Category Archives: Vcenter

Recover ESXi 7.x Bootbank

November 15, 2022 1:06 PM / Leave a Comment /

During the the installation of a VMware VIB file I lost connectivity to my usb stick containing the installation of esxi. Facing the following errors within ESXi Log:

Could not install image profile: Failed to copy files from /tmp/stagebootbank to /altbootbank: [Errno 5] Input/output error

Device or filesystem with identifier mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 has entered the All Paths Down Timeout state after being in the All Paths Down state for 140 seconds. I/Os will now be fast failed.

Lost connectivity to storage device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0. Path vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 is down. Affected datastores: BOOTBANK1″, “BOOTBANK2”, “LOCKER-624c4a59-8a3bf37a-8986-e435c87de92a.

After a reboot I saw the error message “BANK5: not a VMware boot bank” however BOOTBANK2 was intact so ESXi was booting with last working state from BOOTBANK2 (BANK6 in my case). Checking with “ls /altbootbank” I saw that alot of files where missing. I started to check if the filesystem was damaged with:

#Check ESXi bootbank device
vmkfstools -P /altbootbank

#Check and repair filesystem
dosfsck -r -w /dev/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:5

While mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:5 is the output of the previous command and :5 is the partition number. So :5 is BANK5 and :6 is BANK6.

Afterwards you can completely copy over the contents of /bootbank to /altbootbank with “cp”. You need to edit boot.cfg and modify “updated” to a number lower (-1). While the next VIB or update/patch you install on esxi will completely maintain the bootbanks again.

Posted in: ESXi, Hardware, vCenter, VMWare / Tagged: , , , , ,

Synology Virtual Machine Manager increase vDisk Limit

November 25, 2020 4:11 PM / 4 Comments /

Recently I tried to run a VMware vCenter Appliance (vCSA) on my Synology. Trying to import the provided OVA File results in an unplausible error, so I tried to convert it with the OVFTool thats provided by VMware on the installation disk. I converted or extracted the vmdk diskimages via OVFTool, its basically achieveable by calling ovftool.exe <ova> file.

After that I imported all vmdk images to my Virtual Machine Manager via Images -> Disk Images and started “importing” a virtual machine with the uploaded diskimages. Sadly Synology limits the maximum vDisks for new and imported virtual machines to 8. This is not a hard limit as Virtual Machine Manager is run by qemu and qemu limit is 256 disks.

So how about trying to add the disks after the virtual machine creation via command line? I was messing around with this but the vdisks are added via virtio-scsi and I found this hard to add the disks manually.

So lets see if we can achieve this a different way. I analysed the JavaScript used by Virtual Machine Manager. This can be found here “/volume1/@appstore/Virtualization/ui/virtualization.js”. There is even a check in it, that prompts you with an error if a machine has more than 8 vDisks. So how can we increase the maximum virtual machine attachable disks?

Open “/volume1/@appstore/Virtualization/ui/virtualization.js” and edit the value of “this.maxVdiskNum=8” from 8 to 16. Save the file, gzip it again via gzip -k virtualization.js and restart Virtual Machine Manager or your whole NAS.

However for a vCenter it takes sometime to setup the machine. Keep the first two disks with VirtIO and all other disks on SATA Setting.

Good Luck.

Posted in: Synology, vCenter, VMWare / Tagged: , , , ,