ESX

Home Lab: Migrating from ESX to Proxmox

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I recently converted my home lab virtualization environment from vSphere\ESX to Proxmox and documented some of the useful tools and commands I used to do so. A little history My lab environment has gone through MANY iterations, both in hypervisor and storage: https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2016/04/25/homelab-a-few-weeks-with-xenserver-and-nutanix https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2016/04/04/upgrades-lab-local-ssd-hypervisors https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2015/07/16/backup-vmware-with-veeam-free-powershell-and-freenas https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2014/07/01/backing-up-vmware-virtual-machines-on-freenas-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2014/06/14/vmware-on-freenas-the-right-way-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2013/09/07/starwind-san-v8-beta-initial-testing-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2013/02/20/freenas-esx-and-nfs-synchronous-writes-and-the-zil-aspx Learning a variety of hypervisors was due mostly to my background in consulting and I’ve tried or used most of the major hypervisors available: HyperV, XenServer, … Read more…

XenDeskop and PVS: You Must Restart Your Computer…

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Most XenDesktop deployments are not rolled out all at once – they are usually done in phases: demo, pilot, test, initial, major, and completion. And more often then not, these phases span months if not years depending on the size of the project. Or sometimes hardware is purchased at different times and happens to be before and after a release of new processor tech. The below error can be a bit hard to track down: … Read more…

VMware on FreeNAS the RIGHT way

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I see a lot of posts on the FreeNAS forums asking about performance for VMware\Hyper-V or any other hypervisor using FreeNAS as the backing storage for virtual machines. Then I see the specs of the systems those people are looking to build or already have built and I frown a bit. First, let me say that FreeNAS is more than capable of handling the task of storage for your home virtual lab – if you … Read more…

Upgrade to the Home Lab

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My home lab environment (or home datacenter as it is starting to become…) started several years ago. First I had just a Server 2003 box that was a DC, file server, RAS server…then Server 2008 and Hyper-V beta came out. A few more disks were purchased to store virtual machines – but 2 spindles and limited RAM only goes so far. Then Server 2008R2 was released so the host received an upgrade – both the … Read more…

ESX PSOD – Can’t Access TTY

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It’s not a good day when an ESX host goes down…thankfully HA brought the VMs back up on another host, but still. Then when the host doesn’t boot back up after…it gets worse. Turns out there was an issue with the storage controller for the local drives – had to load the foreign config and bring the array healthy again. That worked successfully – and ESX started to boot…then I was greeted with this screen: …stuck in busybox. … Read more…