VMware

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 ...

Last week I was moving some VMs for a client using Veeam Quick Migration. During the migration, I happened to stumble upon some strange behavior. The source VMs make up an Oracle RAC cluster, using shared VMDKs. One of the requirements for setting up shared VMDKs, using the multi-writer option, is that they are thick eager zeroed disks. When the VMs got to the other side, they wouldn’t boot. I figured something went wrong during the migration so I tried it again. Once the second run completed, the VMs still wouldn’t boot so I started digging around some more. ...

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 ...