Category Archives: ESX

Running Veeam Backup 5 in a VM

Posted on February 2, 2011 by

One of the best features of most modern virtual backup products, is that they support the vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP), including change block tracking (CBT) and hot-add. More here on VADP: kb.vmware.com/kb/1021175 To take advantage of the vSphere hot-add ability, the … Continue reading →

Posted in ESX, HP P4000/Lefthand, Software, Veeam, VMware vSphere | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Using vCLI (vMA) or PowerCLI for ESXi server maintenance mode

Posted on January 12, 2011 by

Just a quick post (mostly for documentations sake) to highlight on how to take your ESX(i) boxes into and out of maintenance mode using either VMware vCLI/vMA or VMware PowerCLI (Powershell) This can be handy if you have a whole bunch … Continue reading →

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vSphere VAAI Performance on the HP P4000 G2

Posted on November 30, 2010 by

With the recent release of SAN/iQ 9.0 which supports the VAAI vStorage offload features of vSphere 4.1, I thought I would run a quick block zeroing test to see the difference. The setup was as follows: 4 x HP P4500 … Continue reading →

Posted in ESX, HP P4000/Lefthand, iSCSI Storage, VMware vSphere | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

HA error when upgrading ESXi 4.0 Update 2 to ESXi 4.1

Posted on October 12, 2010 by

Ran into this annoying HA error after upgrading some blades all running ESXi 4.0 Update 2. All hosts were upgraded using VUM from a  vCenter 4.1 server. Upgrade all went well, taking only a few short minutes per host. Upon … Continue reading →

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A list of vSphere 4.1 VAAI compatible arrays?

Posted on July 26, 2010 by

This list of VAAI arrays detected by the Pluggable Storage Architecture appears in /etc/vmware/esx.conf of an ESX 4.1 host. Appears  these are there to support the vendors whose arrays will support VAAI now or in the future with firmware. /storage/PSA/Filter/claimrule[65430]/match/model = “SYMMETRIX” /storage/PSA/Filter/claimrule[65430]/match/vendor = … Continue reading →

Posted in ESX, VMware vSphere | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments