Posts Tagged ‘ESX’

Whenever you need to install a new box with ESX, there’s the struggle with matching physical ports to VMware devices. Which network adapter becomes vmnic0?, Which hostbus adapter becomes vmhba1?, etc. Especially when you have a lot of network adapters this can be confusing and you can’t connect to the device over the network unless you [...]

Before upgrading my Virtual Center 2.5 server to vCenter Server 4.0, I decided to temporarily disable HA and DRS. This is just a precaution taken to avoid waiting for cluster reconfigurations right after the upgrade. Because I hate doing things more than once by hand, I used PowerCLI for this.
Although no rocket science you can use the [...]

Everybody backups their environment, but how many do actually test if the backup can be restored? When you do, you know how time consuming this process is and even when you do a test restore, you are actually only testing that particular backup. You can’t possibly test every backup in your environment.
Veeam, an industry leader [...]

In my post Unattended upgrade of HP mgmt agents – Part 2 you could read about my script for an unattended installation of the HP Management agents on ESX3.5. In this part I’ll share my next version of the script for installing the HP Management agents on ESX4.0 and ESX4.0 U1.
In the ESX4 installation, the location of [...]

It’s been a year since I blogged about my script to perform an unattended upgrade of the HP management agents 8.1.1 on ESX 3.5 U3. After HP upgraded their management agents to version 8.2.0 some things changed. The installation procedure is now a 2 step process. First there’s a PreInstall_Setup.sh script which modifies some startup [...]

I just noticed that VMware released a couple of critical ESX3.5 fixes on December 29th, shortly after releasing ESX3.5 Update5 on December 3rd. Wading through the patch details I stumbled upon some severe issues addressed by the ESX350-200912401-BG patch. I quote some issues that caught my eye: 

ESX hosts might get disconnected from VirtualCenter Server. This issue [...]

When running some storage test on an ESX 3.5 environment lately, I ran into a problem where a dead storage path disappeared after a rescan. While this was as expected, the storage path didn’t return after fixing it in the SAN and running a rescan again. After a reboot of the ESX server, the new [...]

Nowadays more and more companies have or are considering a 2nd datacenter in another site. Mostly the main reason for this 2nd datacenter is for disaster recovery purposes. There are 2 ways to utilize this 2nd datacenter. First one could choose for an active-passive setup, where in the 2nd datacenter bare-metal servers are waiting to [...]

I’ve always been using UDA1.4 for my ESX deployments up until ESX3.5. Now when it comes to vSphere the UDA1.4 isn’t a good fit anymore, because it doesn’t support ESX4. Luckily Carl Thijssen, the mastermind behind the UDA, released a 2.0 beta version  a couple of months ago, which, with a little help from Mike [...]

If you want to know the size of your vm, you probably first look at the size of the virtual disks in the vm’s settings, but there’s more to it. A virtual machine consists of the following set of files:

Config files (.vmx, .vmxf, .vmsd, .nvram)
Log files (.log)
Disk files (.vmdk)
Snapshots (delta.vmdk, .vmsn)
Swapfile (.vswp)

To make things more complicated, these [...]