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
VMware has updated their Time Keeping Best Practices KB’s. The new timekeeping articles are: 1006427 Timekeeping best practices for Linux 1007020 Linux using TSC clocksource stops responding 1008284 Time falls behind in a virtual machine when the guest operating system writes to previously unwritten regions of its virtual disk 1005861 Time falls behind in virtual
-> Continue reading VMware Time Keeping Best Practices KB Updates
Just fair warning, that we’ll still be on normal programming whilst this is going on. Which I figure is a good thing. There will be plenty of news coming out from the event, I don’t want to over saturate.
Basically, just what the title says, who is using it, what for, and is there an interest in posts or a forum around it? Post in the comments your thoughts.
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
-> Continue reading How Do You Prepare Your Templates?
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
-> Continue reading Trouble Getting VMware HA Working? – Basic Troubleshooting For VMware’s HA
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
-> Continue reading Y’all See This? – Nexus 1000v Architecture Write Up
Let’s say you have a metric heck ton of hosts, and you need to check them… all. To see if VMotion has been enabled properly. How do you do it? Well, you could hire that out of work banker now out in front of the grocery store to come and click through all of the
-> Continue reading Now Where Did I Put My VMotion?
The link over on the VMTN blog is a bit off and identifies this as #32, but I assure you, this was the VMTN podcast #33, discussing the VITK 1.5 release, and a few other things. TalkShoe Link
When I fired up my RSS reader today I notices a lot of new/updated KB articles at VMware’s site about timing in virtual machines. I figured it’s worth while to link them here just in case. Determining and changing the rate of timer interrupts a guest operating system requests Time in a Linux virtual machine
-> Continue reading Much To Do About Time
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…
-> Continue reading Tapping ESX – Network Sniffing Your VI
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
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
-> Continue reading Log Bundles, of the Virtual Center Variety
Well, I’m not sure how “Extreme” it is, but over the weekend VMware’s Developer community site got a face lift. Unlike Joan Rivers, this one actually kinda looks good afterwards:
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.
-> Continue reading psVIC – PowerShell Virtual Infrastructure Client
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
-> Continue reading vpxd.exe – The Other White Meat
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
-> Continue reading Removing VMware Snapshots – With a Bat (PowerShell, CLI, rCLI… and Perl)
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
Today VMware launched it’s vExpert program. Similar to Microsoft’s MVP program, it’s a reward from VMware, to those out in the community, blogging, on the forums, etc. In addition, vInternals today, launched the vIdiot program, designed to be just the opposite. Wonder what list I’ll end up on.
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
-> Continue reading VMware – An Introduction To Scripting VI Using Perl or PowerShell