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Tag: esxcli

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Kevin Soltow
  • Kevin Soltow
  • October 8, 2019

VMFS Datastore on a USB drive

As an admin, I often have to deal with the necessity to transfer large OVF and ISO files or even move virtual machines (VMs) between ESXi hosts that have poor network performance or disposed in different locations with no network connection whatsoever. If a case like this occurs, a USB flash drive or USB external drive is a way to go. More specifically, you can use a drive in two different ways (by the way, both authors have my most sincere regards and appreciation for presenting these methods in a most coherent and simultaneously simple way). The first one is to copy files from a USB device to a host directly through SSH session without changing drive format as the following article suggests. However, such an approach has some issues, the most tedious one being maximum file size limitations, which certainly limits its use for larger files. You cannot work with the Graphical user interface (GUI) as well. Instead, you gotta use SSH and dive deep into the host data storage system, so you can figure I am a much bigger fan of a second way: creating a VMFS datastore on a USB drive. You can connect it to ESXi hosts and transfer files from one to another (or just store a temporary copy on an external storage device).
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Kevin Soltow
  • Kevin Soltow
  • April 22, 2019

Cool vSphere Command-Line Interface (ESXCLI) Commands that Helped Me a Lot

Today, I’d like to share some of cool ESXCLI commands for performing a good part of IT related routines. Sure, vSphere Client has a wonderful GUI allowing for carrying out most of daily tasks… but CLI is much more powerful tool once you master it! So, that’s actually why I share my “Swiss Army knife” commands here.
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Mike Preston
  • Mike Preston
  • October 26, 2017

vSphere Upgrade Options

When it comes time for your vSphere upgrade there are many different approaches to how you perform the upgrades on your ESXi hosts.   An administrator who looks after a small cluster may update one way, whereas an administrator who looks after an enterprise with 1000s of hosts may opt to go another.  Also, depending on how your environment is deployed you might want to choose one method over another.  Factors such as a whether or not your hosts are managed by a vCenter server, whether or not they are members of a cluster – these things all impact the methods in which you chose to update to the latest version of ESXi.  Certainly, some methods are much more simplistic than others to perform, some offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error – let’s take a look at each method of upgrading our hosts below and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each…
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Mike Preston
  • Mike Preston
  • October 4, 2017

Accessing esxcli through PowerCLI

Picture this – you are working away developing a PowerCLI script that is performing multiple actions – you have it just about complete when you come to a roadblock.  After frantically googling around you find out that this one task you are trying to perform simply cannot be done through PowerShell, yet you know it exists within the local ESXi esxcli command namespace!  This has happened multiple times to me and thankfully, there is a way to access ESXi’s esxcli command namespace without having to leave the comforts of the PowerShell Console. Chances are that if you have been working at all with ESXi you are familiar with the esxcli command – but for those that aren’t let’s take a quick look at what exactly it does.
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Oksana Zybinskaya
  • Oksana Zybinskaya
  • May 23, 2016

TBW from SSDs with S.M.A.R.T Values in ESXi

Solid-State-Drives are becoming widely implemented in ESXi hosts for caching (vFlash Read Cache, PernixData FVP), Virtual SAN or plain Datastores. Unfortunately, SSDs have limited lifetime per cell. Its value may range from 1.000 times in consumer TLC SSDs up to 100.000 times in enterprise SLC based SSDs. Lifetime can be estimated by device TBW parameters provided by vendor in its specification, It describes how many Terabytes can be written to the entire device, until the warranty expires.
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