I’ve been waiting for APC to create a VIMA ready package of their PowerChute Network Shutdown software for a while now. It’s supposed to be released soon but I haven’t heard a release date yet. For everyone that can’t wait VMTN User “jholland” created this PDF “How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS“. It’s a great creative [...]

RVTools is getting more and more the attention and appreciation it deserves. This also means that more and more people are emailing Rob with all kinds of feature requests. Version 2.3 contains a couple bug fixes and a couple of cool new additions: New vHost tab. The “vHost” tab displays for each host the name, datacenter name, cluster name, CPU [...]

I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following: inconsistent portgroup names inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts [...]

The last couple of days I’ve read a whole bunch of tweets and blogs on Veeam’s FastSCP. Everyone highly praises FastSCP because it is really really fast compared to WinSCP. I’ve been testing it myself in the past and indeed it is. With the release of 3.0 Beta that probably hasn’t changed a bit. Keep in mind though that FastSCP [...]

Yesterday I posted about the mbrscan and mbralign tool that NetApp created. This triggered Nick Triantos of NetApp to write an excellent detailed technical article on why you need to set the alignment: When setup routine queries the CHS (Cylinder / Head / Sector) information of the disk from the BIOS, the CHS data doesn’t actually corresponded to anything physical. [...]

I’ve been test driving a script called “mbrscan” for a while now. Today I noticed that this script had already been released a couple of weeks ago. The cool thing about the script is that you can check the alignment of the VM’s filesystem from the outside. The script runs directly on the service console of ESX. NetApp’s Nick Triantos [...]

I’ve wrote about this tool several times so most of you must have tested it by now and are probably actively using it: RVTools. Rob just notified me that he uploaded a brand new version of his tool. The following have been added to version 2.2: New vDatastore tab. The “vDatastore” tab displays for each datastore the name, connectivity status, [...]