VM-Aware

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing some of the guys from the VMware ESXi team.  It was more a Q&A than anything formal, but it was useful for me to try and get a handle on how VMware see how the product has matured.  It was a fairly short discussion, but some of it may be interesting to some people so I thought I would publish it. (more…)

So you’ve used DiskPart many times to extend data drives, but are irritated at the limitation of not being able to extend boot partitions.  Well no more, Dell have a utility that can extend all partitions, including boot partitions.

The utility is called ExtPart and can be downloaded here, with the release notes being available here.

It is really simple, just like DiskPart.  After extending the boot volume by adding more disks in the physical world or by extending the vmdk size in the virtual world (see this article for more information) it is a case of a single line in the command prompt.  Simply run ExtPart from the command prompt and type something like:

extpart c: 1024 - where c: is the drive to be extended and 1024 is the value in mb that you wish to extend into.

Genius!

Scott Lowe has written an article that discusses the pros & cons of FlexClone & A-SIS when used in conjunction with a VMware environment.

If you are just getting to grips with these technolgies (like me) it is a very useful starting point to understand how the two technologies may work with VMware.

I was investigating it when used with VMware VDI so there are a few very useful tips indeed.

I found an excellent article written on DABCC.com discussing ways to make Windows XP essentially a thin client. Some of the tweaks include:

• Desktop Folder Redirection
• Start Menu Redirection
• Autologin
• Loading iexplore As Shell

Very useful for all those people running VMware VDI as you can use these tips to load VDM in kiosk mode.

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.