please see “Help on Searching”.

This online Hardware Compatibility Guide replaces the former Hardware Compatibility Guides for systems, I/O devices, and SAN arrays for ESX 3.0 and greater versions, as well as VMware View Client. For compatibility guides of other VMware products or earlier ESX releases and VMware View Client, please use the “Other Documents” tab.

Check it out.

I would love to see some additions, for instance “supported path policy” for Storage. (MRU/Fixed) (The MRU/Fixed is actually there but you have to click on the model and then details before you see it.) But also supported versions of Software Agents for the Service Console would be a real welcome! It’s a big step forward again, and according to John they are still working on it and it will evolve over the next months.

Free ESXi and the RCLI

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One of the most discussed topics when ESXi was released for free was the fact the the Remote Command Line Interface(RCLI) was read only. Today Rich from VM/ETC.com dropped the news that as of ESXi 3.5 U3 the RCLI is read/write. Why is this important? For ESXi there’s no Service Console. The RCLI contains most Service Console commands which are very useful during maintenance, troubleshooting or automating certain tasks. I haven’t seen an official announcement yet unfortunately. But as soon as it’s up there I will post it here.

Snapshots, the revision

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I was reading Jason Boche’s blog on snapshots yesterday and noticed a misunderstanding. I tweeted Jason about this and his blog was updated in a sec. But I thought it might be handy to actually outline the basics again especially because during the VMTN Experts Podcast there was a huge discussion on snapshots. Unfortunately I could not join the call via audio so I decided to respond here. [Read more…] about Snapshots, the revision

Leave powered on…

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On Friday I got a question about the “Leave powered on” setting for HA. This setting is used for the Isolation Response. In other words, what does HA needs to do when a network isolation is detected. The question was pretty straight forward:”What happens when a host is isolated from the network or a host dies completely?”.

This question was asked because the default setting changed in ESX 3.5 / VirtualCenter 2.5 from “Power off vm” to “Leave powered on”. The old value was simple, what ever happens the VM will be powered off and restarted on a different host. [Read more…] about Leave powered on…

Inject a driver into ESXi

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I had my doubts about posting this one cause it definitely breaks your support. But a quick search on google revealed that it has been posted before so if you’re gonna do it why not use “my” procedure. Again I would like to stress that this should only be done for test purposes. Mark Erica was so kind to email me this procedure that they used to replace a faulty driver. The driver would be in the next version of ESXi or probably a patch but due to the severe problems they could not wait.

This is how they injected a driver into an installable and running ESXi server:

  • Log-on to the ESXi host with SSH
  • Go to directory where tars are saved and you should find binmod.tgz there:
    cd /bootbank
    ls -l
  • Copy the current original binmod.tgz to temporarily disk location, in this example datastore/test/binmod:
    cp binmod.tgz /vmfs/volumes/datastore/test/binmod/binmod.tgz
  • Untar/zip the file:
    tar -xzvf binmod.tgz
  • Copy the new driver to the extracted binmod.tgz directory:
    cp /vmfs/volumes/datastore/test/unm_nic.o /vmfs/volumes/datastore/test/binmod/mod/unm_nic.o
  • Change rights of new file:
    chmod 755 unm_nic.o
  • Make sure you changed the right of the file:
    cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/test/binmod
    ls -l
  • tar/gzip the binmod again:
    tar -cvzf binmod.tgz usr bin etc lib mod sbin
    Notice that all directories have to be packed from root level: usr bin etc lib mod sbin
  • Go to the bootbank to replace the old binmod.tgz with the new one:
    cd /bootbank
    rm binmod.tgz
    cp /vmfs/volumes/datastore/test/binmod/binmod.tgz /bootbank/binmod.tgz
  • Make sure you replaced the binmod.tgz correctly, check timestamps:
    ls -l
  • Reboot server
  • Check if the correct driver has been installed after the reboot:
    cd /mod
    ls -l
    The result should be new driver file

So you see it’s fairly easy to inject drivers, keep in mind that this is at your own risk. I just noticed VM-Help also has a procedure on his website.

I really love the fact that more and more people are starting to contribute to Yellow-Bricks by sending me scoops, tips, tricks or even commenting. Thanks guys, and if you want to contribute in anyway just drop me an email on duncan [@] yellow-bricks.com