Little bits of information someone might find useful, or not
Thin-provisioned disks can be pretty useful in ESXi. There’s no need to pre-allocate storage or have huge amounts of unused, but allocated, storage sitting idle. However, whilst thin-provisioned disks can semalessly grow themselves, they cannot be shrunk as easily. For example, if you wrote 10GB of data to a thin-provisioned disk and then deleted it, although from the VM’s perspective...
Backups are important – and VMs should be no exception to that. VMware does have their own official backup solution (vSphere Data Protection), however if you’re running on the free version of ESXi or want something a little bit less resource-heavy, ghettoVCB is a good, and free, alternative – perfect for a home lab! Pre-requisites SSH access to your ESXi...
Whilst looking to spin up a new CoreOS VM to run Docker containers in, I noticed that they had added support for configuring cloud-config via VMware’s Guestinfo interface. In short, instead of putting your cloud-config in to an ISO an attaching it to the VM, you can embed it within the VM’s configuration file. To me, this seems like a far cleaner...
Recently, whilst migrating some Hyper-V VMs to ESXi, I ran in to issues booting the VMs after migration. On boot, the EFI partition wasn’t found and couldn’t be booted. Thankfully, it’s a rather simple procedure to reinstall Grub EFI. Power on the VM and allow it to get stuck on the boot screen searching for an EFI partition. Grab the...
