I’ve been looking for this one for some time now. I know there are several tools out there that do the same but none of them are Freeware! Check out WinDirStat. It’s free and gives you a great overview of which folder contains the MB’s! This can be very useful on fileservers when your disks are magically filling up with all sorts of “garbage”. Especially the “extension lists” is very useful, at one of my previous employers we noticed about 25GB of mp3’s and a whole bunch of iso files on our fileserver which definitely should’t have been there! In other words, pick it up! This one is useful! (the source)
fstab modifications gone after upgrade VMware tools
About a month ago I got an email about problems with upgrading VMware tools on a Linux VM. When upgrading VMware tools all modifications done in /etc/fstab after the VMware tools section would be deleted. I never got the chance to actually test it myself but now a KB article popped up and confirmed the bug. Apparently the engineers are working on it so expect a fix/update in the near future. Michael Wilmsen of Wilmsen Automatisering pointed me out to this bug.
ESXi and SSH, what’s next
I get a lot of questions about ESXi and SSH. Most people manage to connect to their ESXi but don’t know what to do next because there’s no actual Service Console there. Well the answer is short and simple: vim-cmd.
A couple examples of stuff you can do with vim-cmd:
enter maintenance mode: vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
List all registered vm’s: vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms
Install VMware Tools for VM with ID: vim-cmd /vmsvc/tools.install [vmid]
Power on a specific VM: vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.on [vmid]
So check out the link above and start trying out this poweful command
VMware podcasts
I don’t know if everyone listens to the VMware podcasts or not, but there are some cool podcasts on this page!
The topics range from Planet V12 blogging to advanced HA stuff. Definitely worth listening to! Maybe I’m just a geek, but I have this on as background music all the time… 🙂
Book: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure
There’s a new book launched at VMworld Vegas 2008! This book is written by John Arrasjid(VMware), Daniel Conde(VMware), Karthik Balachandran(VMware), Gary Lamb(INX) and Steve Kaplan(INX).
You can pre-order the book via Digital-Guru, and here’s there description just to give you an idea: Deploying the VMware Infrastructure is an introduction to the world of VMware virtualization technology written by hands-on experts in the field. This booklet explains virtualization, enumerates its many benefits, and describes a set of real-world use cases. Overviews are provided for each of the VMware server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and automation and infrastructure management products; and detailed information is given about virtualizing your infrastructure-from building a VMware Infrastructure and selecting candidates for migration, to managing and optimizing the virtual environment. Other topics include security and disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, and advanced capabilities such as high availability, virtual machine snapshots and consolidated backups. This booklet is highly recommended for anyone interested in virtualizing their IT infrastructure or expanding their knowledge of VMware Infrastructure, including managers, technical staff, and those new to virtualization or VMware technology.