Yesterday evening I witnessed a weird phenomenon. We had to bring down a complete environment to move a 19″ rack to a different location. We switched the SAN on, waited a couple of minutes and switched the ESX hosts on. When the ESX hosts finished booting we booted the VirtualCenter. Everything looked normal in the […]

Today a customer called about a problem with the Exchange VM. For some reason the ESX Host where this VM resided was always swapping/ballooning. They checked and double checked the settings but could not find the problem. After a quick scan I noticed that there were limits set on memory for each VM. This particular […]

VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:
Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 - Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.
PR:225357 - Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are […]

I noticed at a few customer sites that the Performance tab of VirtualCenter was getting sluggish but never got the chance to really pinpoint the problem. A couple of days ago user “jterpstr” posted about this on the VMTN forum and it seems that the old rows aren’t deleted from the database for some reason. […]

Today I encountered a weird problem. When I started the installation of VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 Server I received the following error notification:”Setup cannot continue. The “VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.0″ requires Update 1 Rollup for Windows 2000 SP4. Please see KB article 816542 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816542/.”
I checked the server but the patch was installed, […]

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 […]