When doing a failover with SRM your VMFS Datastores get labeled with a “snap-xxxxxxx-name” because they’ve been resignatured. Mike Laverick gave this tip on the VMTN forum which enables you to automatically rename your datastores to it’s original name again: Edit the vmware-dr.xml file in the C:\Program Files\Site Recovery Manager\Config directory and look for a line that reads: <fixRecoveredDatastoreNames>false</fixRecoveredDatastoreNames> Change [...]

It seems to be a question that often pops up on the VMTN forum, how can I move my ESX hosts to my freshly installed vCenter server? The answer is actually pretty simple: Just to be on the save side, set DRS to manual and disable HA on the “old” vCenter server / cluster Right click the ESX host and [...]

You might wonder why you would want to pre-install the vCenter agent on an ESX box? Well if you have several remote offices which need to be connected to a central vCenter Server it will take a while before these agents are pushed and installed. Especially if the connection between these sites isn’t as fast as most of us are [...]

Do you have a LeftHand Networks VSA or are you using LeftHand’s VSA for demoing purposes?  Would you like your ESX to shutdown faster, and in fact when it starts up to have the VSA started, and then have the VM’s held on the VSA to be automatically started? If you have a VSA now, while it may auto start, [...]

VMware recently posted two new Whitepapers, which are most definitely worth reading: VMware VMFS Volume Management Technical explanation as to how VMFS Volume Manager handles disks that are presented to the ESX server. This informational note covers use settings to mount or resignature volumes that appear as duplicates to the original volumes created by VMFS. SQL Server and VMware Virtual [...]

I’ve been playing around with my vSphere/Next gen ESX lab. I was replaying the VMworld lab and one of the assignments was to  resize a VMFS volume. Yes that’s correct, resize not extent. Extents have been discussed by many and the general consensus is avoid them if/when possible. But when running out of diskspace you don’t always have the option [...]

On the VI Toolkit blog there’s a great article for people like me. They explain how to speed up your scripts. I’m no powershell guru, and these kind of articles are more than welcome to boost my scripting skills. In short, it comes down to these three tips: Try to load as many objects as possible into arrays beforehand. Once [...]