Technical

February 26, 2010 | 15 comments

VMware ESX 4 can virtualize itself, and by using a special undocumented configuration setting it is now possible to take snapshots of virtual VMware ESX 4 systems.

December 15, 2009 | 7 comments

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0.1 is now fully integrated with VMware vSphere. The product deploys quickly as an OVF virtual appliance and the user interface is a vSphere Client plugin.

October 6, 2009 | 9 comments

With VMware vSphere, ESX, and VMFS, running out of space on a datastore does not cause damage to virtual machines. It is easy to recover without even a guest OS reboot.

October 2, 2009 | 13 comments

When a datastore in your VMware vSphere environment is about to fill up, you can have vCenter automatically spring into action to prevent downtime by using Storage VMotion.

September 22, 2009 | 10 comments

By using an unsupported VM configuration file (vmx) option called cpuid.coresPerSocket, it is possible to present multi-core virtual CPUs to VMware ESX virtual machines.

May 18, 2009 | 101 comments

VMware ESX 4 can run multiple virtual instances of ESX 4 on a single physical server and even allows powering on and VMotion of nested VMs inside virtual ESX (vESX). Perfect for a small VMware vSphere test lab!

April 20, 2009 | 1 comment

VirtualCenter (vCenter) database storage requirements grow rapidly as administrators increase the levels from default settings.

April 16, 2009 | 1 comment

As vCenter Server (VirtualCenter) collects performance data, it is stored in the VC database. As the data ages, it is aggregated to save storage space.

February 17, 2009 | 5 comments

Encapsulation is one of the four key benefits of VMware virtual machines.  On the surface it may seem like this is a common feature across all virtualization platforms — but it’s not. If you are a VMware ESX administrator, you know that a VMware virtual machine consists of several files,  normally contained in a single directory.  [...]

February 5, 2009 | 16 comments

By using Console2 with PowerShell and the VI Toolkit, users have much better text manipulation capabilities as well as the option to use different fonts.

February 2, 2009 | No comments

The VI Toolkit for Windows overrides an existing PowerShell prompt function. Here is one simple way to restore a desired setting.

January 18, 2009 | 13 comments

PuTTY is a popular SSH client for Windows — it works great and it’s free.  Out of the box it uses the Courier font, which looks like this: I prefer the appearance of a traditional Linux (X11) console font.  To me, it makes text much easier to read.  A few years ago I came across a [...]

January 14, 2009 | 3 comments

Even though the VI Client does not offer creation of VMs with thin-provisioned disks, they may exist. Use a PowerShell script to identify them.

January 5, 2009 | 3 comments

When System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) connects to VirtualCenter/vCenter, several changes are made. Learn how to recover everything with PowerShell.

November 20, 2008 | No comments

Duncan at Yellow Bricks has a handy post on cleaning up your VI Client cached server address list. There is a related issue with cached self-signed SSL certificate thumbprints.  When you first connect to a VirtualCenter Server or ESX host, you see a dialog box:

November 14, 2008 | 2 comments

The VI Client (vSphere Client) accepts several command-line arguments that can help administrators automate logging in to vCenter or ESX.