VMware recently posted two new Whitepapers, which are most definitely worth reading: VMware VMFS Volume Management Technical explanation as to how VMFS Volume Manager handles disks that are presented to the ESX server. This informational note covers use settings to mount or resignature volumes that appear as duplicates to the original volumes created by VMFS. SQL Server and VMware Virtual [...]

I’ve been playing around with my vSphere/Next gen ESX lab. I was replaying the VMworld lab and one of the assignments was to  resize a VMFS volume. Yes that’s correct, resize not extent. Extents have been discussed by many and the general consensus is avoid them if/when possible. But when running out of diskspace you don’t always have the option [...]

I received a private message on the VMTN Community that the vCenter Mobile Access forum had been opened up. I wasn’t sure if I could blog about it but John Troyer just posted a message on twitter so it’s out in the open. Read the VMTN blog post about vCenter Mobile Access for more info or just watch the youtube [...]

@lamw pointed me out via twitter to the “diy” VCB Management Console. The “vcbMC” is a front end  for scheduling and creating backup jobs based on VMware Consolidated Backup. As “athlon_crazy” points out you don’t need to remember all the VCB commands and parameters. You can use vcbMC to browse all your VM’s and back them up according to the [...]

Eric Siebert has tweaked his vLaunchpad. Instead of a top 10 Blogs he changed it to a top 20 Blogs because of the enormous amount of high quality blogs these days. I’m proud that I’m still number one on Eric’s list, heck I’m proud to even be part of the list with people like Mike Laverick, Scott Lowe, Jason Boche, [...]

VMFS Blocksizes have always been a hot topic regarding storage performance. It has been discussed by many including Eric Siebert on ITKE and Gabe also opened a topic on VMTN and he answered  his own question at the bottom. Steve Chambers wrote a great article about Disk Alignment and Blocksize on VI:OPS which also clearly states:”the VMFS block size is [...]

On the VI Toolkit blog there’s a great article for people like me. They explain how to speed up your scripts. I’m no powershell guru, and these kind of articles are more than welcome to boost my scripting skills. In short, it comes down to these three tips: Try to load as many objects as possible into arrays beforehand. Once [...]