Tag Archives: vmware

How to add a GPU to a Dell PowerEdge R330 Server and use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi

I am happy to announce that today I was able to successfully add a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to my Dell PowerEdge R330 server in order to use it for Plex transcoding on a VM under ESXi. After extensive research, I ended up settling on a NVIDIA Quadro P400 which can be found used for fairly cheap these days.

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Stop “sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument” messages on Ubuntu (vmware)

I recently ran into an issue after deploying a new Ubuntu VM where the following message would spam my syslog server every 5 seconds:

sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument
sda: failed to get sgio uid: No such file or directory

Turns out these are multipathd messages that VMware began reporting in the operating system a while back and the following resolution can safely be applied:

  1. Login to ESXi and locate the VM
  2. Click edit
  3. Under “VM Options”, locate “Advanced”
  4. Under “Configuration Parameters” click on “Edit Configuration”
  5. Click on “Add parameter” and a new empty field will populate
  6. Click on the new “key” field and input disk.EnableUUID
  7. Finally, click on the “value” field and input TRUE

Click Ok and save. Now you must shutdown the VM and start it back up in order for changes to take effect.

The messages should now stop appearing in the logs.

How To Create And Secure An Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM On ESXi 7.0

Introduction

In this guide I will show you how to create an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM on ESXi 7.0 and setup basic security such as firewall and SSH key.

Download Ubuntu Server 20.04

Head over to the releases page and download the image. For this guide, we will be using the “64-bit PC (AMD64) server install image”.

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Send ESXi Host Logs To Remote Syslog Server

Under the ESXi host, navigate to Host->Manage->System->Advanced Settings and search for Syslog.global.logHost and click edit. Now input the address of the syslog server, in my case, a Graylog VM:

udp://192.168.139.11:8515
ESXi Host Advanced Settings

Enable SSH on the host and login. Navigate to /etc/vmware/firewall and create a file name.xml and add the following editing as needed:

<ConfigRoot>
  <service id="0000">
    <id>graylog</id>
    <rule id='0000'>
      <direction>outbound</direction>
      <protocol>udp</protocol>
      <porttype>dst</porttype>
      <port>8515</port>
    </rule>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
    <required>true</required>
  </service>
</ConfigRoot>

Save the file and reload the firewall by issuing

esxcli network firewall unload

esxcli network firewall load

You should now start seeing logs in your syslog server. Just be warned that it is not persistent across reboots.


How to force passthrough of internal USB controller on a Dell PowerEdge Server

Dell and vmware logo

Recently I’ve decided to give Frigate a try since as some of you already know, motion detection on most cameras can be very flaky at times and I was looking for a permanent solution to false alerts outside my home. One of the issues I encountered during the process was Frigate suggests the use of a Google Coral Accelerator for object detection (which I was lucky enough to score one during the chip shortage) but since my Frigate instance is running under a VM on ESXi, I needed to passthrough the Coral to the VM which turns out it doesn’t work under ESXi 7.x. Simply plugging in the Coral to my PowerEdge R330 server and passing it through to the VM wasn’t enough.

ESXi Host PCI devices settings