If you’re a consultant you probably connect with your Virtual Infrastructure Client to a dozen different VirtualCenter servers or ESX hosts every week. After a couple of months the drop down list “IP Address / Name” gets all saturated and it’s impossible to find the right server… So it might come in handy to clear the list every once in [...]

I just noticed that when running a VM on VMware Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 8.10(but this problem probably also occurs on other non-Windows OS’es), you can’t use the arrow keys. But also ctrl-alt-ins isn’t working, which is annoying cause you would have to do it with the mouse. And no arrow keys also means that you can’t browse through your [...]

I was just rebuilding my “ESX in a box” setup. I wanted to install an iSCSI Virtual San Appliance but why should I? Your answer probably is: well because you need shared storage to do a VMotion / HA / DRS etc. Yes you are completely right I do need shared storage to have these capabilities, but there’s no need [...]

Today I visited a customer that wanted to enable the VMware tools timesync during an automated install of a Windows VM. The customer didn’t want to use powershell / perl or anyother SDK enabled tool. So what’s left? “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareService.exe” –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″ So this command ticks the checkbox for timesync via VMware Tools, which can come [...]

A few weeks ago I posted a document which contains valuable information on implementing VMware HA. I just received an update on this document and uploaded it. I’ve also changed the link in the original post. As most of you know I work for VMware which means I receive a huge amount of email and documents with excellent technical info. [...]

Team Fusion wrote a great post on “defragging” vm’s and why you shouldn’t do it. Or at least be very careful about it. Make sure to read it! Before we begin, it’s important to note that defragmentation isn’t a necessary task – your virtual machine will still work just fine even if you never defrag, and the effects of fragmentation [...]

So you’ve heard this probably from a few dozens of people by now when you don’t hit the expected SAN performance: Set your queuedepth to a larger size. So how do you set this queuedepth? Find out for which module you’ll need to set this option: vmkload_mod -l | grep qla Now set it to a depth of 64 for [...]