If you haven’t read or read about the must have PowerCLI book “VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration“, by Luc Dekens, Alan Renouf, Glen Sizemore, Arnim van Lieshout and Jonathan Medd, then you need to check it out. The book will show you how to automate your VMware infrastructure from vCenter to VM’s. Automate… Read More »
When you upgrade your vSphere environment you normally also upgrade the VM’s virtual hardware to version 7, to take advantage of the new features. This is pretty normal procedure for all VMware admins. But in some very very rare cases you might need to move a VM upgraded to hardware version 7, to a host… Read More »
Using IBM Blades and Cisco switches to run your ESX enviroment? If yes, have you tested what happens if you unplug the network cables going into one switch? If you like me have bundled 2 or more cables going from one switch, to one backbone switch and done the same for the other switch, then… Read More »
Yesterday I by mistake extended a disk on a VM that had snapshots. Using vmkfstools. Kind of like this thread (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/238035). This resulted in the following PowerOn error: Failed to power on Servername on Host in Cluster: Cannot open the disk ‘/vmfs/volumes/LUN/Folder/VM.vmdk’ Reason: The parent virtual machine disk has been modified since the child was… Read More »
Duncan Epping has released a great post on how to partition your ESX 4.0 (vSphere) using scripting and the grafical installer http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/05/27/partitioning-your-esx-host-part-ii/ You cannot define the sizes of the /boot, vmkcore, and /vmfs partitions when you use the graphical or text installation modes. You can define these partition sizes when you do a scripted installation.… Read More »
Today when I needed to upgrade my VC database from MSSQL2000 to MSSQL 2005 i came upon these quick guides. http://blog.core-it.com.au/?p=27 http://spininfo.homelinux.com/news/VirtualCenter/2008/01/06/Howto_Move_Migrate_Design_VC_DB_from_SQL2000_to_SQL2005__
Over the past few months we have seen a few Windows servers with a black screen. Meaning You can’t see the logon promt You get a black screen when you connect with RDP We found that the problem was caused by a change in the Windows color scheme. The solution is to copy the color… Read More »
But ESX as a VM with running VM’s is new. It’s now possible to run ESX as a VM on an ESX server or in a Workstation. See howto http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/
Right after lunch today I had a host (3.5 U3) crach with a kernel panic. It shouldn’t be a problem for clusters running HA, but on this cluster I had disabled HA bacause of an error and hadn’t had the time to depug :-(. So my VM’s couldn’t be started on a new host and… Read More »
After we have allowed Windows 2008 Servers in our VMware VI enviroment, we been having problems sysprepping Windows 2008 Server. So here is a quick guide to sysprep a Windows 2008 server in a VMware VI enviroment. (Use this workaround until VMware VI allows you run sysprep against a WIN2008 Server) Change the source or… Read More »