Enter maintenance mode from the ESX command line: vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter Backup every running vm via vcb in just one command: for /f “tokens=2 delims=:” %%i in (’vcbvmname -h <virtualcenterserver> -u <user> -p <password> -s Powerstate:on ^| find “name:”‘) do cscript pre-command.wsf “c:\program files\vmware\vmware consolidated backup framework\” %%i fullvm Enable VMotion from the command line: vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set [...]

I was always under the impression that ESX 3.x still used “strict co-scheduling” as 2.5.x did. In other words when you have a multi vcpu vm all vcpu’s need to be scheduled and started at the same time on seperate cores/cpu’s. You can imagine that this can cause the VM to have high “ready times”, which means waiting for physical [...]

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 ever [...]

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 ESX 3.5 U3 this [...]

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 isn’t because it’s just a [...]

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 wanted) is VscsiStats. As [...]