Because I will be posting less in the upcoming weeks about problems I face at customer sites I will try to post some cool command-line tip or trick I discovered or picked up somewhere….
open ESX console ,via putty and type the following
vm-support -x
result: all the VMID’s also known as World ID’s,
And if you’re colleagues hardly [...]

I had some spare time on my hands so I decided to add some useful stuff to the VM Reporting powershell script that was posted on this blog. This is what I ended up with, there’s still room for improvement like snapshot information and scsi controller info…

Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.1.1 -User admin -Password admin
$Report = @()
get-vm [...]

A while back I wrote a scripted install aka “cfg” file, and I just noticed I never published it. Check it out, it might be useful in one way or another. It also available for download here!
Especially changing the amount of active nics in a team can be useful(I’ve commented this out again, as of [...]

The common mis perception of the term “snapshot”, related to VMware, can cause huge problems. I’ve spend a lot of time the last years solving snapshot problems. For once and for all, a snapshot isn’t a static situation like a clone is. A snapshot can best be compared to a redo log, although technically it [...]

Via the Dutch VMUG site I landed on a new blog, well new… for me new. This blog is maintained by Toni Verbeiren and he created an excellent article about monitoring performance stats for the scsi controllers inside a VM:

A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if [...]

VMware released 4 patches yesterday:
ESX350-200806401-BG - Critical - Updates to VMkernel and hostd
ESX350-200806402-BG - General - Update to the Service Console Kernel
ESX350-200806404-SG - Security - Security Updates to WebAccess Components Tomcat and JRE
ESX350-200806405-BG - General - Update to VMware-esx-vmx
Good luck with patching!

Just noticed the following topic, which definitely contains some good info about how ESX deals with memory. Thanks to Kit for clearing things up. These posts are valuable, keep ‘em coming!
a short outtake:
Basically how aggressive do you want TPS to scan for shared pages? Obviously TPS has a cost to running in terms of CPU, [...]

At a customer site we noticed that the ESX hosts were swapping, Nagios generated a nice alarm. After some research it seemed like certain VM’s were swapping to the VMFS volume, so not inside the OS but VMware swap usage. A closer look at the system revealed that we weren’t overcommitting. There was over 6GB [...]