I was working on an automated build procedure yesterday of ESX hosts in a cloud environment. I stored my my temporary post configuration script in /tmp/ as I have been doing since 3.0.x. When the installation was finished the host rebooted and I waited on the second reboot to occur, which is part of my post configuration. Weird thing is it [...]

Just something I noticed today while testing an automated install from NFS. The arguments I pass to the installer are: initrd=initrd.img mem=512m ksdevice=vmnic1 ip=192.168.1.123 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1 ks=nfs://192.168.1.10:/nfs/install/ks.cfg quiet Let’s focus on the part that’s incorrect, with ESX 3 the following bit(part of the bootstrap above) would work: ks=nfs://192.168.1.10:/nfs/install/ks.cfg As of ESX 4 this doesn’t work anymore, and when I do [...]

I had a discussion with one of my readers last week and just read this post on the VMTN community which triggered this article. When you create a highly available environment take into account that you will need to have enough vSwitch ports available when a failover needs to occur. By default a vSwitch will be created with 56 ports [...]

William Lam just released version 4 of his Health Check Report. I guess I can talk about it for hours but the sample report that William provides says more in just a few clicks than I can in 1000 words. Below you can find an outtake from the release notes. I clipped it as it was too long, but you [...]

This is just a reminder. The ESXi scripting contest is still running.  Make sure you enter the competition. So far not many people have so chances of winning are pretty big! VMware challenges you to build the best, most creative ESXi management scripts possible. The goal of the ScriptoMania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing [...]

Alan Renouf posted an article on the vSphere Quick Start Guide we recently wrote which triggered this article. First let me quote from Alan’s article: I was responsible for adding all the PowerCLI throughout the book, basically if something is explained and there is an easy way to do it in PowerCLI, we have added a code reference, this enables [...]

This week we(Frank Denneman and I) played around with vscsiStats, it’s a weird command and hard to get used to when you normally dive into esxtop when there are performance issues. While asking around for more info on the metrics and values someone emailed us nfstop. I assumed it was NDA or at least not suitable for publication yet  but [...]