To anticipate and prevent
Somewhere deep in the history of computing, there is a document that says all error messages must be obscure and poorly documented. Rarely does one find a error message that is clear, concise and tells you exactly where to look. Not that it’s impossible, just rare. This weekend I ran across what should have been an easy error in ESXi, “Out of resources”. Unfortunately ESXi doesn’t tell you which specific...
Typically when one talks about building virtual infrastructure the first thoughts go to big boxes loaded with as much redundancy as possible, slotted into a nice home at a datacenter. This is a great idea, however I ended up being tasked with something slightly different. I need to build ESXi servers that were small and cost-effective. Most importantly they were going to be shipped and run in remote offices without...
In most networks, you will have dedicated hardware to function as your “edge” (firewall/router). This is typically for the best, but there are always cases where you can’t put out that dedicated hardware. Sometimes it’s for cost reasons and sometimes it’s for complexity. In my particular case, I was installing an ESXi server in a datacenter and only had 2 amps of power to work with, of which my server...
This week I picked up a project that got put down last month, to install ESXi on one of my psuedo-servers. This particular machine runs an ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard with an Intel Xeon processor. Normally, installing ESXi shouldn’t be that hard, unless your hardware isn’t on the HCL, in which case it can be quite fickle. That’s why this was the third time I’ve run headlong at a brickwall.
I’ve been a long time user of VMWare ESXi for my baremetal hypervisor needs. In order for it to function at its best, the recommendation has always been to install the VMWare Tools. On Windows this is an exe and a piece of cake. However on Linux it has always been a gamble.
