Today I received the following error at a customer site when applying patch via the Update Manager:”Metadata for patch missing.” After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter wasn’t running on port 80 but on 81 for some reason. Opening up the ESX Firewall and restarting the VMware Update Manager service seems to fix this problem. […]

Forbes just uploaded a brand new version of the VMReference Card. Download it, print it and keep it close!
Source: http://vmreference.com/
Here is version 1.1 in all its shining glory.
I’ve made several corrections (thanks everyone), added a few extra snippets and dusted it with a sprinkling of handy tips and tricks.
The biggest change is a small 3i […]

According to this new KB article there’s a backdoor for ESX3i:

Log in to your ESX Server 3i at the console.
Press Alt+F1 to switch to the console window.
Enter unsupported to start the Tech Support Mode login process. Note that no text will appear on the console window.
Enter the password for the root user. Tech Support Mode […]

Vinternals wrote a short article on how to de-install or hide the Capacity Planner plugin for VirtualCenter:
Capacity planner is rather pesky to have hanging around on every VirtualCenter box in the enterprise… especially if you use some other tool for the job! So just add this line to the end of your VirtualCenter install script:
msiexec […]

There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:

Shutdown the VM
Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
done!

And from the service console:

vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec […]

One of my customers wanted to use the default VCB framework but did not want to quiesce the VM for several reasons. (Databases, Active Directory etc.) I could not find an option in the config.js file but noticed the following in the file glue.js:
// A fallback to be able to switch to […]

I just P2V’ed a Suse Linux Server with the cold boot iso. When booting I was confronted with a kernel panic. This is caused by the fact that the modules for the LSI Logic or Bus Logic SCSI card aren’t available, which causes the root volume to be unmountable. I tried to boot from the […]

The PDF I blogged about yesterday included info about 3.0.x and 3.5 features. One of the things that was missing was the option to have the swapfiles created locally. In 3.0.x this done by setting the option “sched.swap.dir” in the .vmx file. The only problem is that this prohibits you from using VMotion for these […]

Using the console it’s very easy to rescan a specific vmhba which can be useful when you are troubleshooting. For lazy people like me it’s disturbing that you have to type the command twice if you want to rescan both HBA’s. Well, as of version 3.5 VMware introduced a new setting in Advanced configuration section […]

When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is:
A while back VMGuru.com hosted a […]