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VMWare ESX(i) Could not power on…

By on April 7, 2009 in Virtualization

We run most of our servers on some sort of virtual environment. Be it XEN or VMWare ESX(i). This has proofed to be a very cost effective way to fully leverage each machine’s CPU and RAM.

In any case, the other day we had to adjust some RAM settings for one of the virtual servers. After setting the RAM and restarting the machine we got an error message saying;

“Could not power on vm: no space left on device”

You can imagine, that we were totally shocked as this was a customer server and time was running out. So, the only cause of this could be that VMWare must have some problems with the expanded RAM.

As it turns out, the solution to this was quite simple. VMWare adjusts the SWAP file and in our case, there was no more space left on the drive that this virtual machine was running on. So, if you are prompted with this message you should go into the general server configuration and adjust the SWAP location. Then adjust it as well in your individual virtual machine environment.

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How to update a ESXi server

By on January 27, 2009 in Virtualization

All of my servers run a flavor of a virtual infrastructure. Most popular is probably the VMWare ESX and ESXi series. Especially, the ESXi offering is a freely available virtualization platform that allows you to host virtual machines hassle free.

So, with any offering there has to be some distinction between the paid offering and the free offering (unless you have open source software, hint hint) and so the ESXi platform is no exception to the game. Still it is a great offering. So, what do you have to do to upgrade to the latest release or available patches?

VMWare provides the VMware Infrastructure Client that can be run (unfortunately only) on Windows. While installing you should choose to install everything, because then there is also the VMware Infrastructure Update installed. With it, is is a breeze upgrade/update your ESXi servers.

The steps are;

  1. Choose Start > Programs > VMware > VMware Infrastructure Update.
  2. On the Hosts tab, select the ESXi hosts to check for updates.
  3. On the Updates tab, click Check Now.
  4. Install the Update. This will download the Updates and Patches. With some it takes a looooong time.
  5. Once downloaded it will prompt for you authentication and install the update.
  6. If needed, reboot the ESXi host machine.

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