Over the last couple of months I gathered the following tweaks for a better performance insight the virtual machine, besides disabling / uninstalling useless services and devices:

Disable the pre-logon screensaver:
Open Regedit
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
Change the value of “ScreenSaveActive” to 0.
Disable updates of the last access time attribute for your NTFS filesystem, especially for i/o intensive vm’s [...]

Via the Dutch VMUG site I landed on a new blog, well new… for me new. This blog is maintained by Toni Verbeiren and he created an excellent article about monitoring performance stats for the scsi controllers inside a VM:

A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if [...]

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 [...]