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How to thin provision an exsiting VMWare disk on ESXi without virtual center

abx21 — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:51:39 +0000

If you are like me then after you installed ESXi you went and created a ton of virtual hosts, then realized that you were short on disk space. In doing research on using NFS as a datastore, I read how by default images on NFS were thin provisioned. In a bit of a jealous moment, I wondered why I didn’t have that option. I learned that by using the RCLI appliance it is possible to convert. “Vmkfstools -i” is your friend. First you must shutdown your VM, in this case called “test-vm”. Then from the RCLI run the vmkfstools command as follows:


vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/test-vm/test-vm.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/test-vm/testvm-thin.vmdk -d 'thin' -a lsilogic

The command prompt on the RCLI appliance will not return until the copy/conversion is done, but you can see the progress graphically in the tasks windows on your VI client. Once the copy is done, go into the settings of your VM, delete the hard disk, and add a new hard disk pointing to the “thin” vmdk you created. Boot your vm, if it all works then you can use the datastore browser to delete the thick vmdk and you are done.

How to Patch ESXi 3.5 Update 2

abx21 — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:45:18 +0000

At least this is how I did it…
Download the patch file here, then scp it over to your RCLI host. You have an RCLI instance somewhere right? If not there is an appliance you can download also from VMWare. Once the file is on the RCLI instance, you can use the vihostupdate command as follows:

vihostupdate --server ip_address_of_your_ESXi_host -i -b ESXe350-200807812-O-BG.zip
And enter your admin user and password at the prompt. You won’t notice to much going on from your VI Client screen. After the vihostupdate command is done, you will notice a little “reboot needed” message in your VI Client. I set the time and date back to the correct date, re-enabled NTP then shutdown my VM’s, and rebooted the ESXi host. It was back up withing 3 minutes, all in all a pretty simple process.

ESXi… EPIC FAIL!!!

abx21 — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:36:51 +0000

“This product has expired, Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.”

Way to go, I had to set the clock back to last week on my ESXi console. There goes my VMWare consolidation proposal at work.

I wouldn’t want to be the poor developer that forgot to take out the “if date = august 12 2008 then fail” line of code.

VMWare ESXi: First Thoughts

abx21 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:15:41 +0000

Having just left a position working on a massive VMWare ESX rollout, I have had a lot of experience with ESX and the whole VI ecosystem. I am also acutely aware of the large amounts of money involved with VMWare. For that reason I have been a big fan of KVM and VirtualBox. But at my new job I see lots of opportunities where having a full blown VI setup would help, but am hesitant to introduce this.

Naturally when ESXi was released for free ;I decided to look into it. The installation was straight forward and withing 30 minutes I had things up and running. VMware offers a Remote CLI appliance which I quickly downloaded and installed, with thei RCLI you can do most of the basic things you could do with Virtual Center, as in cloning and svmotion, albeit obviously by using perl scripts instead of a GUI. Other than the DR and SRS features this can work as a low cost visualization platform. ESXi also has support for HBA, nfs and iScsi storage. Using the VMware converter I was able to clone my windows laptop, albeit it took a few tries. Once I was the cause of problems, here is a hint, don’t change your password on the ESX console while you are doing a P2V. I’ll update this with new experiences, but so far, yeah, its fun to be playing with VMware again.