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Ivan Versluis August 13th, 2008

Who could ever believe and see VMWare releasing their ESX for free. Last night I read small post on my Windows Mobile device.

What is VMware ESXi 3.5?
VMware ESXi 3.5 is the industry’s first, thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware. With its next-generation architecture embedded in hardware, VMware ESXi enables a plug-and-play data center with greater security, reliability and manageability. Requiring no installation and minimal configuration, VMware ESXi accelerates server deployment—IT organizations can take servers from boot-up to running production applications in virtual
machines in minutes.

List of features is amazing and now we all get them for free. Check the full list here, but these are which I like:

• Bare-metal architecture
• Small Footprint with only 32MB
• Virtualization for storage and support for iSCSI
• VLAN tagging support
• Wake-on LAN
• 64bit support

Basically all features I missed with VMWare Server and now getting them for free with ESX3i version.

Why is VMware making ESXi free? VMware is making its standalone ESXi hypervisor available at no cost in order to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Customers have shown tremendous interest in ESXi due to its innovative architecture, simple setup, and high performance. Allowing IT administrators to obtain VMware ESXi for free enables everyone to gain access to VMware’s datacenter technology and prove its value in their own companies.

I have nothing more to add than just go download the VMware ESXi data sheet for more information and get a free copy of VMware ESXi and try it for yourself. I am running couple of production host servers with VMWare Server  and will upgrade them very soon.

Tags: 3.5, ESX, free, i, VMWare

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Ivan Versluis June 12th, 2008

If you need to create 5 or more of Virtual Port groups on a vSwtich and you don’t want to use the VI client than logon on the service console and run the commands below.

For creating a new Virtual Port Group use:

Assigning a special VLAN to this a Virtual Port Group:

With these two simple commands I was able to push my sh script and create same “Networking” configuration on dozen of my ESX servers.

esxcfg-vswitch [options] [vswitch[:ports]]

  -a|–add              Add a new virtual switch.

  -d|–delete           Delete the virtual switch.

  -l|–list             List all the virtual switches.

  -L|–link=pnic        Set pnic as an uplink for the vswitch.

  -U|–unlink=pnic      Remove pnic from the uplinks for the vswitch.

  -M|–add-pg-uplink    Add an uplink to the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -N|–del-pg-uplink    Delete an uplink from the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -p|–pg=portgroup     Specify a portgroup for operation

                        Use ALL to set VLAN IDs on all portgroups

  -v|–vlan=id          Set vlan id for portgroup specified by -p

                        0 would disable the vlan

  -c|–check            Check to see if a virtual switch exists.

                        Program outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -A|–add-pg=name      Add a new portgroup to the virtual switch.

  -D|–del-pg=name      Delete the portgroup from the virtual switch.

  -C|–check-pg=name    Check to see if a portgroup exists.  Program

                        outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -B|–set-cdp          Set the CDP status for a given virtual switch.

                        To set pass one of “down”, “listen”, “advertise”, “both”.

  -b|–get-cdp          Print the current CDP setting for this switch.

  -m|–mtu=MTU          Set MTU for the vswitch.

  -r|–restore          Restore all virtual switches from the configuration file

                        (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY).

  -h|–help             Show this message.

Tags: commandline, ESX, howto, Script, vlan

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Ivan Versluis May 29th, 2008

Last two days I worked with a VMWare Premium Support engineer troubleshooting my VMWare ESX problem for booting the system. I will post another post with exact error messages, but we were not able to get into the service console nor did the other two boot options work. At some  point he asked me did I have a Linux Live-CD? I was think ooh Yeah going back to old school and grabbed my case and found a BackTrack2 cd from two years ago.

After the reboot  and boot into BackTrack we went trough couple of system settings and logs and he asked hey can you forward me the esxcfg-boot.log to me  by email…. I was using the DRAC console and copy and paste is not going to work ;-(.  Guys from past remember the real tricks when we did those back than with IIS and within couple minutes I was able to get the orginal file to one of my tftpd daemon on the network.

How did I get the log files?

•  
  • Download, burn the iso and boot from CD-rom
  • Login with root/toor
  • I prefer the GUI and start KDE by running startx
  • Open Console session
  • ifconfig eth0 up
  • dhcpcd eth0
  • check you ip address with ifconfig eth0
  • now run tftp
  • open ip address
  • put esxcfg-boot.log or any other.

That’s all. For more information and download go to http://www.remote-exploit.org/.

Tags: ESX, howto, livecd, logfiles, network

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