vSphere – Guest VM is shown as (Orphaned)
KB ID 0000414 Problem I’ve seen this happen a few times now, while looking at your Virtual infrastructure, one or more client machines is greyed out and shown as (Orphaned). Solution If you have many guests VM’s on one host with this problem, you can cure this by removing the parent host and re-adding it to the cluster, then right clicking it and select “Reconfigure for HA”. Or you can do the following, on a...
Enabling Tape Drives on vSphere Hosts
KB ID 0000417 Problem Over the next few weeks I’ve got a couple of Hewlett Packard LTO Ultrium 5 Tape drives to deploy with ESXi 4.1 U1. These will work just fine, there is however a problem presenting SCSI U320 drives now, so thanks to my colleague (Andrew Dorrian) for giving me the heads up on the problems I would face with older drives. Make sure you have enabled SSH access on your ESX Host. Note: With the release of vSphere...
VMware error on HP Proliant “Host Baseboard Management Controller status”
KB ID 0000418 Problem Saw this today on a HP Proliant DL380 G7 Server. Solution 1. It’s a simple one to solve, the server was built with the HP ESXi build, and the management agents are complaining because the iLO is not connected to the network. 2. When you connect the iLO socket to the network the alarm should change as shown below. 3. Once you have connected or disabled it you can reset the alarm. 4. Take the opportunity to...
VMware – {hostname} could not reach isolation address: none specified
KB ID 0000445 Problem Seen on vSphere: Error Host {hostname} could not reach isolation address:none specified. Solution 1. In my case the host did NOT have a default gateway, (this had occurred because the subnet mask of the server had been entered incorrectly when the server was built. So the default gateway appeared to be on a different network). 2. With the offending host selected, Configuration > DNS and Routing >...
VMware ESXi – Converting ‘Thick’ Provisioned Drives to ‘Thin’, and ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick’
KB ID 0000579 Problem Thin provisioning of hard drives is pretty cool stuff, full support for thin provisioning was brought in with vSphere version 4. Put simply a thin proviosioned drive is as big as it needs to be, and a thick provisioned drive is set to its maximum size when it’s created. The virtual machines that use these hard drives don’t know, and assume that their hard drive is a set size (even if it is thin...