VMware ESXi 6.7 fails to connect VM web console with "You have reached the maximum number of connected consoles: 40. Please contact your administrator."

VMware ESXi 6.7 fails to connect VM web console with "You have reached the maximum number of connected consoles: 40. Please contact your administrator."

I tried disconnecting all the open session to vCenter which never helped. 

I also tried to restarting the VM which also never helped. I managed to narrow it down to being a problem with the VM and not vCenter, because the web console was working for other VM's. 

The fix for me was to shutdown the VM, remove the VM from the vCenter inventory (don't delete from disk), then Register it from the datastore again. Then the error disappeared. 

Upgrading VMware ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 6

Download and insert the VMware ESXi 6.0 media into the ESXi 5.5 host and boot from the disc drive, you will be presented with the following screen highlight ESXi-6.0.0-2492585-standard Installer and hit Enter.

Hit Enter at the welcome screen.

Hit F11 on the EULA screen to accept the terms.

As ESXi 5.5 was already installed on this host, the setup detected a previous installation. Highlight it and hit Enter.

In this instance, select Upgrade and hit Enter.

Review the confirmation screen and hit F11.

The upgrade process took about 3 minutes installing onto SSD disk.

The upgrade successfully completed for me hit Enter to reboot the host.

VMware ESXi 5.5 Host Purple Screen with "Exception 14 in World 63445:vmm1:VMNAME IP"

The same ESXi 5.5 host has purple'd screen today returning the same error for two different Virtual Machines.

According to the following VMware link;

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2059053 this is a known issue related to using the E1000/E1000E Virtual Network adapter. Although in a production deployment I alwasy use VMNET3 (VMware Tools req'd) for Windows Server 2012 R2 Servers as this was only a lab server I never paid much attention to the network adapter when I created my first template.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1001805

VMXNET 3: The VMXNET 3 adapter is the next generation of a paravirtualized NIC designed for performance, and is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2. It offers all the features available in VMXNET 2, and adds several new features like multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery. For information about the performance of VMXNET 3, see Performance Evaluation of VMXNET3 Virtual Network Device. Because operating system vendors do not provide built-in drivers for this card, you must install VMware Tools to have a driver for the VMXNET 3 network adapter available.

VMXNET 3 is supported only for virtual machines version 7 and later, with a limited set of guest operating systems:

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7, 8, XP, 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and later

·         32- and 64-bit versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and later

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Asianux 3 and later

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Debian 4

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Debian 5

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Debian 6

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and later

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Sun Solaris 10 and later

·         32- and 64-bit versions of Oracle Linux 4.9 and later

I change all of the Windows Server 2012 R2 vmnic's to use VMET3, and so far so good there has been no purple screens. Obviously in a production environment you would maybe go to the effort of patching the server.

The other thing that was clear to check was the build of ESXi 5.5 that was installed on the server, the physical hardware is a HP ProLiant. Therefore it should have a HP opptomized build of ESXi, with all the integrated driver for that hardware. http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/servers/solutions.html?compURI=1499005#tab=TAB4 it turns out in this case it was a base ESXi 5.5 install, therefore I also reinstalled ESXi to ensure the HP build supplied all the correct drivers.

Configuring StarWinds iSCSI SAN (Free) Edition for a VMware vSphere 5.5 Nested Lab

StarWinds offer a free iSCSI SAN that can be installed on a Windows Server to provided an iSCSI target for VMware ESXi 5.5 hosts. This can be good if you are labing vSphere, and you need some shared storage. http://www.starwindsoftware.com/downloads-free. The free edition does have some limitations, the most restrictive is probably the 128GB limit on your LUN's. This is OK for a lab, as you probably would not use a software-based iSCSI target in a production environment.

Once you have downloaded the iSCSI executable, install it on a Windows Server. As my environment is entirely nested I added another Virtual Disk to my vCenter Server (again you would never do this in production) to store the iSCSI Image File.

Click Image File.

Now use the ... button from the wizard, and point to your partition that is going to host the Image File. You must name the Image File, and ensure you have .img extension on the file. I have set the size to 75GB, click Next.

Tick Asynchronous Mode and click Next.

Select Write-back Caching and then click Next.

As this is a new installation choose Create a New Target from the drop down and give the Target Alias a name. You should ensure Allow Multiple Concurrent iSCSI Connections (Clustering) is ticked, if you are planning to connect up multiple ESXi hosts. Click Next.

Copy and paste the full target name to Notepad as it will be required in vSphere. Click Finish.

Click on the Devices menu and select the ImageFile that you just created. Right click on it and select Attach to Target...

Click Attach to the Existing Target click Next.

Select the target that you created, I named mine iSCSI. Click Next.

Click Finish.

The StarWinds iSCSI software is now configured, open the VMware vCenter console and select one of your ESXi hosts. Click on the Configuration tab, and click on Storage Adapters. Click Add.

You will be asked to Add Software iSCSI Adapter click OK. Once the software iSCSI HBA is installed on an ESXi host it cannot be removed.

Once the operation completes right click on the Software iSCSI HBA and select Properties.

Click on the Static Discovery tab, and click Add.

Enter the IP address of your iSCSI server, provided you have not changed the port it should be 3260, and copy and paste the iSCSI Target Name from your Notepad document. Click OK.

vSphere will then confirm that it is now going to rescan all of the HBA's, click OK.

Now click on the Storage tab, and use the Add Storage... button.

Select Disk/LUN and click Next.

Provided the software iSCSI adapter is configured correctly you should see ROCKET iSCSI Disk select this and click Next.

Depending on your requirements click VMFS-5. Version 5 offers many improvements over VMFS-3 for full details using this VMware Documentation link http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50%2FGUID-7552DAD4-1809-4687-B46E-ED9BB42CE277.html click Next.

Click Next.

Name the Datastore and click Next.

Choose Maximum Available Size and click Next.

Click Finish on the confirmation page.

The datastore should now appear as an available storage location for that host.

Right click on Cluster01 and select Browse Datastore, and you should be able to view the files and folders on the datastore.

If you return to the StarWinds Management Console you should be able to view the active iSCSI Session by clicking on Targets and then iSCSI Sessions.