VM’s automatically renamed

Yesterday evening I witnessed a weird phenomenon. We had to bring down a complete environment to move a 19″ rack to a different location. We switched the SAN on, waited a couple of minutes and switched the ESX hosts on. When the ESX hosts finished booting we booted the VirtualCenter. Everything looked normal in the […]

Powershell VI Toolkit

Today I combined a couple of Powershell scripts which as a result gives a nice html formatted file with a table. This table contains all VM’s with their VMware Tools status and version. I’ve uploaded the script here. The outcome looks like the following:

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Performance stats gone

Clint discovered the following:
Source -
Ran into a problem while doing some performance testing on some test VMs. We found that we had no historical performance data for the VM or Host. All we had was real time data. This can be a major issue, especially when you are trying to troubleshoot or like in this […]

ESX(i) 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 Available now!

Check out the release notes, there are a lot of fixes in this update! There’s also an update to the Update Manager and the Converter plugin.
Download link
Releasenotes link

Customization specifications fails during entering password

For some weird reason the customization specification wizard in VirtualCenter 2.5 fails when entering the administrator password. The error: An internal error occurred, and the wizard is unable to store the administrator password securely.

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Update Manager: Metadata for patch missing

Today I noticed the following error at a customer site when I wanted to install the new patch bundle, ”Metadata for patch missing”. After a close inspection I noticed VirtualCenter was installed with a different http port number. For VMware Update Manager to work you will have to open up the firewall manually:
 esxcfg-firewall -o 81,tcp,out,UpdateManager
(Change the port number, in […]

3i is gone, welcome ESXi

VMware seems to have ditched the product name “3i” and silently introduced “ESXi”. I noticed it when the download page was updated today. But you can also read it on the “product section” of the VMware website. I think this is a better name instead of differentiation in versions, keeping the versions alligned and changing […]

New iso’s/builds coming up for 3i / 3.5 / VirtualCenter

There are new iso’s / builds coming up for 3i, 3.5 and VirtualCenter:
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1
Latest Version: 3.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 82663
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1
Latest Version: 2.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 79820
VMware ESXi 3.5 Installable Update 1
Latest Version: 3.5 | 4/10/2008 | Build: 82664
Unfortunately the iso’s aren’t available for download yet […]

Tool: Checking the status of VMware Tools and updating

Rob de Veij created a cool tool for checking the status of VMware Tools and easily upgrading to the latest version of the tools by just selecting the appropriate VM.
RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display the version of the installed VMware tools.It […]

VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory

Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:
source - Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:

Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command:
Get-VIServer -Server

for example,
Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10

When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.
Get the root folder […]