I was just rebuilding my “ESX in a box” setup. I wanted to install an iSCSI Virtual San Appliance but why should I? Your answer probably is: well because you need shared storage to do a VMotion / HA / DRS etc. Yes you are completely right I do need shared storage to have these [...]

VMware Wolf is generating some awesome blogposts lately:

Common system management issues in VMware Infrastructure
Common Network issues in VMware Infrastructure
Common Licensing issues in VMware Infrastructure

All the blog posts contain a downloadable html file with a grid. The grid contains problems followed by possible resolutions.

Great blog posts and very useful information, visit VMware Wolfs blog and download [...]

I wrote about RVTools 2.0 a month ago and suggested a couple of additions. Rob picked these suggestions by me and a couple of my readers up and started implementing them in his tool. Here’s the release notes for this new version:
Version 2.1 (November 2008)

Overall performance improvements.
New vInfo tab. The “vInfo” tab displays for each [...]

I just noticed this new KB article that deals about not being able to upgrade ESXi on a Dell box because of the fact that the virtual media is attached:
Upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
If you cannot upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2, use the following workaround:

Connect to the DRAC through ILO, as follows:

Open the [...]

I was just reading up on my Google Reader. A lot of information been dropped over the last couple of days and more and more people are getting active on the VMware blogoshere. One of the articles that really caught my attention was the “VM Template best practices (Linux)” by Leo Raikhman.
Leo did a great [...]

As of ESX 3.5 it was impossible to add an additional NIC to a team as active without resorting to editing the esx.conf file:
# Active and standby setup and maxActive from 1 to 2
mv /etc/vmware/esx.conf /tmp/esx.conf.bak
/bin/sed -e ’s/net\/vswitch\/child\[0001\]\/teamPolicy\/maxActive = \”1\”/net\/vswitch\/child\[0001\]\/teamPolicy\/maxActive = \”2\”/g’ /tmp/esx.conf.bak >> /etc/vmware/esx.conf
So as you can see, a “sed” command changed the maxActive [...]

Today I visited a customer that wanted to enable the VMware tools timesync during an automated install of a Windows VM. The customer didn’t want to use powershell / perl or anyother SDK enabled tool. So what’s left?
“C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareService.exe” –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″
So this command ticks the checkbox for timesync via VMware Tools, [...]

A lot of people have been asking for this: When will ESX 3.5 Update 3 be released? Well here’s your answer, download it now.
There are a couple of new things introduced:

Increase in vCPU per Core Limit — The limit on vCPUs per core has been raised from 8 (or 11 for VDI workloads) to 20. This [...]