The (un)Official VMWare ESXi thread.

Well i'm going to look at the upgrade, just need to download it, and maybe figure out if I can do an upgrade like applying patches or else I need to go and move stuff round in the garage to get the server monitor connected!!

WHS2011 doesn't have drivers for the VMXNET3, if you can install them when it says no nic detected it works fine, I had to extract the drivers from a 2008r2 machine with vmware tools installed.
 
[Darkend]Viper;22749624 said:
Well i'm going to look at the upgrade, just need to download it, and maybe figure out if I can do an upgrade like applying patches or else I need to go and move stuff round in the garage to get the server monitor connected!!

WHS2011 doesn't have drivers for the VMXNET3, if you can install them when it says no nic detected it works fine, I had to extract the drivers from a 2008r2 machine with vmware tools installed.
Click to expand...

Found an post on the VMware Communities regarding the issues I am seeing. Previously the WHS box was running with a VT-d passthrough NIC but as I am now using teaming (LACP) I though I would not bother. The NIC is picked up as a VMXNET3 adaptor and installing the updated VMTools does not fix the problem for me. According to the post this affects WHS 2011 / Win Server 2008r2 with remote access turned on and something is manipulating packets for traffic flow (QoS etc). I did try removing the network device in device manager and then refreshing and it found the adaptor and installed the VMXNET3 driver but still no network.

The install disc (ISO download) allows an upgrade (ie. patch) or fresh install. The upgrade didn't seem to go so well for me. VM auto-startup screen was acting strangely with turning off of auto-startup for VMs resulting in multiple instances of all VMs appearing in the auto-startup pane of that window. There were a couple of extra issues as well but I cannot think what they were at the moment. Bottom line is that it didn't instil me with confidence so I installed from scratch which seems to be working as expected.

RB
 
Here's a gotcha...

You can't use the current version of vCenter Converter Standalone (5.0 build 470252) to convert a machine into vSphere 5.1 : KB Article

vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 does not support vCenter Server and ESXi versions later than version 5.0.
Click to expand...

Ho hum!
 
Help required

Hi Guys,

I have installed ESXi 5.1 and. I have set my static IP Address. How would i go about installing the VM's via vSphere ?

Bashy
 
Well i'd recommend veeam, been using it for 2 months at work and it's so much easier, currently backup up about 10tb a week with 40-50gb incremental daily.

I've also just upgraded my esxi 5u1 install to 5.1 and it went smoothly, everything seems to be working fine, if not slightly quicker, the vsphere client also feels a lot more responsive.
 
Also remember that if you have Enterprise plus or above vSphere comes bundled with VMware Data Protection which is fine for small environments.
 
Been setting up a few VM's today with snapshots. Pretty nice if you ask me. One problem and just roll your snapshot back.

It's working in a live environment. Intel Quad Core with 8GB ram. 4 Hosts with 1GB each. I have a second data store to store all the VM's on.
 
For those who are using the free vSphere hypervisor and were happy, as I was, that VMware have removed the vRam entitlement in it, please be aware there is a hard limit of 32GB ram per machine (physical) with the free version now.

I also had a rather worrying encounter ove rthe last day or so with vSphere. I had just setup a raid 1 array with a couple of Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives and after importing as a data store I started to copy my WHS-2011 Vm from my current store to this new raid protected one. The copy estimated over 5 days to copy the 200GB vmdk file.

I left it to run overnight but it was still reporting days to complete in the following evening so I cancelled the move. The vSphere client still reported the copy percentage and no acknowledgement of the cancellation in the bottom notification bar but the copy window closed.

I then started to see pauses in the vSphere client. The performance logging listed an average write of 9MB/s to the array during the copy but was showing gaps in the performance charts and was continuing to show more gaps as the chart was updated.

Logging on to the servers console I was also experiencing pauses of, estimated, 10 seconds or above where I could not do anything.

I rebooted the server and went in to the raid controllers BIOS and found the raid 1 array was in degraded status and unsynced. I let it sync and rebooted. I will see how it goes copying tonight.

My concern is that a degraded array had such a big impact on the vSphere 5.1 server as a whole.

I also now have an issue where after copying back the files that were moved to the array I get an error trying to copy back the WHS-2011-flat.vmdk file saying it already exists in the destination directory. The file does not exist in the destination but a WHS-2011.vmdk does.

The VM will not start and errors with a message about the VM missing a disk file that snapshot is reliant on. I have converted the only vmdk in to an independent disk but no joy. I cannot start this VM and cannot copy this -flat file over. I can stand to loose this VM if need be but this is also a bit of a concern if it is so easy to trash a VM on a failed move.

RB
 
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