vCenter Will Not Start! – vCenter Services Startup Order

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[…]

A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)

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[…]

Safe and Natural VMFS Enlargement! – Extend or Grow VMFS and Why You Should Care

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[…]

VI3 Network Troubleshooting Guide

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[…]

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

Managing Your vCenter Events with PowerShell

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[…]

Answering VM Questions 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:[…]