Today a customer called about a problem with the Exchange VM. For some reason the ESX Host where this VM resided was always swapping/ballooning. They checked and double checked the settings but could not find the problem. After a quick scan I noticed that there were limits set on memory for each VM. This particular VM had 1536MB of memory [...]

Check out the release notes, there are a lot of fixes in this update! There’s also an update to the Update Manager and the Converter plugin. Download link Releasenotes link

Today I was testing a scripted installation for a customer. All day long I had weird problems with the script. But whenever I reviewed my script their seemed to be nothing wrong with it. I wrote the scripts with Notepad++ and double checked them with vi and nano. You can imagine I almost threw my laptop out the window of [...]

I received an email stating the following: Microsoft Cluster Server is supported with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1. Support is similar to ESX 3.0.1 with the following additions: Both 64 bit and 32 bit Windows 2003 guests are supported with MSCS. Boot from SAN for VMs using MSCS is now supported. Majority Node Set clusters with application-level replication (for example, [...]

Ernst, a regular poster of the Dutch VMug, posted a script for load balancing paths to an active/active SAN. What it does is select the next path for a LUN, in other words if there are four paths LUN1 will be reached via Path1, LUN2 via Path2 etc. The script, also available for download here: #!/bin/bash for PATHS in 2 [...]

Today I noticed the following error at a customer site when I wanted to install the new patch bundle, ”Metadata for patch missing”. After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter was installed with a different http port number. For VMware Update Manager to work you will have to open up the firewall manually:  esxcfg-firewall -o 81,tcp,out,UpdateManager (Change the port number, in red, according to the [...]

VMware seems to have ditched the product name “3i” and silently introduced “ESXi”. I noticed it when the download page was updated today. But you can also read it on the “product section” of the VMware website. I think this is a better name instead of differentiation in versions, keeping the versions alligned and changing the name makes more sense [...]