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Tag: esxi-host

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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • April 20, 2021

Manage Networking on Multiple Hosts with vSphere Distributed Switch

Traditionally, you would have to configure and manage virtual networks for each ESXi host and virtual machine (VM). VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) simplifies that. VDS offers centralized provisioning, monitoring, and management of virtual networks for selected hosts and VMs, making daily operations more convenient.
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • January 22, 2019

vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 U1 Installation and configuration Guide

VMware’s release of vSphere 6.7 U was launched in October 2018. What’s new? This release includes the necessary tools for convergence and repointing. An external Platform Services Controller (PSC) has sunk into oblivion and the client can move to a simplified embedded deployment. The HTML5 based vSphere Client is now fully functional and the vSphere SSO domain has gained more flexibility with support for embedded repointing. Not bad, right? Catch this wave!
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Kevin Soltow
  • Kevin Soltow
  • June 1, 2018

Installing vSphere 6.5 U2 update without messing things up

One day, any virtual infrastructure needs to be updated. That may be just due to admin’s wish to keep up with modern trends or the need for some cool features that are brought to life with the latest updates. And, speaking of updates, VMware has recently released their vSphere 6.5 U2. Find out more details about it in this document: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-vsphere-feature-comparison-datasheet.pdf So, being a VMware fan, I decided to update my vSphere 6.5 and describe the entire update process from its planning through the installation itself.
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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • April 19, 2018

What should you do if “No space left on device” error occurs while updating VMware ESXi?

While updating VMware ESXi servers, VMware vSphere users may encounter the “No space left on device” error that pops up while executing the “esxcli software vib update” command. Interestingly, the problem occurs even though disks are doing well and have enough free space and df -h command proves that.
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Boris Yurchenko
  • Boris Yurchenko
  • February 22, 2018

Dedupe or Not Dedupe: That is the Question!

Today I will deal with data deduplication analysis. Data deduplication is a technique that helps to avoid storing repeated identical data blocks. Basically, during the deduplication process, unique data blocks, or byte patterns, are identified and written to the storage array after being analyzed. While such analysis is a continuous process, other data blocks are processed and compared to the initially stored patterns. If a match is found, instead of storing a data block, the system stores a little reference to the original data block. In case of small environments, this is not crucial mostly, yet for those with dozens or hundreds of VMs, the same patterns can be met numerous times. Thus, due to the advanced algorithms used, data deduplication allows storing more information on the same physical storage volume compared to traditional data storage methods. This can be achieved in several ways, one of which is StarWind LSFS (Log Structured File System), which offers inline deduplication of data on LSFS-powered virtual storage devices.
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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • November 8, 2017

VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) – how does it work?

VMware has recently released VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO), a handy document that highlights the VAIO I/O Filtering technology operational principles. Here, we shed light on them briefly and discuss how VAIO can be implemented in a production environment. VAIO is a technology and an API providing the direct access to the virtual machines’ guest OS I/O Stream. VAIO is already employed in partner products for maintaining various tasks (i.e., caching write-back and write-through). VAIO is based on the Storage Policy Based Management framework, dedicated to managing virtual machines storages and set the storage rules.
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Romain Serre
  • Romain Serre
  • November 2, 2017

Getting started with PowerShell and VMware vSphere

Since some time, VMware provides PowerCLI which is a set of modules for VMware vSphere. Except if you were in a cave last 10 years, you should know that PowerShell is a powerful scripting language. Initially, PowerShell enabled to manage only Windows Workstation or Server, but since sometimes, a lot of vendors make their own modules to manage their solutions (such as Veeam, VMware and so on). Moreover, PowerShell is available on Linux. For my job, I always use PowerShell. I’m a lazy guy, and if I have to make something two times, I make a script. This is the same thing for VMware vSphere. In this topic, we’ll see how to connect to vCenter and some commands to start.
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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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