vsphere

by alex on proxmox, Virtualization, vsphere

Creating nested ESXi inside Proxmox

Ok, sounds a little silly, but there are times when you might want to have a nested ESX VM inside your proxmox environment – I found this great page on how to do it, but I’d rather do it via CLI so it’s repeatable.

This is the CLI I found which worked for me:

qm create 703 --balloon "0" --boot "order=sata0;ide2;net0" --cores "2" --cpu "host" --ide2 "ISOs:iso/VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201912001-15160138.x86_64.iso,media=cdrom,size=343064K" --machine "q35" --memory "8192" --name "pveESX3" --net0 "vmxnet3,bridge=vmbr0" --numa "1" --onboot "1" --ostype "l26" --sata0 "nvmeLVMlocal:32,backup=0,discard=on,ssd=1"

In the lead up to that, I also found a page on stackoverflow asking if there was an easy way to take the output of “qm config” and turn it into “qm create”. It doesn’t seem like there is exactly that – “qm showcmd” as recommended on there isn’t terrible, but isn’t enough.

So this is what I came up with – unfortunately it only gets 90% of the way there – 

qm config 703 | grep -v 'vmgenid' | grep -v 'smbios1' | grep -v 'meta' | sed -e 's/vmxnet3=.*,/vmxnet3,/g' -e 's/://' | awk '{ printf("--%s \"%s\" ",$1,$2);} END {print("\n");}'

The issue is that it outputs “nvmeLVMlocal:vm-701-disk-0,backup=0,discard=on,size=32G,ssd=1”, but really it needs to be “nvmeLVMlocal:32,backup=0,discard=on,ssd=1” (replace 32 with desired size).

But it’s better than nothing.

Hope this helps someone one day!

by alex on Virtualization, vsphere

A bit of vmware fun for a change!

I’ve got a VMware VCP – Have done for about 8 years (passed the exam 4 times now..), but most of my day these days is dealing with storage – but I’ve had a family fixit to migrate a 17 year old laptop into a VM on a more recent mac.

Nice and easy I sez! Just use the converter! Nekt minit..

vmware error.PNG

For the keyword lulz of anyone searching for this problem: “Error 1920.Service VMware vCenter Convert Standalone Server (vmware-converter-server) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services”

First I tried the obvious – checking the local user was an Admin, running it as administrator, trying vmware’s fix of creating a group called “Domain Admins”.. all with no dice.

Then I found someone suggesting how to start the agent manually, and when I did that, it complained that the certificate could not be verified.. which lead me on another path, checking Properties in Windows, which lead me to this KB entry on how to install the code signing certificate root on Windows XP.. which lead to a KB entry on another site, which led to 404, which led to web.archive.org, saving the file as a PEM, adding the Certification MMC snapin, importing it, and finally, the service started up.

Nice and simple.. only took someone with 19 years of experience with VMware and as a professional infrastructure admin an hour to fix it..

Edit: Oh ho, but there’s more! VMware Converter then was unable to send the image to the Mac – under the hood it’s still the same old converter that has been around for years, which means that it saves the image over SMB to the Mac. Except, Windows XP can’t talk to Catalina by default. Some will suggest upgrading to SP3 (a good idea, but I want to make minimal changes to this system image..), but that isn’t necessary – as outlined at this post, all you need to do is set HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\lmcompatibility level to 3, from the default of 1 on SP3 or 0 on SP2

by alex on Virtualization, vsphere

Go away and I will replace you with a very small shell script..

I did a recent migration of SAN to NAS for a client recently, and had to unmount all of their datastores.

This little one liner for the esxi shell lists all SAN volumes, then gets rid of them..

# esxcfg-scsidevs -m | sed -e ‘s/\:1 //g’ | awk ‘{ printf(“esxcli storage filesystem unmount -l %s;\nsleep 1;\nesxcli storage core device set –state=off -d %s;\n”,$4,$1);}’ >; /tmp/unmountluns.sh

Review the output for sanity, and run.