To complete upgrade to vSphere 5.1 you need to complete few more steps, depends on design some of the can be skipped. Recommended: Upgrading VMware Tools Upgrade the Virtual Hardware for Virtual Machines Back Up the vCenter Single Sign On Configuration Upgrade datastore files system from VMFS3 to VMFS5 Upgrade VMware tools before upgrade of the Virtual Machine Hardware Optional: Install or Upgrade vSphere ESXi Dump Collector Install or...

For a past few weeks I collected around 10 links to documents with a best practice for VMware vSphere.  Links to VMware vSphere Best practice documents are listed in on of my pages: VMware vSphere Best Practice repository...

What the VAAI is? vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) can offload ESX host for specific storage operations such as: Atomic Test & Set (ATS), which is used during creation of files on the VMFS volume (provision new VM) Clone Blocks/Full Copy/XCOPY, which is used to copy data (Clone, storage vMotion) Zero Blocks/Write Same, which is used to zero-out disk regions Thin Provisioning in ESXi 5.x and later hosts, which allows the ESXi...

Few days ago, after restart one of my ESX servers I wasn’t able connect it back to vCenter server. Connection process bar hangs on 80% and after few minutes error message says: Reconnect host Cannot install the vCenter agent service. Agent not running   I checked if vpxa demon was running – service vmware-vpxa status – service was dead, I wasn’t able to start it – service vmware-vpxa start . Messages log...

Few days ago I posted about ESX or ESXi network configuration uses 4 physical NIC’s  Networking configuration for ESX or ESXi Part 1 – 4NIC on standard switches Today, second part of the serial, this time ESX(i) host has 6 pNIC’s (1Gbps) on Standard Switches (vSS). From security, Best Practice and my point of view 6 physical NIC’s is a smallest number. Having 6 NIC’s in a ESX(i) host will supply it with enough...