This came up on Twitter Sunday, and having happened upon it in the past, I thought I’d share the solution that Ed Haletky (Blue Gears) and I came to. Basically it boils down to the service start order for the vCenter and related services. Specifically the order should be: SQL (MS SQL, Oracle, etc) ADAM
-> Continue reading vCenter Will Not Start! – vCenter Services Startup Order
I recently got a comment on a post I had done a while back on VMware tools and Time Sync. While the one-liners there may be useful, they don’t particularly explain how they got to the end results. With that in mind, today I hope to explain some of the logic used when you need
-> Continue reading A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
I just received my copy of Steve Jin’s “VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere ”, As I tech edited the book I’ll not post a long review, other than to say that the book is a good resource, and overall a good book. If you are, or will be programming
-> Continue reading vSphere SDK – The Book!
Now that I have you at attention, let us take this time to talk of things. Important things. The things your parents never told you about VMFS. First let us start with some definitions, each of these will be taken in the context of VMware Virtualization using ESX/vSphere, and VMFS, but you knew that, didn’t
-> Continue reading Safe and Natural VMFS Enlargement! – Extend or Grow VMFS and Why You Should Care
No I’m not kidding either. Found this via Twitter last evening in fact. There is now a Twitter plugin for the VI client. Not sure how much use it is, but it shows how flexible the plugin stuff can really get. Go to the source and check it out yourself.
At least three of these, and laminate at least one. Really. The VI Toolkit Quick Reference card by Virtual-Al is a perfect starter guide, and quick reference doc for those working with the VI Toolkit. Not only because I’ve got a line or two in it, but because it really is useful, take a look:
-> Continue reading VI Toolkit Quick Reference Card
The VMware Networking Blog has posted a useful set of slides on troubleshooting VMware networking: At VMworld last September, one of our engineering staff, Srinivas Neginhal, delivered a fabulous breakout session on the topic of “VI3 Networking: Advanced Troubleshooting.” Srinivas squeezed a 79-slide deck into the available time—he could have easily doubled or tripled the
-> Continue reading VI3 Network Troubleshooting Guide
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
While great, managing events with the the VI Client can be a pain. No search functionality, old events fall off the list, etc, etc. So what is an admin to do? A resourceful admin will have been playing with the VI Toolkit, and would have found the get-vievent cmdlet. Let’s take a look at how
-> Continue reading Managing Your vCenter Events with PowerShell
Because there is an answer for everything and for everything that answer is PowerShell. Sometimes in your Virtual Infrastructure, you will have a need to answer a question or two. Normally these questions are put to you by vCenter: “Did you copy or move this VM?”, “Is today your birthday?”, “Who shot Kennedy?”. For Example:
-> Continue reading Answering VM Questions With PowerShell
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
-> Continue reading HALP! My Virtual Infrastructure Client Events Have Disappeared!
Why? Because it’s awesome, that’s why. Below is an example, complete with syntax and screenshots on how to defragment a windows guest using VMware’s VIX. Here is what it looked like before: Here is the command used from the host where VIX is installed: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VIX>vmrun -T esx -h https://vCenter.server.com/sdk – u domain\user -p
-> Continue reading Using VIX to Defrag Windows Guests
I’ll set the scene a little… I’m working late, I’ve just installed Update Manager and I‘m going to run my first updates. Like all new systems, I’m not always confident so I decided “Out of hours” would be the best time to try. I hit “Remediate” on my first Host then sat back, cup
-> Continue reading Increase Simultaneous VMotions as well as Increase Performance
Sort of, it seems: Today, RSA integrates with VMware in an couple of what I would call "useful but not earth-shattering" points – you can integrate envision authentication with Virtual Center and it also integrates with VDM 2.1 and VMware View Manager for hardened authentication. But, with VMware as mission-critical as it is, security
-> Continue reading ESX Does RSA?
The worst has happened. That sexy ESX host that you spent ages building and perfecting went south. For some reason, the raid you built was corrupt, and now you’ve re-installed ESX. With luck you had your VM’s on some shared storage (SAN, iSCSI, NFS). Or… You’ve just SCP’d over a metric boat load of VM
-> Continue reading Adding VM’s to Inventory
kernel: testing NMI watchdog … <4>WARNING: CPU#0: NMI appears to be stuck This is what I was greeted with this morning on a 64bit RHEL 5 VM. After looking around the internet a bit, I found that this was a guest OS problem that was caused but a number of things. First, was the resource
-> Continue reading 64bit VM Error – NMI Appears to be Stuck
Screenshot Tour: VMware Converter 4 Beta – Linux Conversion After some fighting, I was unable to get the Windows Converter 4 package installed on my XP VM. However, I did have some great success in installing Converter 4 and converting an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS virtual machine. These screenshots begin after converter is installed. We has
-> Continue reading Screenshot Tour: VMware Converter 4 Beta – Linux Conversion
In cleaning out my RSS reader I happened upon an interesting little site: CompareMyVM is a free tool that allows you to compare your VMware ESX Server virtual machine resource allocations with that of the community at large. You can compare by application category to see how your peers are allocating resources to gain the
-> Continue reading Compare My VM!