Yesterday I posted about the mbrscan and mbralign tool that NetApp created. This triggered Nick Triantos of NetApp to write an excellent detailed technical article on why you need to set the alignment: When setup routine queries the CHS (Cylinder / Head / Sector) information of the disk from the BIOS, the CHS data doesn’t actually corresponded to anything physical. [...]

One of the most promising features in my opinion for the upcoming version of ESX definitely is “Host Profiles”. With host profiles you can ensure that each and every single ESX Host has been installed in the same way. But this feature isn’t available yet, and you would probably like to know if at least all hosts in a Cluster [...]

I’ve been test driving a script called “mbrscan” for a while now. Today I noticed that this script had already been released a couple of weeks ago. The cool thing about the script is that you can check the alignment of the VM’s filesystem from the outside. The script runs directly on the service console of ESX. NetApp’s Nick Triantos [...]

While doing a “mini-healthcheck” at a customer site I noticed a specific Datastore with less than 2% of free diskspace. After a bit of research an orphaned VMDK was found. Orphaned vmdk’s are virtual hard-disks that are not connected to a VM. Probably because they were removed from the inventory without deleting the files. You can easily find these orphaned [...]

I already announced it yesterday, but the Nomination form actually was released today. John wrote a great blog article on vExpert of which the following is an outtake: If you aren’t active in online places like the VMware Communities or the blogs, or if you aren’t active in your local virtualization community, then this award isn’t for you. However, if [...]

Most of you know that I’m a VMware employee. To be more precise I’m a VMware PSO Senior Consultant. PSO stands for “Professional Services Organisation”: The global VMware Professional Services Organization (PSO) influences the success of each VMware implementation. The PSO team is dedicated to the success of the customer and their virtualization strategy and implementation. The PSO team ensures [...]

Yesterday VMware released a patch for the Site Recovery Manager Client: Client Patch for Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Update 1 This client patch for Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Update 1 corrects a performance problem observed at sites that support more than seven ESX hosts. If you are running SRM, it might worth downloading the patch and installing it! The download [...]