On the VMTN forum I read a cool solution for clearing your update cache when you use a web repository for patching your ESX hosts: “yum clean all”. Never thought of that cause I hardly use a web repository, always use a VMFS volume and the vmprofessional script.

When looking for the “maximum number of allowed console connections, I stumbled upon another handy option in VirtualCenter, “Edit -> Client Settings”. Set the maximum number of allowed console connections (0 to 100) to all virtual machines. Close all “Getting Started” tabs at once.

I’ve been looking for the lockdown option in ESX 3.5 for a few of hours these last couple of days and can’t seem to find it. In ESX 3i you can easily put it in lockdown mode when you add the host to the Cluster or afterwards here in the configuration/security section: After a search on the internet is seemed [...]

As most of you know, when VMware Consolidated Backup dumps image level backups VCB only dumps used diskspace. Unfortunately for us VCB does this by checking at block level if it contains only zero’s or not. If it contains only zero’s the block is considered empty, but an Operating System doesn’t zero out the disk space that contained the files [...]

I’m not the only one who thinks that the Storage VMotion interface is a burden. A couple of scripting wizards started creating a decent interface for the Storage VMotion script, which definitely come in handy. Check them out: Dominic of VMProfessional created an additional perl script to make storage vmotion a bit easier. It works very simple just edit the [...]

Support for Jumbo Frames is one of the major new features for ESX 3.5. Especially for the people who are using an iSCSI SAN configuring jumbo frames could be very beneficial. Instead of having an MTU(maximum size of transmitted packet) of 1500 an MTU of 9000 would be possible. That would cut out a lot of the iSCSI overhead. But [...]

I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly any evidence that HA did [...]