Comments for ProVirtualzone – Virtual Infrastructures

Comment on Virtual Flash File System partitions issue by Luciano Patrao

Luciano Patrao — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:54:12 +0000

In reply to George Davidson. Did you try to erase the partitions where the swap cache is located? Do that carefully. Always double-check if you are erasing the right partition.

Comment on How to clone your ESXi SD card for backup by Luciano Patrao

Luciano Patrao — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:51:53 +0000

In reply to John McCarthy. so when you clone with Clonezilla it will reuse the full free space?

Comment on vSphere 7 Update 2 loses connection with SD Cards a Workaround by Luciano Patrao

Luciano Patrao — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:50:55 +0000

In reply to ballhawk45.

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your message.

Since I am on vacation, I am not doing any updates for now. Not even test any new versions.
When I am back, I will test these new updates, and I will update the blog post if needed.

Thank you again for your support on this subject.

Comment on Virtual Flash File System partitions issue by George Davidson

George Davidson — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:21:56 +0000

How did you remove the virtual flash resources? I keep getting an error that they’re in use. It says to make sure the host isn’t using it for swap cache or VM read cache, which I confirmed, but I still get the error.

Comment on How to clone your ESXi SD card for backup by John McCarthy

John McCarthy — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 19:01:37 +0000

Yes Clonezilla saved our bacon when we were experiencing the bootbank disconnects in 7.02. My boss purchased sd cards from HP, we cloned the original host sdcard to the newer HP sdcard, went seamless. Only issue was we had one 64 gb card, that host had to be rebuilt.

Comment on vSphere 7 Update 2 loses connection with SD Cards a Workaround by ballhawk45

ballhawk45 — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 15:23:15 +0000

Luciano – ESXi 7.0 U3f was just released and includes a NEW vmkusb driver, VMware-vmkusb_0.1-7vmw.703.0.50.20036589. Unfortunately the release notes entry for this item only says “Updates the vmkusb VIB.” so no useful information. I wanted to post this here as the change introduced with the vmkusb driver in 7.0 U2 was the one that unleashed unthrottled I/O on USB devices and caused all this trouble to begin with, and now we have a new version with absolutely no indication of what issues it addresses or improvements it makes. Presumably it maintains the I/O throttling of post-7.0 U2 versions that stabilized ESXi environments with USB-based boot devices. Note this version is the first newly-released version of vmkusb driver since vmkusb_0.1-6vmw.703.0.20.19193900 released with ESXi 7.0 U3c in Jan 2022 (U3d and U3e did not update this driver), so be vigilant for any changes in behavior.

Comment on How to clone your ESXi SD card for backup by Luciano Patrao

Luciano Patrao — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 20:14:55 +0000

In reply to John.

Hi Jonh,

Thank you for your comment.

Never used Clonezilla to clone an ESXi SD Card. Does it work properly? Have you tried and tested the new SD card and it works without any issues?

Comment on How to clone your ESXi SD card for backup by John

John — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:56:48 +0000

This is cool. wish I saw this earlier. we used Clonezilla to do the same thing. Nice writeup. Definitely going to try this on one of our hosts.

Comment on Move vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VMs datastore by Luciano Patrao

Luciano Patrao — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 09:09:15 +0000

In reply to ballhawk45.

Hi Patrick,

This is new for me. Did VMware provide you with any KB for this specific issue?

I never use a specific Datastore for swap files, so maybe that is why I never encounter this issue. But when I have the time, I will try to test this and update my blog post accordantly.

And thank you very much for bringing this to my attention.

Comment on Move vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VMs datastore by ballhawk45

ballhawk45 — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 02:32:55 +0000

Luciano – One small bit of knowledge that I would like contribute to this post that resulted from a number of calls to VMware support… vCLS vms are deployed without reserved memory, so they require a swap file. IF you do not store vm swap files in the “Virtual machine directory” (default setting) but have instead set the option to store swap files on “Datastore specified by host” and then you manually specify only a subset (one or more) of your datastores as allowed for vCLS, you MUST also include in the vCLS-allowed datstores list the same datastore(s) that your cluster hosts specify for vm swap files. If you do not, the eam process wll create the vCLS vms for the cluster, then the vpxd process will see that the defined swap file location for those vms is not available to them and deletes the vms – then eam will determine there are not enough vCLS vms in your cluster and redeploy new ones, them vpxd destroys them…and so on in an infinite loop. I have experienced this in multiple environments and resolved it by adding the unique swap file datastore for each cluster to the list of allowed vCLS datastores for that cluster. This should be fixed in a future release per Support.