I need to find out witch firmware version is running on my HBA without rebooting the ESX host.. I thought this was possible by GUI but couldn’t find it, so I decided to check this by console. Give the following commands:

Navigate to:

- cd proc/scsi/qla or lpfc820
- ls –lia

To view the HBA information:

- cat 6
- cat 7

Result:

It wasn’t so difficult!

Oke.. I didn’t know this feature, last week a colleague consultant shows me a little menu to (re-)configure the ESX service console. With the command “console-setup” you can add or delete some vSwitches, create a new SC and view current configurations.

If you never worked with ESX CLI then will this a nice feature to setup/troubleshoot the SC.

The option “Console-setup” is available since ESX 4.0 update 2

Menu structure:

When you console-setup as root from the service console, you are presented with this menu:

1. Show Current Service Consoles

2. Show Network Adapters

3. Show vSwitch/vDS Information

4. Delete Service Console

4.1 Select the interface to delete, defaults to vswif0

5. Configure Service Console

5.1 vswif ID, default to vswif0

5.2 Name of service console port group: default to “Service Console”

5.3 vSwitch for service console, default to vSwitch0

5.4 IP Address:

5.5 Subnet mask:

5.6 Default gateway:

5.7 VLAN ID: default to 0

5.8 vmnic to use for the service console

5.9 Save Changes

5.10 Return to Menu

6. Exit

Use:

• Options 1,2 and 3 for display current information
• Option 4 to remove an existing service console interface (vswif). You may also do this, if you want to recreate it.
• Option 5 to change the configuration of an existing vswif interface, or for creating a new one.

More information: VMware

After upgrading from VMware ESX 3.x to ESX 4.0 you can cleanup the bootloader from the older ESX 3.5 installation. You can do this from the console of by connection the host with ssh, give the command “cleanup-esx3”

Little note: You can run the cleanup-esx command as long as everything works for you in 4. If you use the -f flag, the software prompts you to confirm that you want to disable the ability to roll back to the ESX 3.x.x.

Thanks xchello from Dutch VMug for the tip!

“Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to the server 172.16.254.202:902” or “Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to the server no such host is known”

Solution:

To avoid losing access to the ESX host, perform the following steps:

1. Add the ESX server in your DNS

2. Edit your hostfile on the workstation (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts\) and add your ESX server

After adding the ESX by DNS in my hostfile and restarted the VI Client I was able to open Console screen.

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Het kan wel eens voorkomen dat een server spontaan een zwart scherm geeft op de console of tijdens een RDP sessie. Enkel is dit op te lossen met een herstart van de server, soms ook niet. Het is vaak gokken waar het gebruikersnaam, wachtwoord en domain moet invullen. Zie voorbeeld:

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