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 […]

I just received the following:
New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2.
ESX Server patches can be accessed through the on-line ESX Server Patch Download tool:
[http://app.connect.vmware.com/e/er.aspx?s=524&lid=2272&elq=4D5713F997F04342981A231DF09609D0“>]
Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.
VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patches
ESX-1003516 (Critical): fixes an issue where snapshot of a Suspended Virtual Machine fails;includes a […]

Ernst, a regular poster of the Dutch VMug, posted a script for load balancing paths to an active/active SAN. What it does is select the next path for a LUN, in other words if there are four paths LUN1 will be reached via Path1, LUN2 via Path2 etc.
The script, also available for download here:
for PATHS […]

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 […]

Back in the days of ESX 2.5 I managed a bunch of IBM Servers. It regularly happened that when a raid mirror set broke the IBM ESX host(the only servers I witnessed this with…) froze completely. I thought this problem was fixed with 3.0.x and I thought it was a VMware problem.

There are a bunch of new patches released for 3.0.x:
New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.
VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patch Download Page
[http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_301.html]
ESX-1003504 (General): Fix for mptscsi_2xx Driver
ESX-1003505 (General): Fixes Network Connectivity Issues with Intel e1000 Driver
ESX-1003506 (General): […]

When troubleshooting a VMotion problem on an unpatched ESX 3.0.2 update 1 host today I wanted to use vmkping. This constantly resulted in the following error message:
syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0×7616c4e3, kernel: 0×50f63116)
I did not find any useful info on google so I checked the VMware knowledge base, maybe some over at VMware can read […]

VMware just released a new version of the ESX 3.5 ISO according to their download site. The release notes haven’t been update yet so unfortunately I can’t tell you what’s included, but my guess would be the patches released on the 17th of January.
Latest Released Version: […]

During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node […]