Filtering logs in ESXi 6.0 - A practical example

Recently I rented a new server with an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i controller and - of course - installed VMware ESXi 6.0 on it. I will soon migrate my "production workloads" (the V-Front Online Depot, the ESXi Patch Tracker site and my Zimbra E-Mail server) onto this box to improve their availability. A disk failure is one of the most likely disaster scenarios, so a hardware RAID controller with two mirrored disks will certainly help.

After I had the host installed and configured I did a routine check of the log files and found a lot of SCSI errors like these in /var/log/vmkernel.log:

cpu1:34460)NMP: nmp_ThrottleLogForDevice:3178: Cmd 0x1a (0x439d80668b00, 0) to dev "naa.600605b0058b25f01c995a4f0b03da18" on path "vmhba1:C2:T0:L0" Failed: H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0. Act:NONE
cpu1:32779)ScsiDeviceIO: 2646: Cmd(0x439d80716d00) 0x4d, CmdSN 0x1 from world 34425 to dev "naa.600605b0058b25f01c995a4f0b03da18" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x20 0x0.

These errors were referring to the RAID 1 disk, and first I was worried about them - according to KB289902 the D:0x2 translates to "Device: Check condition" and the sense data codes 0x5 0x24 0x0 and 0x5 0x20 0x0 mean "Illegal request", "Invalid Field in CDB", resp. "Invalid command operation code". I double checked that the RAID controller is on the VMware HCL, I searched the Internet for these errors, found few peoples' posts describing this issue, but no solution. I even updated the firmware of the controller, all to no avail ... and then, finally, I stumbled over KB1031221 which - basically - describes that these errors are "normal" and "can be safely ignored".

Well, that calmed me down... But I'm a log purist: I wanted to get rid of these false error messages in vmkernel.log!

What's new in the V-Front Online Depot - or - how to install ESXi on an HP Pavilion 17 notebook

Recently I added some new NIC drivers to the V-Front Online Depot. Well, they are not really new, but were created back in 2011/12 by a Japanese guy who goes by the nickname ichi. He was actively participating in Dave Mishchenko's vm-help.com forums and posted the drivers there.

Although I was aware of them since then I did not add them to the Depot before - I thought that no one would really need them these days, because the NIC models that they support are pretty old and rarely used today. I was wrong, at least in one case, because I needed one of these drivers myself to install ESXi on a brand new HP Pavilion 17 notebook that I just purchased ...

CPU Microcode Updates revisited: What's new in ESXi 6.0?

Almost two years ago I wrote an FAQ post on CPU Microcode updates with ESXi 5.x. This still gets a lot of hits, but - although the general information about Microcodes still applies - the ESXi related information needs an update, because things have changed with ESXi 6.0.

So what's new and different now?