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), WinImage(Demo) Download the [...]

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 up with works for the [...]

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 the LUN, especially when you’ve [...]

I’ve seen a lot of people picking up on the queuedepth settings lately, especially when there are QLogic adapters involved. Although it can be really beneficial to set the queuedepth to 64 it’s totally useless when one forgets about the “Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding” setting. This setting always has to be aligned with the queuedepth because if the Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding parameter is given a [...]

Three totally different command line tips/tricks this time: Dump a specific disk via the VCB Proxy monolithic(1 big chunk): Open a cmd and goto your VCB installation path “vcbexport.exe -M 1 -d test01.vmdk -s TestVM/TestVM.vmdk” Any swapping going on or more info on memory usage in general: Open a putty sesion to your ESX box “watch -n 1 cat /proc/vmware/sched/mem” [...]

The common mis perception of the term “snapshot”, related to VMware, can cause huge problems. I’ve spend a lot of time the last years solving snapshot problems. For once and for all, a snapshot isn’t a static situation like a clone is. A snapshot can best be compared to a redo log, although technically it isn’t because it’s just a [...]

Over the last couple of months I gathered the following tweaks for a better performance insight the virtual machine, besides disabling / uninstalling useless services and devices: Disable the pre-logon screensaver: Open Regedit HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop Change the value of “ScreenSaveActive” to 0. Disable updates of the last access time attribute for your NTFS filesystem, especially for i/o intensive vm’s this [...]