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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

During the installation of VirtualCenter the following error code was presented “25036″. With no further message the installation is cut-off. After a close inspection it seemed that there already were a couple of SQL Express 2005 services installed, the software was removed and the services were still there but disabled. I guess for some reason [...]

VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:
Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 - Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.
PR:225357 - Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are [...]

Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s [...]

A couple of months ago at the Dutch VMug meeting Bouke-Jumé gave some good storage tips. This is one of them:
The LSI Bus Logic Controller / Driver has a standard queue depth of 256. Although it isn’t possible to set this higher it is possible to add a second controller and when you make sure [...]

Vinternals wrote a short article on how to de-install or hide the Capacity Planner plugin for VirtualCenter:
Capacity planner is rather pesky to have hanging around on every VirtualCenter box in the enterprise… especially if you use some other tool for the job! So just add this line to the end of your VirtualCenter install script:
msiexec [...]