Posts Tagged ‘vmware’

VMWare ESXi force MAC Address re-generation

Thursday, April 2nd, 2015

This is on 5.1u2

I don’t know how this happened as I am doing these steps every time, yet today the newly created VM with added templated disk is getting the same MAC address every time.

I tried the solutions with deleting those 5 entries form the fwx file, to no avail.

The next logical thing to do is to move the VM to another folder. I simply renamed the VM container folder. And that solved my problem.

BUT, renaming the folder back, surprise, gets the old MAC address and UUIDs back! I don’t know why and I don’t have time to figure it out, so I just leave it in new folder and choose “I copied it” when powering on the VM.

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VMWare ESXi – VM is gray when adding new hardware

Wednesday, March 26th, 2014

VMWare ESXi 5.0 U1

It happened to me that I created a new VM, then copied over a template VMDK but forgot to add it. When I started the VM it complained of no OS, so I edited the config and added the HDD.
Right after this operation, the VM became gray and was no longer manageable.
I removed it from inventory, then added it back again and now it was showing properly as powered on.
I powered it off, then on again.

Now, the VM kept showing a text cursor “dancing” on the screen like crazy.
I powered it off, removed the HDD, then added it back and powered it on.

Now, it’s usable.

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Install VMWare ESXi 4.1 on USB stick

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

As part o fmy VGA PCI passthrough testings, I wanted to install esxi on a USB stick.
After failed with several solutions (including lili usb creator, which works for 5.0) I found the following site that did better than putting the ISO on the USB stick: it literally installed esxi on the usb stick:

http://bitterbuds.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-install-vmware-vsphere.html

This might work for 5.0 as well but no time to test it yet.

The only problem is, I am not able to set up a datastore on it 🙁 so guess I’m back to finding a sata hdd.

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Oracle RAC Templates on VMWare ESXi

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

A little while ago I started and managed to get an oracle RAC template to run from cmwares ESXi.
The long story short is that I installed OracleVM in a virtual machine created on the ESXi with a 100 GB hdd.
So basically now I had a hypervisor running inside a hypervisor. Yes, it works just fine.
Then installed oracle VMM on another virtual machine on the ESXi.
Then I enabled promiscuous mode on the virtual machines private vswitch. Absolutely a must. This is a deal breaker. Unless you do this, you will not be able to ping from domU into the internet, only another domU or dom0.
Then installed the RAC templates on the Oracle VM as normal, following the documentation.

At this point I was having a working RAC environment, with the only drawback that it had the overhead of running inside a secondary hypervisor.

So nect step is to move the RACs out of Oracle VM and into vmware ESXi.
This appears to be trickier. I tried vmware converter on the running RACs. Node 1 I converted as is but then it wouldn’t boot because it was running a XEN kernel and that is not supported by vmware.
So for node 2, I rebooted into the non-xen kernel, the el5euk one. I had to manually edit grub to boo that by default because as it seems, nice little oracle VM doesn’t give you much chooce to see the booting process. Maybe it’s possible but I didn’t had the need to figure out since I knew how to edit the boot menu.
Then I converted node 2 and now when it boots it will eventually go into a kernel panic as, the only errors I was able to see prior to the kernel pani, it cannot mount the partitions.
I tried installing different kernels by using a centos livecd and chroot-ing to it but to no avail.

Next step is to modify the original rac2 to have a modified non-xen, non-euk kernel and see if that works. If I don’t forget, I’ll keep you updated on this progress.

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VMWare player drag drop between virtual machines freezes one of them

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

I am doing some testing and developing, using 2 virtual machines and I need to frequently move data between them. I figured easy way is to drag and drop from one directly to the other.
This was working fine until the source VM froze. I couldn’t even switch to it. or interact with it in any way.
I restarted all the vmware services to no avail.
Then I looked at the processes and notice vmware-unity-helper. :lightbulb:
Killed the process and everything went back ton normal.

PS: to all those who are watching my vmware related posts: in a about a month from now I’ll set up my first personal ESXi (I have one at work). That will be GOLD 😉

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Reset root password on VMWare ESX/ESXi v4

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

It so happened that we received a server with ESX on it and some settings; like the IP address to connect to it. Which was wrong. Then the user/password to connect to it which, you guessed, was wrong as well.

So, here I was unable to use the machine because some folks could not remember what password they set on the machine. And then comes google-ing to figure out how to reset it. There’s the vmware KB article that explains it along with some others and all of them mention the grub loader screen. Well, bad luck because on our esxi version 4, there’s syslinux as bootloader. Of course I figured this out after installing knoppix on a usb drive and booting from it (because the server came with no cd/dvd drive). Then came the second issue, of mounting the filesystems as explained in most of the articles on the net about resetting the root password (because as explained, we couldn’t edit the bootloader config to enter single user mode). Well, the issue was that some of the partitions on the disk were vmfs which might be something vmware related, I haven’t digged to find out since the issue was present: I couldn’t mount and hence was unable to read/write to those partitions.

Then, I figured I could play around with the syslinux boot config file to try to force it to enter single user mode. And since there was the syslinux.cfg and a couple of boot.cfg on some other partitions, I modified them all. But to no avail, for some reason I couldn’t guess what the kernel was so the boot failed. Better said, and I quite: “Kernel panic”. I love that message 😀

Back to the issue at hand, finally :P, I noticed some tgz files out of which 2 had current date. I immediately thought that they might contain some stuff about current things (ambiguous, I know) so I jumped with MC (midgnight commander) in them. To my surprise, the state.tgz file contained a local.tgz which contained the /etc directory which contained, among other things, the shadow file. Someone screamed bingo? 🙂 I know I almost did.

So what I did was to extract everything out (since MC does not support saving changes into archives, or at least not with that knoppix version), edited the shadow file and removed the roots password hash (as explained in a lot of articles on the net) and then I tar-ed the /etc in local.tar, then I gzip-ed that into local.tgz then I tar-ed that into state.tar and then gzip-ed that into state.tgz, every time making sure to chmod 700 on the tgz files (as on the original file), and wrote that to the mounted partition overwriting the existing one. And voila, root password got reset.

Phew, that issue took a few hours to solve. Well, enjoy 😉

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[SOLVED] Diablo 2 CPU usage 50%/100%

Friday, November 12th, 2010

(for those who don’t like reading, solution is at the end of the article 🙂 )

I’m not going into the details but it seems that it is known that diablo 2 has a bug in it’s engine that makes it use the entire available CPU, which on single cores results in a 100% CPU usage and on dual cores in a 50% CPU usage of one core.

I’ve tried a lot of solutions, one of which was a process priority program, after which I’ve found out the actual cause which obviously explained why that method didn’t work.

So I figured I could solve this by running the game in a virtual machine. False. Then I figured I could try to use vmware ESX and run in a virtual machine under that for the only reason as ESX allows controlling the resources, mainly I can tell it what amount of the CPU to use for the VM. I spent a week trying to get that to work (I installed ESXi in vmware player, so yes, it works (don’t forget to enable virtualization if you don’t have it enabled in the BIOS)). After some terrible results running the copied VMs I installed a new one from scratch, put diablo on it but, it was again using full CPU however not to run diablo but to run the vm WITH diablo. And beside this, diablo wasn’t even playable. The lag was huge on the menu alone, the game itself was suicide to play.

So I dropped this version and went on to searching which now produce a pretty good result: http://mion.faireal.net/BES/

This little thing will actually get the process to sleep for a little bit, thus resulting in the process using less CPU. And since diablo doesn’t need that much CPU, this is all nice and dandy. THIS really works. Now I’m off to playing diablo, wihout causing my CPU to spit smoke hehehe.

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Copy files to VMWare ESX/ESXi

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

I’ve been playing with vmware esx running in vmware player (ha, you didn’t know that was possible, did you? just google it up, there are quite a few articles on the subject). And as many, my first impuls was to copy an existing vmware machine. So, I searched how to do that and in another article (again, google as I didn’t save the link) I found that I can use winscp over ssh. I first had to enable ssh and keep in mind that you CAN connect with the default root user at least from 4.1 (the article mostly say you can’t and invite you to create a new user for it, which btw in my cases I couldn’t get working for some reason). I then eventually connected through the console (yeah, you can do that to in 4.x without any other gimmicks, just press alt+f1 for the console).

Long stroy short, this is the article I finally decided to link to:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2082

basically, it’s a real tip for winscp users which in most if not all cases configure their winscp to resume transfers (which is a natural thing to do) but in case of ESX this is not a good idea because some renaming is done in the background which esx doesn’t like.

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VMWare: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

I started getting this error “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to” when attempting to resume a suspended virtual machine. For whatever reason, this happened after a I have used acronis disk director to merge a partition to the partition on which the visrtual machines reside to gain more space. It could be only a conincidence though.
Anyway, After trying a few times to resume/power on the vm and also restarting vmware client (VMWare workstation ACE edition) I closed the workstation, restarted all services one by one and then started up the workstation again. I found the virtual machine powered on (in the powered on list) but not viewable. if I took a screenshot it clearly showed it was running. So, since I could not interact with the machine, I suspended it again, then resumed and everything was back to normal.
This happened once yesterday and once just now. In both times I’ve done the above steps and got the same results so it appears this is a workaround the problem.

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vista or vmware 6 idiotic keyboard problem

Monday, November 5th, 2007

for some time now I experiance the following while working with lazarus in a vmware 6 workstation running a vmware 4 image under windows vista running on my laptop to which a keyboard.mouse and lcd screen are connected via a KVM switch:
at some random times, one of the alt, shift or control key no longer work.

my only solution so far is to pause the vmware and restart vista. for some reason I would blame it on vista. any ideas when a stable SP1/2 will be available for vista?

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