MS Virtualization blogs and VMotion

Recently there was an article published on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog which compared Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities to VMware’s VMotion. (VMblog pointed me towards the article) In the second article the writer responds on a large amount of reactions he had regarding VMotion being superior:
After my last blog I received almost two dozen email […]

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:

[…]

Patches for 3.0.1 and 3.0.2…

I just received the following:
New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2.
ESX Server patches can be accessed through the on-line ESX Server Patch Download tool:
[http://app.connect.vmware.com/e/er.aspx?s=524&lid=2272&elq=4D5713F997F04342981A231DF09609D0“>]
Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.
VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patches
ESX-1003516 (Critical): fixes an issue where snapshot of a Suspended Virtual Machine fails;includes a […]

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

Weird scripted install problems

Today I was testing a scripted installation for a customer. All day long I had weird problems with the script. But whenever I reviewed my script their seemed to be nothing wrong with it. I wrote the scripts with Notepad++ and double checked them with vi and nano. You can imagine I almost threw my […]

Support for Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) in 3.5 update !

I received an email stating the following:
Microsoft Cluster Server is supported with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1. Support is similar to ESX 3.0.1 with the following additions:

Both 64 bit and 32 bit Windows 2003 guests are supported with MSCS.
Boot from SAN for VMs using MSCS is now supported.
Majority Node Set clusters with application-level replication […]

load balancing active/active SAN’s

Ernst, a regular poster of the Dutch VMug, posted a script for load balancing paths to an active/active SAN. What it does is select the next path for a LUN, in other words if there are four paths LUN1 will be reached via Path1, LUN2 via Path2 etc.
The script, also available for download here:
for PATHS […]

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 […]