Today I received the following error at a customer site when applying patch via the Update Manager:”Metadata for patch missing.” After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter wasn’t running on port 80 but on 81 for some reason. Opening up the ESX Firewall and restarting the VMware Update Manager service seems to fix this problem. […]

For those who encountered the same weird networking problems as I did, I was just browsing through the Knowledge Base articles for the patches released yesterday and found out that they fixed the driver for the Intel quad-port nic. When using VST half of the packets were dropped, for more info on the problem check […]

VMware just uploaded a whole bunch of patches for ESX 3.5:
ESX350-200802301-BG : Update to the bnx2 Driver
ESX350-200802303-SG : Security Update to the util-linux Package
ESX350-200802304-SG : Security Update to the Perl Package
ESX350-200802305-SG : Security Update to the openssl Package
ESX350-200802306-BG : VMware ESX Server 3.5, Patch ESX350-200802306-BG: Daylight Saving Time Update
ESX350-200802401-BG : Updates to vmware-hostd
ESX350-200802403-BG : Improved Statistics Collection for Support Scripts, Fix for […]

Eric Sloof just pointed us out to the Blog on the VMware website about the upcoming Powershell Toolkit Beta. I have been playing around with this toolkit for a while but had a hard time figuring out how to actually make useful scripts. The PDF that was also released has some cool examples of useful […]

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 […]

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 […]

Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s […]

Two days ago RyanWI posted about an unidentified partition which generates errors in the vmkernel log. Today I visited a customer with the same setup, Dell servers and an EMC SAN and I was curious if I could reproduce this error. Well I did not had not much trouble reproducing the error because they already […]

A couple of months ago at the Dutch VMug meeting Bouke-Jumé gave some good storage tips. This is one of them:
The LSI Bus Logic Controller / Driver has a standard queue depth of 256. Although it isn’t possible to set this higher it is possible to add a second controller and when you make sure […]