How Do You Prepare Your Templates?

Template VM’s are specialized VM’s. They’re designed to allow you to rapidly re-deploy preconfigured virtual machines, with little to no fuss. Often, however, that is not the case. I mean, who doesn’t just right click and “Convert to Template…” What that action does, is simply mark a file letting vCenter and ESX both know it’s
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Trouble Getting VMware HA Working? – Basic Troubleshooting For VMware’s HA

Trouble with your HA config? vCenter (VirtualCenter) giving you all kinds of crap while setting it up? Let’s take a look some things to do when ‘Configure HA’ bunks up. Do you meet the requirements? There are a few things that you need in order to make sure all the bits of HA work. There
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Y’all See This? – Nexus 1000v Architecture Write Up

Not sure when I came across this, and how late to the game I am on it, but alas, cleaning out my Firefox tabs today I came across a deployment diagram for the Nexus 1000v on ESX4: Some key observations of importance:     * The version of ESX running here is ESX 4.0 (not yet
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Tapping ESX – Network Sniffing Your VI

So while ESX 3.5 (not sure about i) may have tcpdump and tcpslice: [root@esx root]# tcp tcpd      tcpdump   tcpslice They’re of limited use, at least with the way ESX implements networking, vSwitches after all, are good and proper layer 2 devices. Now, that is not to say you couldn’t do something with arp poisoning, but…
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VI3 Quick Reference Card

This is one of those that you’ll want to print out, laminate, and had to all of your co-workers. Really, it’s that good. It’s the VI3 Quick Reference Card. It’s updated for VI3 update 3, and it makes Chuck Norris want to shave. This is thanks to the awesome work of Forbes Guthrie at vmreference.com

Log Bundles, of the Virtual Center Variety

Things break. They always do. Chaos is inevitable. So how do you get insight into some of the chaos that was occurring in your Virtual Center when disaster strikes? Turns out, the VI Client makes this quite easy. After you get your Virtual Center service running again, connect using the VI Client. Once connected… well
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psVIC – PowerShell Virtual Infrastructure Client

Yes, that is what it is! You can get it from here. As listed on the page, it requires the PowerShell 2.0 CTP 3 available from here. You’ll also want to grab the VMware Remote Console from here (It is optional however). Installation: After you pull down the .7z file, extract it anywhere you like.
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vpxd.exe – The Other White Meat

Came across this useful little gem today, its the executable responsible for running, or at least managing the VMware Virtual Center Service. Where is it located? C:Program FilesVMwareInfrastructureVirtualCenter Server>dir vpxd.exe Volume in drive C is C_DRIVE Volume Serial Number is F463-F653 Directory of C:Program FilesVMwareInfrastructureVirtualCenter Server 07/12/2008  04:07 AM        13,557,760 vpxd.exe 1 File(s)     13,557,760 bytes
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Removing VMware Snapshots – With a Bat (PowerShell, CLI, rCLI… and Perl)

I’ve found a few situations in which snapshots get stuck, like glue, to a running VM, and despite your best effort to delete them, they wont go away. Like in-laws, they stick around, a bit longer than is pleasant. If a snapshot has not been removed cleanly on the first try, you may want to
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VMware – An Introduction To Scripting VI Using Perl or PowerShell

These slides look to have been released after last years VMworld, and provide a great introduction to scripting and automation with the VMware tools. Link! The labs will help you get started with scripting VMware Infrastructure to enable automation, extensibility, and integration with existing tools. When we ran this at VMworld, we had about 600
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HALP! My Virtual Infrastructure Client Events Have Disappeared!

This is one of those settings that you only find when you need. Today, I needed it. While writing another post, I decided to go back and get the text of an error that I encountered. This can be done in the VIC by editing the client settings, and then “Lists” in order to grab
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Exchange on VMware – Podcast, Webinar, and White Papers, Oh My

This particular topic comes up from time to time in discussions. Yes it is OK to run Exchange on VMware, and Exchange 2007 on VMware is a supported configuration… for more info, follow the links below: The Podcast – Wednesday, Jan 14, for another round of the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast The Webinar – Jan
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Running Update 3? San Gone Funny?

VMware release KB 1008130 yesterday, describing just this: Symptoms include: VMware ESX or ESXi host might get disconnected form VirtualCenter. All paths to the LUNs are in standby state. esxcfg-rescan might take a long time to complete or never completes (hung). The KB goes on to say, that right now the only fix is a
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