Almost a year ago one of my colleagues told me about a project he was working on called the “vSphere Resource Kit“. I guess it reminds many of you of the Resource Kits that were released for the Microsoft products. I guess the idea is quite similar. On twitter several people asked who the authors were and many said they were “unknown” [...]

One of my former colleagues(who wants to remain anonymous) notified me about this. Although many of you might not even be doing this, for just the few who are it is useful to know this caveat. For security reasons some customers have the requirement to insert specific account information for every user. It appears that when you modify the details for [...]

Every once in a while you would want to stress a VM or multiple VMs to test the working of for instance VMware DRS. There are multiple tools available but most of them only focus on CPU and are usually not multithreaded. My colleague Andres Mitchell developed a cool tool which will load a multithreaded CPU load and will generate [...]

I receive a lot of hits on an old article regarding aligning your VMDKs. This article doesn’t actually explain why it is important but only how to do it. The how is not actually as important in my opinion. I do however want to take the opportunity to list some of the options you have today to align your VMs VMDKs. [...]

I was working on an automated build procedure yesterday of ESX hosts in a cloud environment. I stored my my temporary post configuration script in /tmp/ as I have been doing since 3.0.x. When the installation was finished the host rebooted and I waited on the second reboot to occur, which is part of my post configuration. Weird thing is it [...]

To be honest and completely frank I really don’t have a clue. I have been reading all these so called best practices around changing the default behaviour of “1000″ to “1″ but none of these contain any justification. Just to give you an example take a look at the following guide: Configuration best practices for HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array [...]

I already knew this was coming up but wasn’t allowed to talk about it. As it is out in the open on the VMTN community I guess I can talk about it as well. One of the most common issues experienced with VMware HA is a split brain situation. Although currently undocumented, vSphere has a detection mechanism for these situations. Even more [...]