Esx on Evan Hoffman

"Call HostServiceSystem.Start for object XX on vCenter Server YY failed" when starting snmpd on ESXi 5.1

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 16:59:35 +0000

SSH into the host and run these:

~ # esxcli system snmp set --communities 
~ # esxcli system snmp set --enable true

After that, make sure you have the port (161/udp) open in the firewall config and it should start up ok. (The root problem is the file /etc/vmware/snmp.xml - those commands fix it).

VMWare Tools Compatibility Matrix

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:15:22 +0000

Question: If I install the latest version of VMWare Tools on a guest, what kind of compatibility do I get when I vMotion to an older version of ESX? In other words, is VMware Tools backwards compatible with older versions of ESX/ESXi?

Answer: Yes, it’s backwards compatible. From this tool:

Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 with Update Manager

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:57:54 +0000

This turned out to be so ridiculously easy I probably shouldn’t even mention it, but only because I remembered that Update Manager exists. I thought I was going to have to burn an ISO, go to the datacenter, pop the disc in, etc. But with Update Manager this is all handled remotely. Just download the files from vmware.com and upload them to your vCenter server through the client. This YouTube video by VMware walks you through the procedure:

The VMware datastore LUN 2TB (well, 1.99999 TB) size limit

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:00:15 +0000

I started migrating our physical machines to VMs using VMware a few years ago and the first problem I ran into is still the most annoying one: the size limit for LUNs is, per VMware’s docs, (2TB - 512B). That’s 512 bytes shy of 2TB, so basically 1.99999 TB, or 2047.999 GB. So when I create a new LUN for a datastore in the SAN the max size is 2047 GB. Now, as the VMware KB article states, this is a limitation of SCSI, not VMware per se, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. When I first setup ESX, I created a 5 TB LUN for the datastore. It showed up in vCenter as 1 TB. After some Googling I learned of the 2 TB limit – the usable space is basically usable space = (size of lun) % 2TB, where % is the modulo operator – and found something suggesting using extents to expand the datastore across luns. I did that, but I later learned that there seems to be a consensus that extents should be avoided.