I’ve covered this one before, but it is so awesome it needs to be mentioned twice. It really is that good. What does it do? It latches your vCenter, and will check your clusters for HA/vMotion compatibility, and will let you know what is broken if there is something ‘off’. They have several videos and
-> Continue reading The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – OpsCheck
Note: This is a post written by Pancil. Pancil normally sits quietly in a dark corner of the blog sanity/spell checking my posts. He is also a Sr. Virtualizaiton Engineer at Rackspace, where he and I work side by side, making the "Private Cloud" Awesome. So, while reading another blog Cody suggested that the ideas
-> Continue reading vZen: Real world principles to ‘Virtualization Zen’ designs
This one goes without saying. Veeam’s Fast SCP is another file copy tool, but designed specifically to SCP or securely copy files, and do it very fast. Consider pulling this down and giving it a shot the next time you are going to spend most of an evening or two copying a few TB of
-> Continue reading The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – FastSCP
The next up in the list of tools I’ve found essential to managing a virtual environment is TeraCopy. TeraCopy is not actually strictly a virtualization tool, but it will make your life as an administrator much easier. So what does TeraCopy do? It copies files from one location in windows to another… really REALLY fast.
-> Continue reading The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – TeraCopy
What is VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)? I’d start with reviewing the overview page. VMware Fault Tolerance, based on vLockstep technology, provides zero downtime, zero data loss continuous availability for your applications, without the cost and complexity of traditional hardware or software clustering solutions. Pretty awesome no? FT has it’s limits (1 vCPU, etc) and it
-> Continue reading Scheduling VMware’s FT (Fault Tolerance)
This begins a few posts on the topic of “Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed”. What qualifies as one of these tools? Well… anything that you’ve found really useful for managing VMs or your virtual infrastructure, and is something every administrator should have in their tool box. Starting things off, is Gparted. Gparted is an
-> Continue reading The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – Gparted
While it is a somewhat known fact that you used to be able to shrink disks using vmkfstools -X in ESX 2.x, the option was removed as of ESX 3.0. The reason for this probably stems from those few customers that were not familiar with using the command properly and ended up cutting off too
-> Continue reading How to Shrink a VMDK file in ESX
As LucD points out: When you attend a conference like VMworld you get lots of goodies pushed your way. With some of these you only realise when you are back home what you were given. The vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide is a good example of such a little gem that came my way during
-> Continue reading Lot’s of Awesome In A Small Package
This post may not mean much to a lot of my readers, but I figure, due to the larger audience here it is worth posting. Basically, our local vMUG is quarterly, and heavily vendor sponsored. While generally useful, I’d like to continue the techie discussion that only seems to happen afterwards. So what does this
-> Continue reading San Antonio Mini-vMug
Ok, So maybe they didn’t save the world, but the sure saved my weekend. Rather than spend a lot of time on the intro, let’s dive right in. These will be in Problem/PowerShell/Output format. The Problem: More spaghetti environments, this time we need to count some resources. The first counts CPU, the second Memory. Yes
-> Continue reading Four PowerCLI One-Liners That Saved The World!
Amongst the most valuable sessions at VMworld 2009 for me this year was the Ask the Experts sessions. Not for any specific question exactly, but for the brain share that was gathered up on stage, and in the quality of the questions being asked. I will do my best to summarize them here based on
-> Continue reading VMworld 2009 Ask the Experts Follow-Up
There was only one session today I wanted into, and into it I got. The day started however with an amazing cup of coffee: PowerCLI with Carter Shanklin This was another of those sessions that made the entire trip worth it, and that was only because of this particular slide: Ok, so the content was
-> Continue reading VMworld 2009 Day 2 Wrap Up
I was going to try live blogging some of this, however that is not quite my style if you will. So I will try to summarize in a few posts where I went and what I did. So without further adieu: Lab 1 – Scripting Virtual Infrastructure with PowerShell & Perl All and all a
-> Continue reading VMworld Day 1 Wrap Up
One of the most amazing new features of vSphere is the ability to hot add hardware into a supported guest OS. However, when you need to upgrade your 20 node web farm, all of the right clicks and slider moves can become cumbersome. That is where VMware PowerCLI (PowerShell) comes to the rescue! A few
-> Continue reading vSphere 4 Hot Add Hardware and PowerShell
The ever wonderful Virtu-Al has released an update to his PowerShell Daily report. This script is beyond awesome in usefulness and should be required in any production VI deployment. Really, it is that good. Also! There have been some mods to get it looking nice on the iPhone. What is new in V2? Bug Fixes
-> Continue reading PowerShell Daily Report V2 (and some iPhone love)!
I almost wish I had stumbled on this before. Microsoft has published an “Owners Manual” for PowerShell. You know, that little book in the back of your glove box? Yeah, only this one is uber useful, and while not PowerCLI specific, will make your life as a VI admin, and Windows admin that much nicer.
-> Continue reading PowerShell Owners Manual
In doing some background research for a post on FT vs. MSCS, I stumbled upon a wonderful write up by Brian Atkinson aka. “VMRoyale”, on FT’s laundry list of requirements, limits, and other considerations. The original post is here. He does an excellent job of pulling together data from various VMware docs and puts together
-> Continue reading VMware FT (Fault Tolerance) Requirements & Limits
Amazon just posted my 3 star review of OnlineFlashCards for the VCP310. You can read the entire thing here. I’ve quoted some bits of it here: When I received the product, it came in a shrink wrapped box. Odd I thought, considering this is an online product, what is the box for? I shook it
-> Continue reading OnlineFlashCards VCP310 – Review Posted
This post comes because I am just as confused as the rest of you when it comes to the options available in some of these new vSphere interfaces. I figure it best to take a look at some of the options, and figure when it is best to move away from defaults and start tuning
-> Continue reading VMDirectPath? Paravirtual SCSI? – vSphere VM Options and You!
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