I have already written a blog post about how you can configure the ESXi host setting disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault in vSphere version 5.1. You can find that blog post here. I have received a couple of questions about how to configure the setting, called VMkernel.Boot.terminateVMOnPDL, in ESXi 5.5 so i decided to put together a blog post about it. …
VMware released VMware vCenter Server 5.1 U2 and VMware ESXi 5.1 U2 yesterday. I got quite a few customers running vSphere 5.1 and some of the problems fixed in update 2 has been seen in my customers environments so this is great news. One thing i know will be really appreciated, at least among my …
There are a few of my customer still running vSphere 5.1 U1 and one of them reported an issue related to the VMFS Heap Size (VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB) configuration a few days ago. Keep in mind that my customer upgraded to U1 from a previous vSphere 5.1 version meaning that the old VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB was retained at 80 MB …
A few days ago i came across a VMware vSphere, version 5.5, stretched cluster implementation that caught my attention. Background My customer uses the following setup: 8 ESXi version 5.5 hosts. 4 placed in Datacenter01 and 4 placed in Datacenter02 2 Storage systems. 1 storage node placed in Datacenter01 and 1 storage node placed in Datacenter02 …
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.0b, for both the Windows based vCenter Server and the virtual appliance vCenter Server, was released 2013-12-22. The software can be downloaded from various locations on the VMware download site depending on your license but this link directs you to the VMware vSphere section of the VMware download site. I have identified …
A customer contacted me a few days ago and wanted a operational procedure for moving a vCloud Director (vCD), version 5.5, based virtual machine (VM) from one vSphere cluster to another vSphere cluster. My customer uses vSphere version 5.5 and had one major requirement that had to be taken into account. The VM has to …
For those of you using a backup and restore solution based on a software backup and restore client installed in each virtual machine it is a good idea to secure the virtual machine configuration file, the .vmx file. Backing up the data from within the virtual machine is not enough for making a restore process …
Last week i was asked by a customer to help him reclaim CPU, Memory and Storage resources from over sized virtual machines (VM) in his vSphere 5.1 environment since the overall utilization has increased more than expected over the past 2 months. The customer request was very simple: Free up as much resources as possible …
A new version of vCenter Server 5.5 was released today. A complete list of included fixes/updates can be found here (short version) and the complete release notes can be found here. You can download the new version here. I have had some problems when updating both production and test/development environments and most of the problems i have …
I was asked by a customer the other day how to find out, using the ESXi command line, how much disk space a thin provisioned virtual machine disk consumes. Back in the ESX days you used the du command to query the virtual machine disk and in ESXi, version 5.5, you need to use the stat command. Fot this …
A few weeks ago a customer asked me how to automate the export of the vSphere vNetwork Distributed Switches (VDS) configuration. Their existing routine included to make a manual export of the VDS configuration whenever a VDS change was implemented including adding or removing a VDS port group. In the vSphere Web Client you can …
One customer contacted me a week ago with a question regarding a vSphere vCenter Server problem they have seen after upgrading to vCenter Server version 5.1. I recall i had the same problem back in 2012 when upgrading to vSphere 5.1 and i thought it was worth to create a blog post about it, even …
This will be the last (third) article in the blog series about how the different vCloud Director (vCD), version 5.1.2, Organization virtual datacenter (Org VDC) allocation models affects the vSphere layer including the vSphere cluster resource pool backing the Org vDC and the virtual machines (VMs). The first blog post in the series covering the Pay …
This will be the second article in the blog series about how the different vCloud Director (vCD), version 5.1.2, Organization virtual datacenter (Org VDC) allocation models affects the vSphere layer including the vSphere cluster resource pool backing the Org vDC and the virtual machines (VMs). The first blog post in the series covered the Pay As …
A couple of weeks ago i raised a question on twitter if someone had a recommendation regarding a free vSphere monitoring tool. I received quite a lot of answers but not that many fulfilled my customer requirements: Free of charge. Must be able to monitor the virtual machine virtual hard disk utilization e.g. only 10% …