I get a lot of questions about ESXi and SSH. Most people manage to connect to their ESXi but don’t know what to do next because there’s no actual Service Console there. Well the answer is short and simple: vim-cmd.
A couple examples of stuff you can do with vim-cmd:
enter maintenance mode: vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
List all registered [...]

read more....

There’s a new book launched at VMworld Vegas 2008! This book is written by John Arrasjid(VMware), Daniel Conde(VMware), Karthik Balachandran(VMware), Gary Lamb(INX) and Steve Kaplan(INX).
You can pre-order the book via Digital-Guru, and here’s there description just to give you an idea: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure is an introduction to the world of VMware virtualization technology [...]

read more....

I’ve never seen this before. I wrote an article about root SSH access to a ESXi system. Today I noticed a blog entry that describes how you can disable root access for SSH and create users which can use “su” to become root! Cool stuff.
Check the article here! Here’s the procedure:
Log in to the console,
edit [...]

read more....

I’ve noticed many of the hits on my blog are related to ESXi. One of the most asked questions is how can I SSH to an ESXi hosts? Looking at my wordpress stats, this is also one of the top searches.
By default this isn’t possible. But there’s a way to get this working, just do [...]

read more....

For those like me who would like to check ESXi 3.5 update 2 but don’t want to install on a local harddisk. Here’s a good pdf about how to install it on a USB memory key. It’s fairly easy and I just booted my IBM X61 laptop with ESXi.
In short:

First get the following tools: 7-Zip(Free), [...]

read more....

Today there was a cool article released on the Storage Nuts & Bolts blog. It’s about file level recovery from within a VMDK based on an NFS datastore. NFS is just mentioned cause this is the preferred way to go for the NetApp family, but it doesn’t matter NFS or VMFS the solution they came [...]

read more....

I just came across the following on the VMTN forum which is a very useful command in my opinion. When metadata changes for a LUN, that LUN is being locked by a host. Sometime the lock isn’t released, which can cause weird situations. In this case you would want to know which host is locking [...]

read more....