New 3.5 Patches

VMware released 4 patches yesterday:
ESX350-200806401-BG - Critical - Updates to VMkernel and hostd
ESX350-200806402-BG - General - Update to the Service Console Kernel
ESX350-200806404-SG - Security - Security Updates to WebAccess Components Tomcat and JRE
ESX350-200806405-BG - General - Update to VMware-esx-vmx
Good luck with patching!

Cisco and VMware best practice

A couple of weeks ago I received a cool PDF via email, this week it appeared online(source blog). Check it out:
The Source PDF:
VMware has collaborated with Cisco to produce a guide for deploying VMware Infrastucture 3 with Cisco switches. This guide covers the physical and virtual data network and storage network deployment considerations for ESX [...]

ESX memory usage

Just noticed the following topic, which definitely contains some good info about how ESX deals with memory. Thanks to Kit for clearing things up. These posts are valuable, keep ‘em coming!
a short outtake:
Basically how aggressive do you want TPS to scan for shared pages? Obviously TPS has a cost to running in terms of CPU, [...]

shutdown all vm’s and ESX

Just dropped the following short script in a topic on the VMTN Community. It shuts down every VM on the host and than the host itself, but it will enter maintenance mode first, just to be sure that no other vm’s get migrated to this host.

VMLIST=`vmware-cmd -l`
for config in ${VMLIST}
do
vmware-cmd ${VMLIST} stop trysoft
done
vimsh -n -e [...]

Swapping, esxtop and /proc/vmware/sched/mem

At a customer site we noticed that the ESX hosts were swapping, Nagios generated a nice alarm. After some research it seemed like certain VM’s were swapping to the VMFS volume, so not inside the OS but VMware swap usage. A closer look at the system revealed that we weren’t overcommitting. There was over 6GB [...]

Customization spec fails part II

A while back I blogged about the customization specification wizard failing when entering the password. Today I visited the same customer again. This problem only occurred when running it from the VirtualCenter itself. Today I upgraded the VirtualCenter server to 2.5 Update 1 and the problem is solved… Still don’t know why it happened,

VMware ESX 3.5 Template Deployment Bug

I just encountered the same bug that Aaron Delp blogged about in January:
It appears we have found a possible bug in the Deploy from Template Command in ESX 3.5. When you create a Windows Server based template and then try to deploy directly into an Active Directory with customization, the new system will get an [...]

Changing the IP-address of an ESX host and HA

Monday evening a colleague changed the ip-address of three VMware ESX hosts. He followed the standard VMware procedure, which usually works like a charm. In this case after the ip-address was changed HA did not work anymore. Disabling and enabling the HA resulted in the following error: “Configuration of host IP address is inconsistent on host …”
After [...]