VMware

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work provisioning and decommissioning LUNs on some Fibre Channel arrays. As you all know, this process can be somewhat tedious when provisioning a new LUN on vSphere or removing said LUN. In the past, I would always use this PowerCLI command Get-VMhost -Cluster "Cluster1" | Get-VMHostStorage -Refresh This would first get all the ESXi hosts in the cluster “Cluster1” and then launch the refresh cmdlet on each host. The problem with this is that it can take a really long time for the command to complete because the refresh is executed host by host. Before starting the next refresh, the command waits for the previous one to finish. While this is fine for smaller environments, the time really does add up when you have a decent sized cluster. ...

Today I was preparing some updates with VUM on Lenovo servers running vSphere 6.0. Things did not go as expected. While staging the patches I was greeted with this error. ERROR: The host returns esxupdate error code:15. The package manager transactions is not successful. Check the update Manager log files and esxupdate.log files for more details. Looking into the esxupdate.log file I could find the following entries: 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: BootBankInstaller.pyc: ERROR: The pending transaction requires 242 MB free space, however the maximum supported size is 239 MB. 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: An esxupdate error exception was caught: 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: Traceback (most recent call last): 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/usr/sbin/esxupdate", line 238, in main 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: cmd.Run() 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/build/mts/release/bora-5572656/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib/python2.7/site-packages/vmware/esx5update/Cmdline.py", line 148, in Run 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: esxupdate: ERROR: File "/build/mts/release/bora-5572656/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib/python2.7/site-packages/vmware/esximage/Transaction.py", line 250, in InstallVibsFromSources ...

Today I got my shiny new host for the homelab. After installing ESXi, I noticed the 10 Gbit NICs weren’t being detected. After looking around a bit I found the drivers in the form of a VIB. Start by uploading the VIB to a datastore that is accessible to the host. Turn on the SSH service in the security section and fire up a session. Once connected run esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/NAS1-iSCSI/net-ixgbe_4.4.1-1OEM.600.0.0.2159203.vib ...