VMware just released 9 new patches for ESX 3.5: ESX350-200901401-SG – PATCH – Security – KB 1006651 – Updates VMkernel VMX hostd. But most important fix that this patch containts definitely is: VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 U3 I/O failure on SAN LUNs, and LUN queue is blocked indefinitely. For a full description of this issue, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008130. ESX350-200901402-SG – [...]

I was delivering a Site Recovery Manager Jumpstart today. During the configuration of the Storage Replication Adapter(SRA) the task got stuck at 23%. I’ve seen the configuration of the SRA get stuck once before at 23% so I knew it was the “DiscoverLuns” command that failed for one reason or the other. We ran the configuration of the SRA again [...]

Just noticed this pingback. The topic title “Balancing LUN paths on your ESX hosts with powershell” sounded promising so I headed over. Justin Emerson is the owner of the blog and he wrote a short but effective script that changes the active paths on your active/active SAN(FIXED). After watching this video that was posted by the VI Toolkit team, I [...]

I was working on an ESXTOP post when Jason Boche published his blog post “ESXTOP Drilldown“. My post was similar so I decided to dump the post and start over again within a few weeks or so. Yesterday I encountered a performance issue at a customer site. One thing I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that “ESXTOP” [...]

I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following: inconsistent portgroup names inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts [...]

Recently a customer asked me if HP Flex-10 was fully supported for ESX(i) or not. For those that don’t know what Flex-10 is: HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module is the industry’s first interconnect that flexibly allocates the bandwidth of a 10 Gb Ethernet network port across four NIC connections. This eliminates the need for additional costly NICs, switches [...]

I was just skimming through the new KB articles and noticed this one “Verify the health of ESX Server Operating System“: There are many ways to look at ESX host performance. This article focuses on quick assessment of the 4 main resources: Disk Space CPU Memory Network The article refers to different KB articles for pinpointing and solving performance related problems. I [...]