This is an updated post covering VMware Workstation 11 instead of Workstation 9, it’s been updated to cover installing using the formatwithmbr switch during the initial boot process as well as highlighting an issue with creating multiple USB keys from the same VM template.
This is still the the quickest and easiest method for me to install ESXi on to a host with no local CD\DVD drive.
Continue to read after the break for the updated build \ preparation process.
During a rebuild of my home lab recently I stumbled on to problem which means I need to update the VMware Workstation \ Fusion ESXi build instructions I have previously issued. Due to me having to rebuild the hosts one at a time to ensure that the USB drives use the mbr partition instead of GPT I followed my previous instructions of using a VM in VMware Workstation to rebuild all three USB drives, all was good with the first host running but as soon as I added hosts 2 and 3 I started experiencing issues with the hosts not working well with each other. Each host was able to ping components outside of themselves but were unable to ping the other hosts, making things even stranger still was that I couldn’t add the hosts to vCenter either, having done the obvious and made sure I hadn’t made any mistakes with networking (all using the correct IP addressing, subnet masks and DNS servers etc) I put a post out to Twitter asking for some advice, this wasn’t a new build having had been used previously to build out the Shuttle servers so I knew that the ISO image was fine so then someone asked what happened with a single server being on line, powering down two of the hosts I found myself able to ping the remaining host without issue, however as soon as I powered up another host I encountered dropped pings all over the place.
Thinking perhaps that I had a faulty NIC card (it happens and is the reason I have a spare one sitting around) I started playing with all three hosts to see which one of the three could be causing the issue, as it turns out none of them and all of them. Individually each host performs as expected, it’s 100% pingable, able to join vCenter and works as expected but adding any other host to the environment would cause the entire environment to break down and become un-responsive.
I recently came across an issue with my home lab that indicated I had an issue with my Cruzer Fit going to a Write Protect mode, doing a search online showed that a number of people were also exhibiting the same kinds of issues but this wasn’t being restricted to SanDisk Fit drives.
I have been a fan of the Cruzer Fit for a while now, it’s sleek size meant that prying little fingers (I have a two year old who loves to investigate) can’t pull it out and lose it and it looks great on the front of my Shuttle SH63H3 cases so I was a bit alarmed to realise that I may have to replace these with another brand of drive that may not offer me the same flush fit as the Cruzer Fit.
One thing I have to mention is that my usual method of installing ESXi in to my lab environment usually involves using VMware Workstation to create a VM, attaching a USB drive to the laptop and then attaching that to the VM, hey presto you have a readily available way of installing ESXi on to a system that doesn’t have a CD\DVD drive fitted. The reason I mention this will become clearer later on in the article.
Now I should mention that the original lab build was done on VMware ESXi 5.1 and I blogged about how to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 here, during that time I haven’t really had much need to make changes to my ESXi environment and didn’t take note as to if\when the SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives I was using in my environment went to read-only but I know it has to have been after the 5.5 upgrade.
Now how did I know that the drives had gone to a write protect mode? well carry on after the break to find out.
I put together this little post to help people clean and format their USB or fixed disk in Windows 8.1, I needed this because some of my USB drives have previously been formatted with ESXi or Linux installed on them and this was the easiest way to bring them back to a useable format.
Continue after the break to see how to clean your ESXi or Linux formatted drive
In previous posts I have demonstrated the installation and initial configuration for the vRealize Operations Manager 6 installation. At the end of the last post we were left at the log on screen to continue the configuration.
Log in with the admin user and password and let’s continue after the break to configure vRealize Operations Manager.
Playing around in my home lab over the last couple of months I carried out an installation of vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), had a look around it and then promptly deleted the vApp after a month or so.
Spring forward a couple of months and going through the new vROPS 6 installation and going through the vCenter registration process with vROPS 6 I received the following error message.
Because this installation isn’t actually replacing an existing instance I decided against overriding the existing registration and decided to go with a de-registration, thereby allowing a fresh registration of vROPS 6.
Using the MOB incorrectly can lead to you breaking your vCenter server so please do so carefully.
In the previous blog post I left you at the Getting Started vRealize Operations Manager screen.
In this blog post I will be going through both the Express and New Installations, continue reading for more information.
This is a multipart blog post detailing the installation and configuration of the new vRealize Operations Manager product.
Unlike the previous vCenter Operations Manager release this is a single VM only product and doesn’t rely on the two node UI and Analytics VM vAPP.
Now deploying the appliance is pretty straight forward, in fact if you have already deployed an OVA file before you can deploy vROPS as well but for those of you who haven’t deployed an OVA \ vApp before please continue on.
In a previous post I installed and configured the Synology Syslog server to allow me to stop me getting the below message on my hosts.
The reason for the message is that I run my 3 ESXi hosts using SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB keys and as such there is no persistent storage for logs. In this post I am going to show you how to configure some VMware infrastructure to point to our newly configured Syslog server.
In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives
