Esxi 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:

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.