Tag Archives | vsphere 4

A few people have been asking what Ephemeral ports are and what is there purpose. This is a quick overview. So what is an Ephemeral port? An Ephemeral Port stops the binding of a dvPort. This resembles the same behaviour in the standard vSwitch. This can be used when port history is not required or relevant.  You can see on the screen shot below the three types of Port Binding available on a dvSwitch port group. The three types of port binding available: Static Binding (Default): means that the dvPort will be assigned to the VM at configuration time. Once all the ports are “booked” by VMs, it will not be possible to connect another VM, even if the connected VMs are powered up or not. Dynamic Binding: means that the dvPort will be assigned at the moment of VM power-up. This option allows for over committing the number of […]

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.