ESXi 5.1 – Null Byte

Invalid IPMI MAC Address

By Antti Hurme 08/11/2013 No Comments 1 Min Read

Encountered an interesting issue when adding Power Management settings on one VMware ESXi 5.1 host today when vCenter Server returned an error message that the BMC MAC Address was invalid. The interesting thing was that I did check the Mac address prior to entering it in VMware vSphere Client and as such should have been correct. After digging trough the vCenter Server logs, located in a vCenter Server 5.1 installation:…

Get VM’s that require consolidation and approve consolidation

Development VMware

By Antti Hurme 16/08/2013 No Comments 2 Min Read

Wrote a small script that checks if there are any VM’s that require consolidation and asks for user action to consolidate them. You can choose between Yes and No on single VM’s or All to make the action automatic. It’s fairly simple to modify this script to make it automatic, if you so want to. It also catches any issues with consolidation so you don’t need to look at the…

ESXi APD&PDL – Part 1 Diagnosing lost iSCSI LUN

VMware

By Antti Hurme 27/06/2013 2 Comments 8 Min Read

ESXi APD&PDL – Part 1 Diagnosing lost iSCSI LUN

This is Part1 of iSCSI All Paths Down (APD) and Permanent Device Loss (PDL) situations which can cause quite a big havoc in a VMware virtualization environment. In this first part I will focus on how to diagnose the situation, what to look for in LOG files and how to verify what has actually happened. NOTE!: This is not a definitive guide, and should only be considered as such. This…

Random packet loss with VMware ESXi 5.1 virtual machines using VCNI

VMware

By Antti Hurme 16/01/2013 3 Comments 5 Min Read

Random packet loss with VMware ESXi 5.1 virtual machines using VCNI

This post is about a really odd problem that occurred some while ago, and was solved with a really small configuration change on all vSwitches on all the hosts in the cluster. I haven’t come across the same problem on a single host, but that doesn’t say it’s not possible. As the topic says, the problem showed itself as just a really random packet loss between traffic from the Virtual Machine to the outside network. Sometimes…