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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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!

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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A while back I blogged about the customization specification wizard failing when entering the password. Today I visited the same customer again. This problem only occurred when running it from the VirtualCenter itself. Today I upgraded the VirtualCenter server to 2.5 Update 1 and the problem is solved… Still don’t know why it happened,

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I just encountered the same bug that Aaron Delp blogged about in January:
It appears we have found a possible bug in the Deploy from Template Command in ESX 3.5. When you create a Windows Server based template and then try to deploy directly into an Active Directory with customization, the new system will get an [...]

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