vlance Emulated version of the AMD 79C970 PCnet32. Older 10 Mbps NIC with drivers available in most 32-bit guest OSes except Windows Vista and newer. VMXNET Paravirtualized adapter, optimized for performance in virtual machines. VMware Tools is required for VMXNET driver. e1000 Emulated version of the Intel 82545EM 1Gbps NIC. Available in Linux versions 2.4.19 … Continue reading Comparing Virtual Network Adapter Types
Month: September 2013
Virtual Machine Files
vSphere administrators should know the components of virtual machines. There are multiple VMware file types that are associated with and make up a virtual machine. These files are located in the VM’s directory on a datastore. The following table will provide a quick reference and short description of a virtual machine’s files.
N_Port Virtualization (NPIV) Requirements
N_Port Virtualization ( is an ANSI T11 standard that describes how a single Fibre Channel Physical HBA port can register with a fabric using several worldwide port names (WWPNs), what might be considered Virtual WWNs. This in turn means that since there are multiple Virtual HBAs per physical HBA, we can allow WWNs to be … Continue reading N_Port Virtualization (NPIV) Requirements
vSphere Management Assistant (vMA)
A very nice tool that an administrator can download is a virtual appliance called the vMA which is Linux based (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, SP1), it has several components, including the vCLI and vSphere SDK for Perl. The requirements for the vMA aren’t too crazy, must have 1 vCPU, at least 600 MB of … Continue reading vSphere Management Assistant (vMA)
Configure vCenter Server storage filters
vCenter Server provides storage filters in its advanced settings to help you avoid storage device corruption or performance degradation that can be caused by an unsupported use of LUNs. These filters are available by default. We have a few different ones to choose from: VMFS filter, RDM filter, Same Host and Transports filter, and Host … Continue reading Configure vCenter Server storage filters
Understand and apply VMFS resignaturing
Each VMFS 5 datastore contains a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). The UUID is stored in the metadata of your file system called a superblock and is a unique hexadecimal number generated by VMware. When a duplicated (byte-for-byte) copy of a datastore or underlying LUN is executed, the resultant copy will contain the same UUID. As … Continue reading Understand and apply VMFS resignaturing
net-dvs Command
In order to view more information about the distributed switch configuration, use the net-dvs command. This is only available in the local shell. Notice that it specifies information like the UUID of the distributed switch and the name. We can also see information regarding Private VLANs if we have those set up. If we keep … Continue reading net-dvs Command
esxtop Memory View
There are many useful things to look at when in the memory view of esxtop. Several important things to look at near the top of the esxtop. PMEM /MB - memory for the host VMKMEM /MB - memory for the VMkernel PSHARE /MB - ESXi page sharing statistics SWAP /MB - ESXi swap usage statistics … Continue reading esxtop Memory View
esxtop CPU View
The default view of esxtop is CPU, there are several useful counters in this view. GID - group ID NAME - virtual machine name NWLD - number of worlds %USED - percentage physical CPU time accounted to this world %RUN - percentage of total scheduled time for the world to run %SYS - percentage of time … Continue reading esxtop CPU View
esxtop Network View
The last post discussed navigating esxtop, now let’s get into each view a little bit more. There are several network counters that are default when you go to the networking view, here’s a brief overview of each: PKTTX/s - # of packets transmitted per second MbTX/s - MegaBits transmitted per second PKTRX/s - # of … Continue reading esxtop Network View
