You are here: Home / Archives for 3.5

Balloon Driver Problems with SQL

September 9, 2009 By 7 Comments

I have been meaning to write this up for a while; Scott Drummonds' 'Love Your Balloon Driver' post today at his Virtual Performance blog gave me a nice reminder.  I actually caught a sneak peak at the graphs with an explanation from Scott at his instructor-led lab at VMworld 2009.  Scott calls out that the only workload they discovered suffers from balloon driver activity is Java.  The reason for Java's problems with balloon driver activity is that Java itself runs in a VM and so the guest OS cannot properly determine which pages should be swapped out when the balloon driver calls for … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Issues & Troubleshooting, VMware, VMware How To, VMworld Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

vCenter Client Passthrough Authentication

March 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I started this blog for a couple reasons: 1.) To help you, my readers, with your virtualization projects, and 2.) To help myself by: a.) raising my online profile as an expert in the community, and b.) To give myself somewhere to keep tidbits of knowledge that I find myself going back to look for over and over again. This post is a 2b. I just built up a new laptop and couldn't remember how to set up pass-through authentication on my VI3 Client. A quick Google search gave me the answer, courtesy of Stu Radnidge's post on nothing other than VirtualCenter 2.5 Passthrough Authentication.  This … [Read more...]

Filed Under: VMware, VMware How To Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

DL380 BIOS Configuration for VMware

March 16, 2009 By 1 Comment

One more post to wrap up the nonsense with my DL380 G3 ESX servers.... Vincent Vlieghe noted that you must make a couple changes to your DL380 G3's for ESX to work correctly.  His post was written back in 2006 when we were still working with ESX 2.x, but the same appears to be true of ESX 3.5 RTM (Updates are not supported on this hardware per the HCL).  The changes you must make to BIOS are: For stable operation on these systems, ESX Server requires a BIOS MPS Table Mode setting of Full Table APIC. With the exception of the specific systems referenced below, the following BIOS settings … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Issues & Troubleshooting, VMware Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Double-Check the HCL

March 12, 2009 By 1 Comment
Search Results for DL380 G3 on the VMware HCL

I wrote some time back about networking problems with a clean install of ESX 3.5 U3 on a HP DL380 G3 server in a lab environment.  A simple downgrade to ESX 3.5 RTM corrected the issue and I didn't think much about it.  One of the servers in the lab died and I went about the business of rebuilding it.  Having learned my lesson, I started with an ESX 3.5 RTM install and then patched to Update 3 plus other applicable updates.  Much to my chagrin, the server began crapping out on me randomly.  Some reboots, some networking issues, and other assorted not so good things.  Now the DL380 G3 is … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Issues & Troubleshooting, Uncategorized, VMware Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Networking Problems with ESX 3.5 Update 3 on the DL380 G3

November 24, 2008 By 2 Comments

I began building up a new lab environment with a few old DL380 G3 servers (courtesy of ebay) and pulled down the latest ISO of ESX 3.5 with Update 3 integrated.  The install went well with my only changes to the defaults being some partitioning changes (I more or less follow the recommendations set forth by Rich at VM/ETC for partitioning) and not checking the option for creating a default network for virtual machines - I prefer to set up all my networking manually once I am in the VI client.  I selected the first on-board NIC for my Service Console connection.  The NIC was detected as a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Issues & Troubleshooting, VMware Tagged With: , , , , ,