In a couple of hours my colleague Remco and I will be flying to VMworld, Cannes. I will be leaving my laptop at home so no blogs over the next couple of days! I want to spend as much time as possible gathering information/knowledge and making new virtual contacts!

When troubleshooting a VMotion problem on an unpatched ESX 3.0.2 update 1 host today I wanted to use vmkping. This constantly resulted in the following error message:
syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0×7616c4e3, kernel: 0×50f63116)
I did not find any useful info on google so I checked the VMware knowledge base, maybe some over at VMware can read […]

VMware just released a new version of the ESX 3.5 ISO according to their download site. The release notes haven’t been update yet so unfortunately I can’t tell you what’s included, but my guess would be the patches released on the 17th of January.
Latest Released Version: […]

PeterB posted a topic about all known HA advanced options on the Dutch VMUG. If anyone has more options please post ‘em and let’s try to make this list as long as possible:

das.failuredetectiontime - Amount of milliseconds, timeout time for isolation response action
das.isolationaddress - IP adres the ESX hosts uses for it’s heartbeat. It will […]

For those attending the VMworld, check out the time table Rene created in Excel. Will come in handy when deciding which session to attend!
I am attending VMworld Europe 2008 Next week in Cannes. Today I was looking what kind of sessions wil be presented. On the VMworld site there is a link to see a […]

During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node […]

According to this new KB article there’s a backdoor for ESX3i:

Log in to your ESX Server 3i at the console.
Press Alt+F1 to switch to the console window.
Enter unsupported to start the Tech Support Mode login process. Note that no text will appear on the console window.
Enter the password for the root user. Tech Support Mode […]

During the VMware course DSA I discovered that it is in fact possible to dump specific vmdk’s with the use of the default VCB tools. While I was finding out a way to script this I was notified in one of my blogs by JTurver(Justin Turver) that he already wrote a script that could do […]

VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:
Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 - Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.
PR:225357 - Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are […]

Two weeks ago I finally received my VCP welcome kit with my VCP number. It took a while but I’m glad I finally received it. For some reason VMware decided to send me another VCP kit with another VCP number. Weird… Well it’s better to have two than none I guess…