Access the DCUI console from the via shell ssh

Did you know you can call up a graphical dcui while you are ssh'd into your host?




Just type DCUI









Now you can  access a black and white shell

Read More

Convert : V2v Amazon EC2 instance to Vmware

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2207331

User Fred Weston had a error when he tried converting his amazon ec2 windows 2008 boxes to Vmware workstation vms. He experienced a BSOD that pointed to storport.sys

ivivanov posted this answer which was confirmed by Fred Weston

You need to somehow get access to the target disks. You can use VMware Workstation to mount the target VMDK or you can temporarily attach the disk with the Windows directory to another Windows VM (in this case you should open Disk Manager and select Rescan Disks command from the Actions menu and the new virtual disk from the converted Amazon VM should become visible). After that:
* run regedit on that machine
* select HKLM hive
* from the File menu select 'Load Hive' command
* navigate to the target SYSTEM registry hive (it is under WINDOWS\system32\config\system *on the target disk* that was attached to the VM, but *not* the currently running Windows directory)
* pick a name for the new key (e. g. ec2-system)
* navigate to  ec2-system\ControlSet001\Services
* search for the three drivers and delete the whole keys
* then select again the ec2-system key under HKLM
* from File menu select 'Unload Hive' command and close Regedit
* unmount the mounted VMDK or detach the target virtual disk from the "temporary" VM

Power on the converted VM



Good knowledge to have in the toolkit.

Read More

iscsi conenctions in guest vs esxi host

Dave.Mishchenko  wrote a nice post on the advantages and disadvantages of using in guest iscsi connections vs having your esxi host handle it.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/2206774

Advantages
- easy to get past the 2 TB disk limit.  This was more of an issue in the past as you can get around this in ESXi 5.1 with a physical RDM
- required for official support with MS clustering - (see the support protocols section) - http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1037959

Disadvantages
- the backend storage network is exposed to a guest OS
- portability of the VM may be hindered - i.e. you have to make sure the destination host will allow for the VM to have all the network access it needs.  That'll probably be the case, but it's more difficult to verify than if the storage is presented via ESXi.
- a snapshot of the VM also requires another snapshot of the iSCSI LUN that the guest OS accesses
- you need to configure multipathing with the guest OS

Read More

Use Powercli to check the build number of your host

So you want to check your host's version number via powercli?


Use this:
This is setup for a single host
****************************************
#thanks ict-freak.nl
#adapted from http://ict-freak.nl/2009/06/09/powercli-get-esx-version-info/


#host will be the host name you want to check
$vhost = Read-Host "Enter the host name you want to check"


Connect-VIServer $vhost


get-vmhost $vhost | Sort Name -Descending | % { $server = $_ |get-view; `
    $server.Config.Product | select `
    @{ Name = "Server Name"; Expression ={ $server.Name }}, `
    Name, Version, Build, FullName, ApiVersion }


Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false


****************************************

Read More

Maximum allowed SCSI paths error

Nice post here from user: SteveShepherd
http://communities.vmware.com/message/2203951




Received this error while rescanning  his storage adaptors:
Error while rescanning adapter vmhba36.  Error was Unable to scan VMkernel SCSI subsystem for new devices.Sysinfo error on operation returned status : Maximum allowed SCSI paths have already been claimed.




Problem:
His count of the scsi paths was no where near 1024, which is the toal number of paths allowed.


He had 12 paths


Example of where to look in the GUI:









Answer he found:
The gui didn’t count dead paths but they are counted against him:


Used esxcfg-mpath -l   to find the list of paths from the command line
Over 1000 dead paths? that's a lot of paths.
Rebooting fixed him up.


Could have also done this:   use esxcfg-rescan -d adaptor
In this case adaptor would be vmhba32 which has the dead path


here is  esxcfg-mpath -l getting an error in a state of a path



 rescan the hba









Now if we look for any dead paths we don’t find one.







No more dead paths

Read More