Unitek NetApp Training Blog

Okay, so I figured this out a few weeks ago and posted a few quick answers to the “How Do I align disks with ESXi server” discussions out there and told a few of my students how to do it. But I have finally had a few minutes to put together all the steps and make them available.

The problem, in case you didn’t know, was how to install the mbrtools from NetApp on an ESXi server. The mbrtools are used to align vmdks. This was fine when we had ESX servers because they had the Service Console that we could connect to and install/run the tools from. ESXi is so stripped down that it makes this task a bit more difficult. The key to the solution is that NetApp has a new version of the mbrtools from Virtual Storage Console 2.1.1 (VSC) that are made just for ESXi servers. The installation guide from NetApp says to just download the tools, but it does take few more steps than that. The following post describes how to install these tools on an ESXi server.

Before I get into all that, I will also point out that I discovered another way to do this. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Edition 5.0 also has the capability of aligning disks during both the P2V and V2V processes. I had to make sure, though, that while going through the wizard to convert the unaligned vm I explicitly chose “Select Volumes to Copy” under “Data Copy Type” when I got to the Options Section. So now it seems you have a couple of options.

Steps to install mbrtools on ESXi server

1. Download tools from VSC 2.1.1
   
2. Upload the file to ESXi server datastore
   
3. Enable ESXi server for Shell/SSH access. This means you will have to directly connect to the ESXi server console. For example, on my Dell server I have the DRAC that I can get console access through.
4. So from the Console I hit F2 in order to “Customize System/View Logs”.
   
5. Login as the root user and your screen should now look like this
   
6. Use your keyboard to select “Troubleshooting Options”. Then using your keyboard make sure you enable “ESXi Shell” and “SSH”.
   
7. SSH to ESXi server and log on as root.
   1. Cd to /vmfs/volumes
   2. Ls to see datastores
   3. Cd to the datastore you uploaded file to
   4. Use tar to extract the files
      1. “tar xvzf mbrtools_esxi.tgz”
         
8. The files are extracted to /opt/ontap
   1. Copy the files to /opt/ontap (use the GUID value for the volume name not the friendly name.)
      1. “cp -r /vmfs/volumes/4eaf88ec-4a55fdbf-05af-0015179870f8/opt/ontap /opt/ontap”
         
9. Cd to /opt/ontap/ and ls
10. You will see the tools and you can use them just as you might have with ESX
    

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Tags: How Do I align disks with ESXi serve, VMware