Pre-migration PowerShell lifesaving tip of the day: get a listing of all your VMs and the datastores they’re living on (’cause we all know your VM names don’t match their storage names, right?) in case you need to re-register your VMs from storage. We’re heading into another datacenter move, and I’ve learned that it’s nice [...]
I suck at scripting. I have this big vSphere PowerCLI poster sitting next to my desk that I’m only now learning to reference. But PowerShell is quickly becoming my go-to tool of choice to quickly find out how my vSphere infrastructure is doing. To that end, Quest software released an awesome get-your-feet-wet-with-PowerShell tool called PowerGUI, [...]
Why didn’t I find this little trick sooner? On the heels of keeping your VI Client connection listing clean, you can also pre-populate your vSphere Client user name and (if you’re able to) password dialog boxes when launching the client. It’s wicked easy – get to the properties of your VI Client shortcut and modify [...]
This post from Eric Sloof is near and dear to my heart: I’ve probably migrated around 300 servers to VM in my current position, and learning how to quickly clean up those VMs once they’re converted can save you a tremendous amount of time (time usually on the weekend or after hours!). I’ve always used [...]
Forbes Guthrie has released another vReference card – this time, updated with juicy 4.1 info. If you work in vSphere and don’t already use one of his incredibly useful previous vReference releases, you owe it to yourself to download the vSphere 4.1 version. Also available are Virtual Infrastructure 3 cards for those of you not [...]
Seems that Scott Lowe has shelved his plans for a follow-up to Mastering VMware vSphere 4 – a book that sits, dog-eared, on my desk permanently. While working on that project Scott has amassed some really useful links to various resources and articles, and posted them today on his blog. Excellent reading for planning a [...]
This completely saved my aching head this morning when we had to update the VLAN on some freshly-built ESX hosts: Esxcfg command help Thank you, Eric Siebert!
Ran into this error this morning, which of course took down one of our (1000+ VM) vCenter environments: The vCenter Server’s vpxd logs contain entries similar to: An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Check database connectivity before restarting. Error: Error[VdbODBCError] (-1) “ODBC error: (23000) – [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]Violation of PRIMARY [...]
This post by Marcel van den Berg just saved my sanity today since I could not make heads or tails of what my beloved Platespin server was trying to tell me: Preparing <servername> (under PlateSpin control) For Synchronization No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:5036 Description: several one time synchronizations [...]
If you haven’t heard about disk alignment and you’re using virtual machines, you owe it to yourself and your most-likely-growing infrastructure to understand what alignment is all about. On a small scale it’s almost unnoticeable. But I can tell you that on a large scale it becomes a major pain for you or your storage [...]