According to this new KB article there’s a backdoor for ESX3i: Log in to your ESX Server 3i at the console. Press Alt+F1 to switch to the console window. Enter unsupported to start the Tech Support Mode login process. Note that no text will appear on the console window. Enter the password for the root user. Tech Support Mode is [...]

During the VMware course DSA I discovered that it is in fact possible to dump specific vmdk’s with the use of the default VCB tools. While I was finding out a way to script this I was notified in one of my blogs by JTurver(Justin Turver) that he already wrote a script that could do what I was looking for. [...]

VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3: Resolved Issues include: Virtual Machine Management Issues PR:219126 – Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met. PR:225357 – Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are configured [...]

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 only around 30GB assigned, nowhere [...]

VMware justed added a new KB article about problems with Storage VMotion script: Storage VMotion can fail for a virtual machine with the error message: Failed to unstun VM after disk reparent. The virtual machine is partially migrated and powered off. Generally, the virtual machine cannot be powered on again. This issue affects: Virtual machines converted in-place (not deployed or [...]

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 had the same issue. I [...]

[edit 18-02-2011: It has come to my attention that the info in this article was incorrect / outdated. The LSI Logic has a default queuedepth of 32. Even if the LSI could go higher than 32 it would be capped by either the device queue depth or disk.schednumreqoutstanding. To enable a single VM to have a queuedepth larger than 32 [...]