Connect-VIServer YOURvCENTERNAME

$Information = @()
Foreach ($VM in (Get-VM | Sort Name | Get-View)){
$MyDetails = "" | Select-Object VMName,VMXLocation
$MyDetails.VMName = $VM.Name
$MyDetails.VMXLocation = $VM.Config.Files.VmPathName
$Information += $MyDetails
}
$Information |Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation C:output.csv

This little report is a nice bit of insurance to have, let me tell you…

One of the best features of the latest PowerGUI / VMware Infrastructure Management release? An incredibly useful dropdown list of common vSphere gotchas to look for (click the thumbnail for a list of ‘em). As I come on board a new organization with a more diverse administration personnel model for vSphere, this list of queries has enabled me to very quickly identify some problems that could grow into larger issues – and to fix them almost as quickly.

Finding a terabyte of orphaned .vmdk files just made me a pretty valuable employee today…

"C:Program Files (x86)VMwareInfrastructureVirtual Infrastructure ClientLauncherVpxClient.exe" -u domainusername

This will launch the client with the user name pre-populated with domainusername, which is super handy for me since I log into all of my vCenters using an admin account. Other switches:

-s hostname to specify a specific host or IP address

-p password to specific a password. Used with -u, ie: -u username -p password

Much thanks to Jason Boche’s original post on this, which is now saving me some typing every day…

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 inclined to upgrade just yet.

Esxcfg command help

Thank you, Eric Siebert!

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 KEY constraint ‘PK_VPX_GUEST_DISK’. Cannot insert duplicate key in object ‘dbo.VPX_GUEST_DISK’.” is returned when executing SQL statement “INSERT INTO VPX_GUEST_DISK (VM_ID, PATH, CAPACITY, FREE_SPACE) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)”

The link to the VMware knowledgebase article is here: vCenter Server service fails with the error: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint ‘PK_VPX_GUEST_DISK’

The curious part? That issue is addressed specifically by vCenter Update 1, Build 208111 and we’re running 208111. In any case, shutting down the vCenter service (ok, it wouldn’t run anyway) and running the SQL script supplied in the KB article did the trick and fixed that which should probably already have been fixed. Still super happy we’re not running on Oracle anymore, though…

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 jobs fails at Step 3 “Take control of virtual machine”. Before this kind of job performed well.

Solution:

reboot the Platespin server and re-run the job. It will most likely run successfully.

Platespin: the Cadillac of physical-to-virtual migrations (or Porsche, or WRX STi, what have you) but decidedly not the best-documented solution on the planet. You’ll find that the errors that are thrown link you to expired or nonexistent knowledge base articles…

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 infrastructure team.

One quick tip: to check your disk offset on Windows systems, simply launch msinfo32.exe from the Run menu. See the thumbnail of this post for a screenshot.

From VirtualGeek’s excellent post:

The purpose of alignment is to minimize extraneous internal array operations. All arrays have internal constructs that are generally a function of the RAID model (and also the filesystem alignment, and in some cases logical page table constructs in virtually provisioned models).

<snip>

All the funky goodness is done via either filesystem or another (pages commonly) abstraction on TOP of the RAID abstraction. Think of a 4K NTFS IO operation in a Guest making it’s way down to the array. Once it gets there, let’s say the array has a 64K stripe, but a 1MB “page” used for these fancy features. Falling into two 1MB logical memory pages as an example – where statistically it’s much more likely to land on a boundary if the volume is aligned on a 4K boundary.

It’s very worth your time to delve into this article and find out how your environment is set up, like right now. You might find your templates are mis-aligned, or in our case, that VMware Converter does not properly align disks on conversion (wonder-app Platespin Migrate does, in fact, give you properly-aligned disks).