Category: VMware

From the Guest Install Guide blog @ VMware. These are the changes or updates made to the Guest Operating System Installation Guide since it was last published: Added support for 32-bit NetWare 6.5 Server, Support Pack 8 on ESX Server 3.0.2, 3.0.3, and 3.5 Update 3. See “NetWare 6.5 Server” on page 302. Added support
-> Continue reading Guest OS Install Guide Updates

Rather than spend a lot of time writing up my own post on snapshots, I’ve found quite a bit of good info on some other blogs that justifies a good copy/paste here. From boche.net Disk write I/O inside a guest VM may be seldom or it may be very active. It depends on the role
-> Continue reading ESX Snapshots – Careful Running With Those Scissors

Not even blogging a few weeks and I’ve already made a mention on one of the more popular VM blogging sites VM/ETC. So hello to anyone who found their way in from there.

VMware’s new names certainly make for much longer titles, don’t they?  That said, I found out from Mr. Scott Lowe, that SRM Update 1 is now available. Some of the new goodies include: SRM has separated the permission to test a recovery plan and to actually run a recovery plan. This allows more junior admins
-> Continue reading VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Update 1

So I’ve been trying not to post on weekends. Really. Weekends give me a time to sit back, relax, hang out with my family, and generally unwind from a busy week in Virtualtopia. However from this Friday to next, I get to be “On-Call". What does this mean? It means I get calls starting at
-> Continue reading On Call Weekend!

Ever wonder what condition caused your ESX server to fail a LUN over to another path? VMware has written a detailed KB article about this and cited examples for each scenario: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003433 The main 4 conditions are: NO_CONNECT ILLEGAL_REQUEST NOT_READY INTERNAL ERROR The majority of these conditions are exclusive to Active/Passive arrays (MRU policy) as
-> Continue reading LUN Path Failover Conditions

The Hacker 2 Hacker Conference Brazil this year featured a paper called “Hypervisor Framework”. An interesting read for those more interested in the nitty gritty of how all this “Virtualization” stuff works

This was too good not to post here, and is well worth a read. Will Microsoft sunset VMware? – 18 months later – From IT20.info

So Tarry Singh posted today on the VMware security advisiories. While that’s been covered here, and elsewhere, I did find a few of his points interesting: Ask yourself the following: * Do you know that such malicious attacks are not taking place in your environment? * Do you know if there is some sort of
-> Continue reading Security in a Virtual Environment

I posted on this earlier, but wanted to follow up with some posts by some smarter folks, Mike Laverick, Chris Wolf, and VirtualGeek have now all blogged on this, and the general consensus is that DPM is still “experimental” and unless there is a compelling reason, it may be best not to play with fire. 
-> Continue reading More on VMware DPM and MTBF

Timely blog posts for the WIN! This came up at the office today, that is to say, is running Exchange in a VM a good idea? The general consensus was that "YES” it is. You see those quotes there, they’re significant. That is not to blanketly say that running a massive Exchange deployment in a
-> Continue reading Exchange on VMware

I just found a pile of Virtualization Webcasts, seemingly focused around VMware on BrightTALK. Go, browse, watch, become enlightened.

Until reading this at vinternals, I wasn’t even sure what HA Slot Size’s were.  Now I’ve got some homework to do. In the meantime, read here about how their calculated.

Like everything else, there are more than a few ways to do this.  We’ll cover them here from least to most painful. All of these require access to the service console, so ESXi users… Sorry. vmware-cmd stop hard Log into the service console (SSH, iLO, KVM, etc) Type “vmware-cmd –l” This will return a list
-> Continue reading Killing a Stuck or Hung VM

I was directed to this script by a kind gentleman from #vmware on freenode. http://communities.vmware.com/message/958881#958881 You will likely want to follow in the discussion there to get the jist of it, and it more or less works. Please post in the comments if you would like a full example & demonstration.

DPM or Distributed Power Management, is like VMware’s DRS on Steroids. It is the evolution of the DRS or Distributed Resource Scheduling concept. For those that don’t know what DRS is, I will do the needful and link the VMware Marketing Page for it. Here it is in a video: Now that you get the
-> Continue reading VMware’s Distributed Power Management – What is it, and What does it mean for you?

Now that we’ve discussed what the service console is and what it does for you. We’ll talk about making it redundant, why Service Console Redundancy is important, and some ways of going about that. Another “Pretty Big Task” but one worth sticking around for (at least for the cookies at the end). The Department of
-> Continue reading The Service Console: Part 2 – Redundancy

Two of them this time around: VMSA-2008-0019 (The website does not appear to have a 0019, but the 0018 matches up with it) Updated VMware Hosted products and patches for ESX and ESXi resolve two security issues. The first is a critical memory corruption vulnerability in virtual device hardware. The second is an updated bzip2
-> Continue reading VMware Security Announcements