Recently a customer asked me if HP Flex-10 was fully supported for ESX(i) or not. For those that don’t know what Flex-10 is: HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module is the industry’s first interconnect that flexibly allocates the bandwidth of a 10 Gb Ethernet network port across four NIC connections. This eliminates the need for additional costly NICs, switches [...]

I was just skimming through the new KB articles and noticed this one “Verify the health of ESX Server Operating System“: There are many ways to look at ESX host performance. This article focuses on quick assessment of the 4 main resources: Disk Space CPU Memory Network The article refers to different KB articles for pinpointing and solving performance related problems. I [...]

I didn’t know this was possible. But you can easily check via the COS if autostarting of VM’s in enabled or not according to this KB article: Log in as root to your ESX host with SSH. Open the /etc/vmware/hostd/vmAutoStart.xml file in text editor. Search for a line that reads: <enabled>true</enabled> If you find the line, the functionality is enabled. [...]

Just before 2008 ends VMware released a bunch of patches for the 3.0.X release of VMware ESX. 9 Patches, all are “General” patches: ESX303-200812401-BG: Virtual Machines Stop Responding When Disconnected from Serial Port ESX303-200812402-BG: Fix for vdf -P Command to Delimit the Output Values With Proper Spacing ESX303-200812403-BG: Qlogic iSCSI Driver Allocates Target IDs Greater than 255 ESX303-200812404-BG: Permissions on [...]

If your hostd, vpxd and or vpxa log files are rotating to quickly or not quick enough check out this great KB article on how to set this up. The most important thing to set is the maximum amount of logfiles and the size. Be sure to do a basic calculation so your logging partition won’t fill up completely! And [...]

I was just reading this excellent KB article on consolidating snapshots. It really contains a wealth of information and a procedure on how to remove a snapshot of a disk that has been changed in size for instance. if the disk has been changed in size the following error will show up during the boot process of the VM: The [...]

Just noticed this great VMware KB article. The article deals about converting aka p2v’ing Microsoft Domain Controllers. Those of you who have done VMware implementations and migrations know that this usually causes problems and leaves the Active Directory in a faulty state. This will lead to replication not working properly anymore. My advise usually is: Create a new VM from [...]