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 driver for the LP11002 used [...]

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 strange routing / connection errors [...]

A couple of days ago I wrote about the problems with VST and the Intel Quad-port nics. I tested the work around, using “access ports” on the physical switch(EST, external switch tagging) and it seems that the problem is “solved”. A couple of hours ago VMware posted a knowledge base article about this problem, so if you are experiencing these [...]

One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much much more. I just tested [...]

This week I implemented a couple of Dell 2950 Servers which contained an Intel quad-port nic. The physical switch ports were setup as a trunk so I used VST(Virtual Switch Tagging). I combined the onboard Broadcom ports with the Intel quad-port nics to have the most redundant setup. When I started testing the HA and DRS functionality I noticed that [...]

When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is: A while back VMGuru.com hosted a script which enabled you [...]

On a regular basis I noticed that people forget to monitor the free diskspace of their VMFS volumes. I created a script that can easily be scheduled with crontab and mailed with smtp_send. You can send it as an html based email if you setup MIME correctly. (For more info on how to set this up, check this blog) The [...]