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There has been some discussions around what the total number of VMware vCenter Concurrent vSphere Client Connections is. Currently there is no limit, but it is recommended to keep this at a total of 30.  Anything over this total and performance issues may be experienced. It also depends on how you use the vSphere Client. If you have fewer entities opened in the inventory tree, your vSphere Client puts less burden on the vCenter server therefore it may support more vSphere Client without noticeable performance downgrade. Why? Because for every opened managed entity like virtual machine, the vSphere Client asks vCenter to monitor its status using vSphere PropertyCollector API. The more to monitor, the more burden on the vCenter of course. Thanks to Steve Jin (DoubleCloud.org) for providing the above information.

I haven’t done this in a long time, due to working on large customer accounts that use automated build processes to build all there ESXi servers, but I needed to do this for my home lab, so thought I would post how to configure a USB key to boot into the ESXi installer.  Handy if you have no CD/DVD drives.  I used Windows to carry out this. 1) Download  the latest version of Syslinux. Current version (At the time of writing) 4.02 – Download here 2) Insert the USB key. It will require about 300 MB free space for the ESXi install files and should be formatted as FAT32. 3) Run  c:syslinuxwin32syslinux.exe <drive letter>      – This alters the boot partition on the USB key and copy over the file ldlinux.sys to the root directory. 4) Mount the ESXi Install ISO and copy the contents to the USB key. 5) On […]

I have been building a very basic home lab today, and came across this error when trying to add the host into vCenter. “Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Not enough space to install agent.” I began investigating the error, which to me sounded like a disk space error.  The host is running ESXi 4.1 off a USB key.  I checked the disk space and all was fine and acceptable. What I discovered was that a VM that was running on the host had eaten a huge chunk of memory, and there was only 128MB free (this host only has 2GB RAM, not ideal I know).  I stopped a few of the VMs which free’d up some memory, and then tried to add the host to vCenter again.  Everything worked well.

Some news on the Novell Suse Enterprise Linux (SLES) front. From yesterday (15/9/10) SLES for VMware, a Linux distribution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 is available now.  Customers who have purchased VMware vSphere 4.1 licenses on or after June 9, 2010 qualify to run an unlimited number of SLES virtual machines and receive all necessary patches and updates for free. I personally think this is a great deal, and will be interesting to see where VMware and Novell go with this partnership, maybe lots of joint appliances in the future. For further official information click here.