Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

vSphere and vmfs-undelete

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This week someone asked me during the VMTN Podcast on chat if I knew where vmfs-undelete resided in vSphere. I had a look but couldn’t find it either. A quick search gave me this:

vmfs-undelete utility is not available for ESX/ESXi 4.0
ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3 included a utility called vmfs-undelete, which could be used to recover deleted .vmdk files. This utility is not available with ESX/ESXi 4.0.

Workaround: None. Deleted .vmdk files cannot be recovered.

So if you are currently actively using vmfs-undelete and looking into upgrading to vSphere take this in account!

And the winners of the VMware top blog are…

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Eric Siebert just published the new TOP 10 Blogs. I want to thank every one who voted for me. I’m really surprised with the number of “#1” votes I got. As you might notice compared to Eric’s own TOP-20 some people have moved up or down. I think the most noticeable is Gabe entering the TOP 10 and Chad going from 10th place to 3rd, but that’s well deserved in my opinion!

[update: Eric just tweeted 11 – 20 so I added these to the list]

  1. Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping(1) – 102 first place votes – weighted score of 991
  2. Scott Lowe’s Blog – Scott Lowe(2) – 39 first place votes – weighted score of 707
  3. Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac(10) – 61 first place votes – weighted score of 550
  4. NTPro – Eric Sloof(3) – 12 first place votes – weighted score of 412
  5. RTFM Education – Mike Laverick(8) – 5 first place votes – weighted score of 232
  6. VM/ETC – Rich Brambley(6) – 5 first place votes – weighted score of 196
  7. Virtualization Evangelist – Jason Boche(5) – 4 first place votes – weighted score of 190
  8. Gabe’s Virtual World(12) – Gabe Van Zanten – 5 first place votes – weighted score of 132
  9. Virtualization Pro – Various(4) – 3 first place votes – weighted score of 129
  10. Mike D’s blog – Mike DiPetrillo(7) – 3 first place votes – weighted score of 120
  11. VMware Tips – Rick Scherer(15)
  12. The VM Guy – Dave Lawrence(16)
  13. VCritical – Eric Gray(17)
  14. Planet VM – Tom Howarth(11)
  15. Ken’s Virtual Reality – Ken Cline(20)
  16. Professional VMware – Cody Bunch(09)
  17. Virtual Future – Sven Huisman (19)
  18. Rational Survivability – Christofer Hoff(13)
  19. Virtual Black Hole – Steve Beaver(18)
  20. Musings of Rodos – Rodney Haywood(14)

ftCLI.pl – VMware Fault Tolerance Management

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William Lam did it again. He created a script that manages FT from the command line. The script is called ftCLI.pl and here are the details:

Description: Managing VMware Fault Tolerance via the command line.

Params: The following operations are supported: create|enable|disable|stop

Requirement:
vSphere vCenter 4.0
ESX(i) 4.0
Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus or Eval licensing

Assumption: Your environment is FT capable and is configured properly

I think it speaks for itself. If you are a command line guy this is really useful! Great work William, keep it up! Just head over to the VMTN Communities for the download link and more details on how to use it.

Yellow Bricks wallpaper!

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I was looking for a new wallpaper for my laptop as the old ones started to bore me. Coincidentally I ran into Sander Ras this week. Sander designed the Yellow Bricks logo almost two years ago, and I asked him if he could create a wallpaper for me based on this logo. This is what he emailed me and I really liked them so I wanted to share them with you:

Standalone vSphere hosts and the local VMFS

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On twitter @lamw just asked a question which triggered me to blog it cause I expect this is something more people will run into sooner or later.

Anyone know if you can change the default VMFS block size in ESX4 during interactive installation?

This is something that I also ran into personally a couple of weeks ago. If you install ESX 4.0 with the defaults a large VMFS volume is created that fills up the disk. This VMFS volume has a default block size of 1MB which means a file size limit of 256GB.

In the setup there’s currently no way of changing the block size. (If I’m wrong please leave a comment.) The only way to avoid this is to create two VMFS volumes. The first one will need to be created during the installation and will be the volume on which the Service Console VMDK resides. The second VMFS volume should be created after the installation and will be hosting the VMs. Although it does sound like an unnecessary step I personally think it is a good approach. This way the chance of filling up(snapshots) your VMFS partition which hosts you Service Console is very slim.