Posts Tagged ‘ESX’

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 [...]

Lately I’m moving around my VMs and storage luns between my ESX clusters a lot to accomplish a complete redesign of my Virtual Infrastructure. At some point I got lost and didn’t had the complete overview anymore. Which luns were attached to which cluster? To remove(unpresent) a lun from an ESX host/cluster on the storage [...]

This week I ran into problems with vCenter server and almost all of my VMs were orphaned in vCenter. To resolve this issue I needed to disconnect/connect each ESX host. Because I hate doing repetitive tasks I created a little PowerShell script that I wanted to share with you.

# Variables
$VCServer = “vcserver.yourdomain.local”
$password = “rootPassword”

#Connect to [...]

If you love VMware you have to love Apple and if you love ESX4.0 you have to love a Mac. Well, at least I know I do. Both companies are light years ahead of their competitors and characterized by superior design, excellent performance and both fighting Microsoft’s marketing machine.
Since I’m a great Mac fan and [...]

In part 1, I explained the virtual machine settings that are available to us regarding to memory, in part 2, I explained how the ESX kernel assigns memory to a VM and in this part I will dive into ESX memory reclaiming techniques.
The ESX kernel uses transparent page sharing, ballooning and swapping to reclaim memory. [...]