VM-Aware

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.

I have almost completed an installation of DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation product and wanted to find out about how the wider SQL Server (in my case) community feel about storage virtualisation.

It just so happened that one of the articles I ended up reading was written by the always excellent Brent Ozar. It discusses the topic using real life use cases and quite a lot of detail.

For the customer I have implemented DataCore, they don’t quite need to worry about some of the issues that Brent points out, but some of the points are certainly worth considering.

One of the great new bits of functionality in ESX 3.5 Update is the ability to hot extend non-boot virtual disks without shutting down the VM.

I decided to give it a go with a Windows 2003 Standard VM and thought I’d provide a How To for anyone that might need/want it.

You can download the pdf here.  It is the first version of the document so please feel free to comment and let me know how to improve it.

I’m working on a Linux equivalent, but to be honest, I have never tried this before in Linux so it might be a while until the Tech Note appears