I currently have a cluster of two ESX 3.5U2 servers connected directly via FiberChannel to a NetApp 3020 cluster. These hosts mount four VMFS LUNs for virtual machine storage. Currently these LUNs are only made available via our FiberChannel initator in the Netapp configuration If I were to add an ESXi host to the cluster … Read more
I want to rule out the ESXi kernel being the cause for my terrible 15MB/s write speed on the local VMFS datastore. I am using a Dell PERC H710 RAID controller, and would like to boot from a boot disk and perform some writes to bench mark the raid array. Is there any boot disk … Read more
I’m generally a networking guy but I’m trying to learn VMware. I’m running two ESX 3.x servers with virtual center. I know that it is possible to create redundancy or high availability by configuring a clustered environment. For HA to work, both ESX hosts must mount to the same datastore on SAN. When one ESX … Read more
I have a server running ESXi 5.5 hosting several VMs. The host has 2 datastores, one within the local disk, one on an external SAN. Suddenly we had a problem and restarting the server we were not able anymore to map the internal datastore (it was not listed in the datastore list) and the VMs … Read more
My problem is the following: I have a 1TB HDD with the information of a server that I need now. I do not know what to do to access the information, inside the HDD there is a vmfs formatted partition that I do not see, and it contains the data I need. I think the … Read more
After reinstalling VMWare ESXi server, how can I attach existing VMFS partitions? I looks like the only way to do this is to have them formatted, and I’d really like to keep the existing data already on them. Answer I just did this today (4.0, not 3.5). I had an existing disk with a single … Read more
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers. Want to improve this question? Update the question so it’s on-topic for Server Fault. Closed 9 years ago. Improve this question So, I have this friend that deleted a VMDK that had all his family photos on it. ESX4i did not prompt him that … Read more
I’m trying to get ESXi4.0.0 to increase the VMFS partition to match my newly increased RAID 5. I went from ~850GB to 1250GB on the RAID virtual disk, and VMWare is showing the correct amount of space. Yet if I go to hit the “increase” button on the datastore it doesn’t list anything available, it’s … Read more
How do you calculate your maximum throughput available for a RAID volume? Do you use your VMFS block size per IOP? Your OS Blocksize? Your array stripe size? Any idea? Answer The OS\App blocksize and your IO patterns are what you want to focus on. VMFS blocksize has no effect on IO patterns – it … Read more
I would like my VMWare ESXi 5 server to have a USB-attached HDD datastore which I’d be able to detach, attach to my laptop and browse files on it. As far as I understand, the hard drive is to be formatted in VMFS. How can I browse such on a Linux or a Windows PC? … Read more
