Server Fault Stack Exchange
Server Fault Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [vmware-vsphere]

vSphere is an enterprise level virtualization solution. It acts as the cloud computing OS managing a set of VMware ESXi-based hosts.

VMware's vSphere is a cloud computing virtualization platform built around the ESXi bare metal hypervisor. vSphere includes popular features such as HA (High Availability), DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduling), vMotion (live migration of guests), and Storage vMotion (live migration of guests disks between datastores).

See the vSphere product page at vmware.com.

1305 questions
62
votes
10 answers

How to [politely?] tell software vendor they don't know what they're talking about

Not a technical question, but a valid one nonetheless. Scenario: HP ProLiant DL380 Gen 8 with 2 x 8-core Xeon E5-2667 CPUs and 256GB RAM running ESXi 5.5. Eight VMs for a given vendor's system. Four VMs for test, four VMs for production. The four…
Simon Catlin
  • 5,222
  • 3
  • 16
  • 20
57
votes
2 answers

vSphere education - What are the downsides of configuring VMs with *too* much RAM?

VMware memory management seems to be a tricky balancing act. With cluster RAM, Resource Pools, VMware's management techniques (TPS, ballooning, host swapping), in-guest RAM utilization, swapping, reservations, shares and limits, there are a lot of…
ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
41
votes
7 answers

Replace VMware vSphere infrastructure with open source alternatives?

We are planning a slow migration from VMware (and third party apps) to open source alternatives (free would be great). Basically, we want to start with some little cluster lab, then migrate the production environment (35+ ESX, 1500 VMs) in the…
minWi
  • 511
  • 1
  • 4
  • 7
37
votes
5 answers

Are VMware ESXi 5 patches cumulative?

This seems basic, but I'm confused about the patching strategy involved with manually updating standalone VMware ESXi hosts. The VMware vSphere blog attempts to explain this, but the actual process is still not clear to me. From the blog: Say…
ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
28
votes
4 answers

Best Practice: vCPUs per physical core

I am trying to find some documentation or best practice guides for virtualization with respect to provisioning vCPUs per physical core (of a CPU). If it matters, I am looking at vmWare for the virtualization implementation. For example, an Intel…
Dr. Watson
  • 383
  • 1
  • 3
  • 7
28
votes
6 answers

Why are snapshots considered as temporary backups not real backups?

I am using VMware ESXi. In our team we use to provide snapshots for long term backup. Then we faced issues like memory spillover and the server got hang up. I started reading in VMware knowledgebase articles and everywhere. Everywhere it was…
Samselvaprabu
  • 1,311
  • 5
  • 13
  • 26
22
votes
4 answers

How much contention is too much in VMware?

For a while now I've been trying to figure out why quite a few of our business-critical systems are getting reports of "slowness" ranging from mild to extreme. I've recently turned my eye to the VMware environment where all the servers in question…
Chuck Herrington
  • 517
  • 2
  • 7
  • 17
19
votes
4 answers

How to fix "BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 17163091968s"?

UPDATE: I updated the title of the message, because I've recently seen more of these problems with this exact time amount of 17163091968s. This should help people investigating the symptoms to find this page. See my (self-)accepted answer below. I…
tuomassalo
  • 738
  • 2
  • 8
  • 22
18
votes
3 answers

Understanding the VMware ESXi limitations of the free Version

I am running an ESXi Vsphere Client Version 6.0.0 but with all the different documentation and changes I have trouble to understand my limitations. From the official documentation I see that my limit for physical CPU should be unlimited but I can…
RayofCommand
  • 1,451
  • 8
  • 26
  • 36
18
votes
2 answers

An unknown tool is wiping our Virtual Machines and we can't ID it

A console view of a Windows 2008 R2 VM, on vSphere is showing the following screen: "Operation 2 of 2" "Wiping disk" Can someone advise on what this program is? Some information on this mystery: A number of VMs are now effected. The symptom is…
Rqomey
  • 1,055
  • 9
  • 25
18
votes
1 answer

vSphere - Why upgrade VM Hardware Version?

At the beginning of the year we performed an upgrade of our vSphere environment from vSphere 5.0 to vSphere 5.1 U1 Build 1063329 compromised of about a dozen ESXi hosts and a vCenter instance hosted on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. One of the…
user62491
16
votes
3 answers

Deploying VM from vmdk / vmx file

I have a vmdk file and vmx file (and all the other files from someone elses datastore) copied onto my own data store. If I try to deploy from the vmx file, I get a vm with the name "unknown # (invalid)" where # is a sequential number depending on…
Jeff
  • 661
  • 7
  • 13
  • 26
15
votes
3 answers

How to crack the 1 Gbit iSCSI limit between ESXi and VNXe

I'm having big troubles with my iSCSI network and can't seem to get it working as fast as it could. So I've tried pretty much everything to gain full performance from my SAN, having involved specialists of VMware and EMC. A short description of my…
Ryan Hardy
  • 210
  • 2
  • 6
15
votes
5 answers

Choosing a SAN technology for 100s of VM Web Servers

The Problem We have an issue with performance on an existing platform, so I'm turning to the hive mind for a second opinion on this. The performance issue so far relates to IOPS rather than throughput. The Scenario A blade centre of 16 hosts, each…
SimonJGreen
  • 3,195
  • 5
  • 30
  • 55
14
votes
6 answers

vSphere - copy virtual machine to external usb hard drive

We have an ESXi server standing somewhere else. I can connect to the server with the vSphere client. There is an external USB hard drive plugged into the server. How can I copy a stopped VM to the external hard drive?
Anatol
  • 349
  • 2
  • 6
  • 19
1
2 3
…
86 87