BernieT wrote a nice blog about why you should enable write cache. Check out his findings, below a short outtake. Explaining Write mode (basic’s). Write through -> When a write request is received by the RAID controller, the controller will not respond to the O/S with a “write success” until the data is written to the physical disk/s. Write back [...]

VMware just released 3 critical patches and a general patch for ESX 3.0.x. So if you are still using 3.0.x pick them up and patch your environment!

I was always under the impression that ESX 3.x still used “strict co-scheduling” as 2.5.x did. In other words when you have a multi vcpu vm all vcpu’s need to be scheduled and started at the same time on seperate cores/cpu’s. You can imagine that this can cause the VM to have high “ready times”, which means waiting for physical [...]

Three totally different command line tips/tricks this time: Dump a specific disk via the VCB Proxy monolithic(1 big chunk): Open a cmd and goto your VCB installation path “vcbexport.exe -M 1 -d test01.vmdk -s TestVM/TestVM.vmdk” Any swapping going on or more info on memory usage in general: Open a putty sesion to your ESX box “watch -n 1 cat /proc/vmware/sched/mem” [...]