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
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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Today I was busy to to install some HP Managent Agents 8.60 on a DL380 G6, after entering the host in maintenance mode, extracting the HP software in the /tmp/ folder I was ready to install the agent. By running the command “./install860.sh –install” I received the warning that some VM’s still running and must be powered down before you install the agent, warning:
An active Virtual Machine [ ***.***.***.*** ] has been detected on host [*****.*****.local]
And:
Please modify the state of the VMs to be Suspended or powered off and then retry Agents Installation.
See full message log:
[[email protected]********* 860]# ./install860vibs.sh –install
HP Insight Manager Agent 8.6.0-11 Installer for VMware ESX
Target System is VMware ESX 4.0.0 build-208167
Server: ProLiant DL380 G6
This script will now attempt to set ESX Host in Maintenance Mode
for IM agents install.
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
(vim.fault.NotFound) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
msg = "Unable to find a VM corresponding to "***.***.***.***"",
}
(vim.fault.NotFound) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
msg = "Unable to find a VM corresponding to "***.***.***.***"",
}
An active Virtual Machine [ ***.***.***.*** ] has been detected on host [*****.*****.local]
The ESX host will be put into maintenance mode
to be able to install/uninstall the agents.
The Virtual Machines must be either Powered off or Suspended
by the operator to allow the transition
of the ESX host into maintenance mode.
Please modify the state of the VMs to be Suspended or powered off
and then retry Agents Installation.
[[email protected]********* 860]#
Read more…
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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After some problems with my ESX 4.0 host I want to move some critical VM’s to my ESX 3.5 u4 host.. but my upgraded hardware level (7) is not compatible with my ESX 3.5 u5 host. The following is a step-by-step guide on how to perform this downgrade:
I want to downgrade my Windows 2008 64-bit with XenApp 6 with hardware level 7 to hardware level 4.
Time to downgrade:
Download and start: VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.1

– Click: Convert Machine
Read more…
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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After upgrading the VMware ESX 4.0 host with VMware Update Manager I received in the boot loader a few errors:
fsc.ext3: Unable to resolve ‘UUID=xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx’
*** An error occurred during the file system check.
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.
To resolve this issue:

– Login with Root credentials
Error warnings:
fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve ‘UUID=7d6111a3-d848-4e18-88e3-46a66912f8e6’
fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve ‘UUID=b07fd5a0-4a19-445d-adae-3b3679b5be3b’
fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve ‘UUID=b2ac1406-2dc1-4d4a-8649-0072389978ab’
Edit file /var/fstab/ by using VI of NANO
Read more…
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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When Creating a snapshot for a virtual machine fails
Or you receive the error:
File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore
Note: This error does not occur on ESX 3.5 or earlier.
ESX 4.0 is able to detect when a snapshot file at maximum size cannot fit into a datastore. Instead of allowing the file to be created, which may not work correctly if it grows to big, ESX cancels the operation and displays the above error.
To confirm if the snapshot files may be too big, compare the size of the virtual machine’s base disks against the block size of the datastore which contains the virtual machine’s working directory.
Note: If you are using Raw Device Map, you should compare the size of the RDMs instead of the base disks.
Read more…
Carlo Costanzo from VMwareInfo.com has posted the following helpful article:
The SVGA II driver installed by VMware Tools doesn’t work with 2008 R2 or Windows 7. Console sessions will randomly lockup.
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/218244?start=105&tstart=0
According to the thread there is a WDDM driver in U1 that you can install manually to fix the problem by browsing to –
“C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video“
A good one 🙂
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
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When attempting to upgrade ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1, you may experience the following symptoms:
- Update Manager (VUM) upgrade operation fails or times out at 33%.
- Upon reboot, the host that was being upgraded displays a purple diagnostic screen with the following error:
COS Panic: Int3 @ mp_register_ioapic
Customers using VMware vSphere 4 upgrading to Update 1 with 3rd party management agents running.
Read more…
vSphere 4.0 introduces a new para-virtualized network device – VMXNET3. We recently published a paper demonstrating its performance characteristics, compared to that of enhanced VMXNET2 (the previous generation of high performance virtual network device from VMware).
Some highlights of this paper are:
(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.
(2) Dramatic gains across all configurations of IPv6 traffic, with significant CPU usage reduction and throughput improvement over enhanced VMXNET2.
In a nutshell, VMXNET3 offers performance on par with or better than its predecessors on both Windows and Linux guests. Both the driver and the device have been highly tuned to perform better on modern systems. Furthermore, VMXNET3 introduces new features and enhancements, such as TSO6 and RSS. TSO6 makes it especially useful for users deploying applications that deal with IPv6 traffic, while RSS is helpful for deployments requiring high scalability. Moving forward, to keep pace with an ever-increasing demand for network bandwidth, we recommend customers migrate to VMXNET3.
For more details, please read our full paper from here.
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