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 [...]

I was just testing the new, but still experimental feature, Distributed Power Management. I’ve installed 3 ESX Hosts and added all of them into an HA-DRS Cluster. I enabled DPM and set the mode to manual and pressed “Generate recommendations”. I had one host with an HA failure and DPM recommend me to switch off another host. Which in this [...]

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 installation CD with the “rescue” [...]

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 VM’s. In 3.5 VMware resolved [...]

For those who did not have any luck with the deleting of the dll(ssleay32.dll) described in this blog, there’s another possibility to enable the VMware Converter plugin without crashing your VirtualCenter client: Go to the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI] And set the following key to “Enabled” “C:\\Program Files\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\Virtual Infrastructure Client\\Plugins\\Converter Enterprise\\plugin.dll”

VMware just uploaded a cool PDF about configuring an iSCSI SAN. This particular PDF is created by EMC and deals about an EMC Celerra iSCSI SAN but there’s more than enough useful info in there for those who don’t own an EMC iSCSI SAN. The cool thing about the Celerra is the possibility to use “network load balancing”. Where most [...]

Today I encountered a weird phenomenon which I did not encounter yet. I installed the VMware Converter Plugin for VirtualCenter client, so far so good. Only thing left to do was to tick the checkbox to enable the plugin. But as soon as I ticked it the VirtualCenter client crashed without any warning. I rebooted the server, and tried it [...]