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Questions tagged [vmware-esx]

VMware ESX is an enterprise-level computer virtualization product offered by VMware, Inc.

VMware ESX is an enterprise-level computer virtualization product offered by VMware, Inc. ESX is a component of VMware's larger offering, VMware Infrastructure, and adds management and reliability services to the core server product. VMware is replacing the original ESX with ESXi.

VMware states that the ESX product runs on bare metal. In contrast to other VMware products, it does not run atop a third-party operating system, but instead includes its own kernel. Up through the current ESX version 5.0, a Linux kernel is started first, and is used to load a variety of specialized virtualization components, including VMware's vmkernel component. This previously-booted Linux kernel then becomes the first running virtual machine and is called the service console. Thus, at normal run-time, the vmkernel is running on the bare computer and the Linux-based service console runs as the first virtual machine.

Source: wikipedia

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Vmware host time drift

How does one ensure that linux hosts, running on vmware infrastruction 3 or vmware 3 esxi remain in sync with the ntp server. I have found that a linux guest running under esx or esxi has a tendency to have the clock drift in the future. How does…
biosFF
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How can I setup vSphere so that VLAN tags are not stripped at the vSwitch?

I am trying to test a VLAN-related networking issue, so I thought that firing up a couple virtual machines would be the easiest and cleanest method to test the problem. On the vSphere server I created a new vSwitch with no adapters bound, then…
Peter Grace
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Why is the vSphere console view so slow?

Why is the Console view on the vSphere client so slow? It's a real shame because it's a shame to have to establish an RDP session every time you work on one of the VMs because of the speed of the console (I saw a tool to right click and open an RDP…
GurdeepS
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Choosing between VMWare ESX and ESXi

We currently run one instance of VMWare ESX server, but want to start virtualizing more physical hardware with VMWare, while keeping the cost of VMWare licensing as low as possible. Is ESXi a good option or do we need purchase a new license for ESX…
Lamar
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Ballooning occuring on SQL server

From what I understand ballooning should occur only when the host begins to run out of physical memory, somewhere above 90% usage. I have an SQL server running in a three node cluster (64 GB RAM in each host) and it has been assigned 8 GB of RAM as…
user35213
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Can you use a USB dongle inside a VMWare ESX Virual Machine?

I need to know if a USB dongle that is required as a license key for a piece of software will accessible from the physical host machine. This will be a small vSphere 4 installation targeting the quick backup and system restore capabilities of…
Keith Sirmons
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Is there a standard way to benchmark a Windows VM performance from within the guest OS?

We are seeing our software behaving unusually at one of customers where it is being run inside a Windows 2008 virtual machine. The host is VMWare ESX Server. The biggest issue I have seen is our processes drop socket connections or socket…
akirekadu
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How much memory does ESXi require for itself?

I know that Microsoft suggests that you leave 1GB of memory for the parent partition on a Hyper-V server. Does VMware have a similar suggestion?
Corey
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High Availability Solution for VM on local Storage

Hi I have the following setup for using vSphere with HA: My problem with this is the finding some kind of reasonable HA for the database server. The IOP requirements of the database server are very high, as such the database files are spread across…
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copy vmware vmdk files while vm is running

I need to copy some VMs from one datastore to another. I'm running ESX 3.5 U3, VMs are mostly Windows-based. I don't care about data integrity since it's only to test NetApps deduplication on the target destination and the VMs will never be running…
zero_r
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How does Linux determine the SCSI address of a disk?

Greetings, I'm working with RHEL 5.5 guest VMs under VMware ESX 4. When I configure the virtual disks in the VM hardware settings, each disk has a SCSI address in the format "N:M". For example, "1:3" would mean SCSI host number 1 and SCSI target ID…
Chris Sears
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Where's my memory?! Nginx + PHP-FPM front end webserver slows to a crawl

I'm not sure if I have a problem with a memory leak (as my hosting company suggests), or if we both need to read http://linuxatemyram.com. Maybe you clever people can help us out? This is a front-end webserver VM running essentially only nginx &…
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hardware recommendations for a DIY storage system based on ZFS

Looking to make use of old server lying idle as a proof-of-concept ...here are specs Dell PE 2900: Xeon 5110 - 2P, 12 GB RAM, 8x 300 GB 15K drives, Perc 5i+256 MB cache what additional h/w would be needed on the server and hosts? 1GB ethernet card,…
JMS77
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Getting metadata from within VMWare Guest OS

Is there a way to get metadata (i.e. VM Name, Annotations, etc.) from within the Guest OS? I'm using a Ubuntu JeOS template and want to run a script on startup which configures new VMs according to the metadata. This is on VMWare ESX.
Robert Wilson
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Adding new virtual disks to a RHEL host in ESX "live"

I'm sure I've just missed which tutorial/manual page covers this, but how do you add get the guest OS to recognize that you've added new drives to it without a reboot? I have a RHEL5 guest running on ESX 4. I've added new virtual disks to the VM,…
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