VM-Aware

I found a fantastic article that talks about a free method of monitoring the event viewer for NMV related warnings. I know this functionality should be included in the product, but until it is try using blat as described in this article.

Daemon Behr has written a nice and succinct article on when and how to use more than one virtual CPU in a Virtual Machine.

A few of the highlights:

• Be very selective with vSMP only use it when applications can take advantage
• Don’t assign a VM the same amount of vCPUs as you have pCPUs
• Remember to change HALs for migrated physical machines if necessary

I know most of this is taught during the training courses, but you’d be surprised how many installs I have been to that have ignored them.

Always useful to keep in mind.

As most people will know by now there is a serious issue with licensing in the latest version of ESX 3.5 Update 2, which causes valid licenses to expire today (12th August).

The implications here being:

• No VMotion
• No DRS
• Inability to power on of machines that are not already powered on

The solution is to disable NTP and manually change the date to a few days past and then wait for VMware to release a patch within the next 36 hours.

To change the date simply check out this post.

Be careful when changing the time as any Virtual Machine that has the time synchronised with the host via VMware Tools will have the incorrect time applied. You may want to change this option to use either you time keeping DC or an ntp server directly.

Be careful and don’t do it unless you absolutely have to.

Existing Virtual Machines that are already powered on will continue to run, but if they are shut down they will not be able to be powered on again until either patched or the date has been changed.

Eric Siebert has compiled two more excellent Top Ten lists:

Storage in VMware

Get More Technical with VMware

Not much more to say, just that they are as excellent as I’ve come to expect.

Richard Bramley has written another excellent article that has stoked up some helpful comments as well.

It discusses the very useful RAMCheck tool in ESX that will check for faulty memory.  I have used the utility a few times and it turns out, courtesy of a reader comment, that it has been removed from ESX 3.5.  I usually use MemTest if I’m pretty certain that a machine has faulty memory, but RAMCheck was always quite useful.

Anyway, have a stroll over to Richard’s blog and check out all the useful posts.

The Desktop Virtualization blog have posted a handy article on how to change the root password if you have forgotten/lost/mislaid it.

Check it out here.