I was always under the impression that ESX 3.x still used “strict co-scheduling” as 2.5.x did. In other words when you have a multi vcpu vm all vcpu’s need to be scheduled and started at the same time on seperate cores/cpu’s. You can imagine that this can cause the VM to have high “ready times”, [...]

Three totally different command line tips/tricks this time:

Dump a specific disk via the VCB Proxy monolithic(1 big chunk):
Open a cmd and goto your VCB installation path
“vcbexport.exe -M 1 -d test01.vmdk -s TestVM/TestVM.vmdk”
Any swapping going on or more info on memory usage in general:
Open a putty sesion to your ESX box
“watch -n 1 cat /proc/vmware/sched/mem”
Reinitialize the [...]

Because I will be posting less in the upcoming weeks about problems I face at customer sites I will try to post some cool command-line tip or trick I discovered or picked up somewhere….
open ESX console ,via putty and type the following
vm-support -x
result: all the VMID’s also known as World ID’s,
And if you’re colleagues hardly [...]

I had some spare time on my hands so I decided to add some useful stuff to the VM Reporting powershell script that was posted on this blog. This is what I ended up with, there’s still room for improvement like snapshot information and scsi controller info…

Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.1.1 -User admin -Password admin
$Report = @()
get-vm [...]

A while back I wrote a scripted install aka “cfg” file, and I just noticed I never published it. Check it out, it might be useful in one way or another. It also available for download here!
Especially changing the amount of active nics in a team can be useful, and enabling vmotion via the vimsh [...]

The common mis perception of the term “snapshot”, related to VMware, can cause huge problems. I’ve spend a lot of time the last years solving snapshot problems. For once and for all, a snapshot isn’t a static situation like a clone is. A snapshot can best be compared to a redo log, although technically it [...]

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 [...]

Update your bookmarks, EMC’s Chad Sakac recently started blogging and already wrote some cool article. Check out his blog and add it to your RSS reader and/or bookmarks.
A couple of outtakes:
I’ve been working with 10 joint VMware/EMC customers this week in NY, NJ and Houston (phew!), and was in Australia the week before last where [...]

I was just reading up on the PDF’s I gathered over the last couple of weeks and found the Scalable Storage Performance pdf extremely useful. It contains a good explanation about the queue depth setting and much more….
To reduce latency, ensure that the sum of active commands from all virtual machines does not consistently exceed [...]

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 [...]