load balancing active/active SAN’s

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 [...]

VMReference Card 1.1!

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 [...]

Broken Mirror freezes ESX host

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.

New patches for 3.0.x

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): [...]

vmkping results in “syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0×7616c4e3, kernel: 0×50f63116)”

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 [...]

New version of ESX 3.5 and patches for 3.0.x

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: [...]

ESX 3.5 and weird DRS/HA behaviour…

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 [...]

VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 3

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 [...]

Issue with performance stats in VirtualCenter?

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. [...]

Installing VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 SP4 server

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, [...]