Swapping and/or ballooning

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 […]

Performance stats gone

Clint discovered the following:
Source -
Ran into a problem while doing some performance testing on some test VMs. We found that we had no historical performance data for the VM or Host. All we had was real time data. This can be a major issue, especially when you are trying to troubleshoot or like in this […]

ESX(i) 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 Available now!

Check out the release notes, there are a lot of fixes in this update! There’s also an update to the Update Manager and the Converter plugin.
Download link
Releasenotes link

Customization specifications fails during entering password

For some weird reason the customization specification wizard in VirtualCenter 2.5 fails when entering the administrator password. The error: An internal error occurred, and the wizard is unable to store the administrator password securely.

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Update Manager: Metadata for patch missing

Today I noticed the following error at a customer site when I wanted to install the new patch bundle, ”Metadata for patch missing”. After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter was installed with a different http port number. For VMware Update Manager to work you will have to open up the firewall manually:
 esxcfg-firewall -o 81,tcp,out,UpdateManager
(Change the port number, in […]

New iso’s/builds coming up for 3i / 3.5 / VirtualCenter

There are new iso’s / builds coming up for 3i, 3.5 and VirtualCenter:
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1
Latest Version: 3.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 82663
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1
Latest Version: 2.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 79820
VMware ESXi 3.5 Installable Update 1
Latest Version: 3.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 82664
Unfortunately the iso’s aren’t available for download yet […]

Installing VMware Tools fails with “internal error 2203″

When updating VMware Tools the setup constantly bailed out without a decent error. So I decided to un-install the Tools and install them again. Un-installing went smooth but when installing it again I ended up with the error “internal error 2203″. After googling this error the Citrix website gave me the solution, check your tmp […]

VUM: Metadata for patch missing

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. […]

Performance counters bug for the cluster?

Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s […]

Unidentified Flying Partition?

Two days ago RyanWI posted about an unidentified partition which generates errors in the vmkernel log. Today I visited a customer with the same setup, Dell servers and an EMC SAN and I was curious if I could reproduce this error. Well I did not had not much trouble reproducing the error because they already […]