VM-Aware

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.

Using a few different articles I managed to add a security banner at the request of a customer recently. The first article discusses which files to customise, the second article is the Message of the Day editor tool how to and finally Jase McCarty’s post that covered the whole process from start to finish.

Nice.

Duncan Epping of yellowbricks has written many excellent articles in his time, but I have recently needed to check the free disk space of VMFS volumes at regular intervals and Duncan came to the rescue.

Check this article for a script that will check the disk space of all VMFS volumes and format the results into a nice table. Then check this post to find out how to email it to yourself every day at 10am.

Really excellent stuff.

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.

3Par have announced some back-end storage enhancements that can greatly improve the usability, scalability and performance of VMware VDI. Thin Copy Desktop has some of the following enhancements:

Automated Disktop Image Creation & Management - Storage level snapshots that are VMware VDI aware. This will apparently make desktops available in seconds instead of minutes/tens of minutes

Fast & Granular Recovery of Desktop Images - Recovery of desktop images in seconds via the use of scheduled snapshots

Greater Performance - Using Virtual Copy snapshots, which can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients

You can read all about it here.