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. [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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Try it out:
Get a free 60-day evaluation of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), an end-to end solution for virtual desktop management that gives you the ability to deliver desktops from the data center for greater control and flexibility. With VMware VDI, you get the proven VMware Infrastructure 3 software along with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager [...]

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Just noticed the new errors HA produces at the console when a host is isolated in ESX 3.5:
Node isolated from network. Either repair network or override agent startup using option -noiso
And when the host returns from isolation:
Node no longer isolated, will restart
This makes troubleshooting a lot easier! Thanks VMware

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I just had a discussion about an upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5. During that conversation the new HBA drivers that VMware uses came up. After an upgrade it seems that the queue depth settings are lost. Thinking about it I can understand why. ESX 3.5 uses different driver for most HBA’s. For instance Emulex, their [...]

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That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of [...]

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