How to build device drivers for ESXi 5.x

Since I published my ESXi-Customizer and ESXi-Customizer-PS tools to slipstream driver packages into an ESXi installation ISO I was asked dozens of times if I can provide a driver for the unsupported device xyz or whether I can give instructions on building such a driver. So far my answer was always No, because - although I'm quite familiar with using Linux - I do not have any of the Linux kernel hacking skills that I thought would be required to do this.

Read more »

VMware, please fix IPv6 support in ESXi!

In a recent blog post I wrote about my efforts to implement IPv6 in my hosted virtual lab. This is working all fine for my VMs now, but to complete the picture I also wanted to configure IPv6 for the public management / VMkernel interface of the physical ESXi host (Please note: you do not need IPv6 support for the management interface if you just want to use IPv6 with your VMs - these are really two different networks!)

To come to the point: I am currently not able to make my ESXi host use IPv6!

Read more »

Implementing IPv6 in a hosted virtual lab

Did you know that the IPv6 standard was drafted more than 14 years ago, in Dec 1998? Adoption grew very slowly since then, but with today's ongoing exhaustion of IPv4 addresses IPv6 is gaining momentum:

• Almost all important ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and big companies that make business on the Internet already use and support IPv6.
• More an more other companies and institutions look into implementing IPv6 for their Internet-facing services (mainly public web sites).
• All modern Operating Systems have built-in support for IPv6. Many of them (inlcuding Windows 7/8) have it enabled by default.

IPv6 is inescapable. It's here. It's here to stay. It matters. Are you ready?

Read more »

How to clone ESXi 5

I recently received an e-mail with the following question: How do I copy an ESXi installation from a USB key drive on to the internal hard disk of my computer? Normally you would answer like this: You don't do it. You backup the ESXi configuration (e.g. with the vicfg-backup tool), install a fresh copy of ESXi on your hard disk and then restore the saved ESXi configuration.
Read more »

VMware Labs' latest fling: VIB Author and how it compares to the ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools

The VMware Labs have published a new tool called VIB Author that "allows ESXi administrator to create custom VIBs at the CommunitySupported level". When I read this news my first thought was: Hey, that's exactly what my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools (ESXi5-CPT, consisting of tgz2vib and vib2zip) are supposed to do! So, how do these two compare?
Read more »

[Updated] How to update your (free / whitebox) ESXi server to ESXi 5.1

Now that vSphere 5.1 (incl. ESXi 5.1) has been released one of the most frequently asked questions of home users is: How can I update my existing ESXi 5.0 installation without too much effort and without taking any risk? Here is a step-by-step procedure:
Read more »

vSphere 5.1 is generally available (incl. the free and the HP customized version of ESXi)

Late yesterday VMware made vSphere 5.1 generally available. Go to
   http://www.vmware.com/go/download-vsphere
to download. The free version of ESXi 5.1 is also already available:
   http://www.vmware.com/go/get-free-esxi

And HP hardware owners will be happy to find that there is also an HP customized version of the ESXi 5.1 ISO available for download. The shortcut http://www.vmware.com/go/downloads-image-hp-esxi still points to the 5.0 version, but HP's ESXi 5.1 GA is available here:
   https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=HP-ESXI-5.1.0-GA-10SEP2012&productId=285

Right now it is not yet possible to update an existing ESXi 5.0 installation to 5.1 using the well known methods (via Update Manager and the VMware Online Depot). You will probably be able to update by booting the host with the ESXi 5.1 ISO, but the other methods should also be available shortly.

Sep2012 release of the HP Customized ESXi 5.0 ISO

HP has just published updated software packages and device drivers for VMware ESXi 5.0 (at http://vibsdepot.hp.com). With this Sep2012 release HP changes the way how they provide this software: Up to now they have made a complete customized installation ISO (including all the packages) available for download on their own web site. Now they have replaced this download link with a shortcut URL that redirects to a VMware download page: http://www.vmware.com/go/downloads-image-hp-esxi.
Read more »

How to run the HP Online ACU CLI for Linux in ESXi 4.x

Please note: I noticed that this post still gets a lot of attention... Before reading through the whole post you should know: the workaround described here is only necessary for ESXi 4.x. For ESXi 5.x there is an officially supported Online ACU CLI available from HP (see the update at the end of this post)!

A while ago I posted about the Offline version of HP's Array Configuration Utility (ACU). HP does not provide an Online version of this tool for VMware ESXi, so expanding a local RAID array can only be done with this Offline version which requires a downtime of the host for the whole duration of the expansion.

Somehow I did not want to accept this, and - by just trying it out - I finally discovered that you can actually run the Linux version of the ACU CLI tool (hpacucli) in ESXi! hpacucli is not the web interface version of the ACU (which is called cpqacuxe) that you may be used to from Windows systems. cpqacuxe is also available in a Linux version, but I could not get it to run in the ESXi shell.
hpacucli is surely less intuitive to use, but it offers the same functionality than the web tool and allows you to do all controller configuration and volume expansion tasks that are supported with SmartArray controllers. Before trying it be sure to look at the Configuring Arrays on HP Smart Array Controllers Reference Guide (section "Using the ACU CLI", p51 f.) to learn how to use it. The reference guide also describes another utility named hpacuscripting that is also included in this package and works with ESXi. I haven't tried that, but it looks like it is mainly meant for the initial RAID configuration on a newly deployed host.

The Linux version of hpacucli requires some script modifications to make it run in the ESXi shell. First I thought about providing a modified version of it that you could just install and run in ESXi, but then I noticed that HP's license terms do not allow to redistribute the software package. So I will provide step-by-step instructions instead for how to do the required modifications on your own using a Windows machine. Don't worry, it's easy:

1. Download the file hpacucli-8.75-12.0.noarch.rpm from HP.

2. Download 7-zip and install it.

3. Open the downloaded rpm-file in 7-zip:

4. Inside the 7-zip window navigate to the embedded directory \opt\compaq\hpacucli\bld by double-clicking on the displayed file and directory names:

5. Select all the displayed files and click on the "Extract" or "Copy" button to extract them to a new empty sub-directory (U:\$Download\hpacucli in this example):

6. Download the patch script fix4esxi.sh that I prepared and put it into the same directory.

7. Now use the vSphere Client to upload the complete directory to a datastore that is accessible by the host that you want to run the tool on. You can store the directory on a shared datastore to make the same copy accessible to multiple hosts:

8. Now open a shell as root in the ESXi host that you want to run the tool on. Change to the datastore directory that you uploaded and run the patch script like this:
. ./fix4esxi.sh

You need to run the script only once! It will patch the shell scripts that are included and restore the executable permission bits that got lost when we extracted the files in Windows.

9. Now you are ready to run the hpacucli utility in ESXi, either by running ./hpacucli after changing to the installation directory or by calling it by its full file path:

The command controller all show config will immediately show you if the utility has detected your SmartArray controller and display its configuration. With the help command you will get an overview of all available commands and how to use them. However, I strongly recommend reading the above mentioned reference guide, because it includes more detailed information and usage examples.

Now at the end ... a big fat warning and some more hints: Running hpacucli inside ESXi is (of course) not supported by HP or VMware! I can tell you that it just works for me in the configurations that I was able to test, but it could as well fail completely for you or blow up your host!

The tool was able to detect SmartArray P400 and P410i controllers with ESXi 4.1 and 5.0. On an ESXi 5.0 host with a P400 controller I was able to break a RAID1 mirror and concatenate the disks to a RAID0 volume of double size. However, ESXi would not pick up the changed disk size, so I was not able to grow the VMFS volume without rebooting the host. At least I only needed to reboot (causing a very short downtime) and did not have to take the host offline for the whole volume conversion process (which can take very long depending on hard disk sizes).
I wonder if ESXi not detecting the disk size change is due to the old cciss driver that the P400 controller is using. Other SmartArray controllers use the newer hpsa driver that might not show this issue.

Please provide feedback by commenting on this post if you manage to successfully make use of hpacucli in ESXi like described here! This will help to get me and others an overview of what works and what not.

Update (2012-04-18): In the meantime HP has officially made available hpacucli for ESXi. It is part of the HP ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 that I reference on my HP & VMware Links page. For earlier versions of ESXi you still depend on the workaround that I described here.

[Release] ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools v1.0

I just released the first version of my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools. These are two scripts:

• tgz2vib5.cmd (to convert a TGZ file to a VIB file, formerly included with ESXi-Customizer)
• vib2zip.cmd (to combine one or more VIB files into an Offline Bundle ZIP)

These scripts can be used by Community developers (who provide e.g. drivers for unsupported Whitebox hardware) to package their software into VMware proprietary formats.

Go, read anything you want to know about these tools (and the different formats that they handle), and download them on the project page.

Feature request: Add sudo to ESXi to make AD integration a success story

Recently I posted about (undocumented) improvements in the area of AD integration, but it looks like I missed a very important point:

You can log on to a local or remote console using an AD account that has administrative rights, but you won't have root privileges in this session, e.g. you cannot edit any configuration files, restart services etc. To gain root rights you need to use the su command, but that means that you still need to know and enter the password of the root user! From a compliance standpoint this is not acceptable, because the whole point of AD integration is that each VMware administrator uses his AD account for administration and does not even know the root password - to make sure that each change to the system can easily be related to a personal account (Well, for emergency cases e.g. when AD authentication is not available you still need someone who knows the root password or e.g. has it written down on a piece of paper in a sealed envelope).

The easiest way to achieve this would be to use the sudo command in the ESXi shell to run commands in root context without the need to know root's password. This is common practice when managing Unix/Linux servers. Now the point is: sudo used to be available in ESX, but it is not available in ESXi.

So I have a simple feature request for VMware: Add sudo to ESXi! It is the missing piece that would make AD integration a success story, finally.

If you agree and also feel bothered by this, please vote for this feature request in the VMware Community forums, where I opened this thread for that. Thank you all for voting/commenting and special thanks to Masa who brought this to my attention in the comments of my above mentioned post!

Hard to find HP tools: The Offline Array Configuration Utility (ACU)

If you have ever looked for a solution to a specific problem or the download page for a certain tool on www.hp.com then you probably know: Searching (and finding) something is a pain on these pages, and the more desperate you need it the longer it will take you ...
So maybe I will even make a series of "Hard to find HP tools" posts. Anyway I will start with the Offline ACU tool today.

So, what do you need this tool for? I had this challenge before and I reminded that when I came across this VMware Community forums post: Imagine you have an HP based ESXi host with VMs running on local disks attached to a Smart Array RAID Controller. You have run out of disk space and decide to add an additional hard disk to the server. Instead of creating a new (unprotected) RAID volume on this single disk you prefer to expand an existing RAID volume with it. This will give you more disk space and keep the current RAID protection level. How do you do that?
No problem, if you had Windows (or Linux) running directly on the box, because HP made available the Array Configuration Utility (ACU) for these operating systems. It will allow you to do the RAID expansion online while the OS is running. However, for ESXi this tool is not available as an online version.
This is why you need to use the Offline ACU tool. This is just a bootable CD with Linux and the Linux ACU tool on it. So, you need to schedule a downtime for the host (and the VMs running on it) and reboot with that CD to make the required changes to your RAID volumes. Not online, but better than nothing ...

You can find the download link to the current version of the HP ProLiant Offline Array Configuration Utility on my HP & VMware links page (in the General section).

Once you have successfully expanded your RAID volume (and booted into ESXi again) you just need to do the same with the VMFS datastore that resides on it. Please note that since vSphere 4.0 you can grow a VMFS datastore online, and you do not need to use VMFS extents. Choose "Increase..." from the datastore's properties menu: