Before installing VCB and connecting the proxy host to the SAN you should disable automount via diskpart(cmd, diskpart, automount disable, automount scrub). When you don’t disable automount Windows will signature all “incoming” disks. When this happens the VMware hosts will not recognize the VMFS volumes anymore. But fortunately you can re-label the luns as VMFS. Check with “fdisk -lu” what [...]
When reading the VMTN forum I stumbled upon a topic about checking the VMFS for snapshots. Besides snaphunter by Xtravirt, which is an excellent script, there isn’t much out there. You can check the VirtualCenter database for snapshots but this way you would not notice the orphaned snapshots. (Orphaned snapshot occur when the vmsd file gets corrupted.) A couple of [...]
Just noticed the new errors HA produces at the console when a host is isolated in ESX 3.5: Node isolated from network. Either repair network or override agent startup using option -noiso And when the host returns from isolation: Node no longer isolated, will restart This makes troubleshooting a lot easier! Thanks VMware
One of the most useful scripts for ESX in my opinion is health_check.sh. This scripts generates an html file which contains a enormous amount of useful info on how the ESX host was installed. Besides that it contains 30 lines of the most important log files and for instance if there are snapshots and much much more. I just tested [...]
Using the console it’s very easy to rescan a specific vmhba which can be useful when you are troubleshooting. For lazy people like me it’s disturbing that you have to type the command twice if you want to rescan both HBA’s. Well, as of version 3.5 VMware introduced a new setting in Advanced configuration section in the VirtualCenter Client: Go [...]
When writing the “Checking the diskspace on your VMFS volumes” blog I assumed that most of you knew how to send an email from the service console. I received a bunch of emails from people who were interested in how to setup the html email functionality. Well, here it is: A while back VMGuru.com hosted a script which enabled you [...]
On a regular basis I noticed that people forget to monitor the free diskspace of their VMFS volumes. I created a script that can easily be scheduled with crontab and mailed with smtp_send. You can send it as an html based email if you setup MIME correctly. (For more info on how to set this up, check this blog) The [...]






