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PowerCLI: Counting physical CPUs in a...
We recently needed to calculate the number of physical CPUs in use by hosts running Windows VMs in order to work out how many Windows Server 2008 Data Center Edition licenses we require.
Data Center (DC) edition permits you to run as many Windows Server VMs as you like on a host which has the DC license. You don’t actually need to insta [...]
Converting a “Big Board”:...
Migrating what?
First a bit about the urban75 boards. Based in Brixton, London, UK, urban75 is one of the busiest, non-profit community sites around, featuring huge photography sections, bulletin boards, live chat, drug information, football, direct action info and more. The boards are entirely non-profit and carry no advertising. The site is [...]
vSphere PowerCLI: Moved your ISO data...
We recently moved our ISO store from a legacy NFS server to our main NFS filer.
The first task was copying the actual files, which can be done via any machine that has both datastores mounted (with read-write access to the destination store).
The more significant job is reconfiguring the VMs to use the copies of the ISOs in the new datastore. [...]
vSphere Bugs & Minor Irritations
I’ve recently reported a couple of annoying bugs to VMware. Both have been around for a long time, almost certainly since the days of Virtual Center 2.0, maybe even earlier.
If a VM has nothing in the “Notes” annotation, vCenter displays the “Notes” from the previously selected VM instead.
So if you have a machi [...]
vSphere HA Slot Sizes
vSphere HA slot sizes are used to calculate the number of VMs that can be powered on in an HA cluster with “Host failures cluster tolerates” selected. The slots size is calculated based on the size of reservations on the VMs in the cluster. HA Admission Control then prevents new VMs being powered on if it would not leave any slots [...]
vSphere: Attempting to add NFS datast...
We’ve had this error on ESX 3.5 and 4.0 hosts, both ESX and ESXi.
When trying to add a new NFS datastore we get the above error message, both in the vSphere Client and when using the command-line tools.
Logging on to the Service Console on an affected host, “esxcfg-nas -l” also results in the same error.
The cause is invalid [...]
Add multiple datastores to multiple v...
In large vSphere environments it can be very tedious to add multiple NFS datastores to lots of hosts.
PowerCLI comes to the rescue as usual.
I needed to add some datastores to all the clustered hosts in a single datacenter, but to skip our non-clustered standalone hosts which are used for backups.
A bit of PowerCLI which should be fairly self [...]
vSphere 4.1 ESXi Installable on USB?
Looking at the ESXi Installable Setup guides for 4.1 and 4.0 reveals a change. In 4.0 under System Requirements, a USB drive was listed as a possible boot device, as well as being usable for installation. So you could stick in your installation media and select USB as the destination.
Under 4.1, USB is no longer listed in the documentation as [...]
After vSphere 4.1 – what will b...
vSphere 4.1 has been out for a couple of days now.
As well as the new features which have been covered extensively (see What’s New), the release notes list some future changes for the product range. They’re not really hidden but haven’t been given much publicity.
ESX will be dropped in future releases, with ESXi being the h [...]
Passing info from PowerCLI into your ...
For a project at work we’ve been trying to pass information into a VM without connecting the VM to the network.
This is in order to set up some config within both Windows and Linux VMs. We decided to explore the use of GuestInfo variables which are held in memory in VMware Tools within the Guest VM, but which can be set from the host.
F [...]
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