HA “Deepdive”

Article at http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/ very deeply describe VMware HA functionality.

Article clearly explains:

• Primary and Secondary nodes
• Isolation Response
• Slot sizes/Admission Control
• Advanced settings

Mike Liverick's virtualisation blog

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/

Training videos for vSphere4:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=1442

DELL PowerConnect technical documents

Very good - deep technical documents for DELL PowerConnect switches.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/solutions/en/pwcnt_papers?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Shell Script While Loop Examples

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/shell-script-while-loop-examples/

Vmware Linux Guest Add a New Hard Disk Without Rebooting Guest

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/vmware-add-a-new-hard-disk-without-rebooting-guest.html

Infrastructure MS Visio Stnecils

All Infrastructure MS Visio Stencils
http://www.visiocafe.com/

DELL Infrastructure MS Visio Stencils

http://www.visiocafe.com/dell.htm

LiveCD list

http://www.livecdlist.com

Virtualization Performance Benchmark

Virtualization Performance Benchmark VMmark can help for hardware platform comparison.

Public results are available at http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

Very nice article explaining iSCSI in ESX environment
http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-iscsi-customers-using-vmware.html

Platespin Recon 3.6 - bugs and issues

Platespin Recon 3.6 have big issues with hardware inventory of some servers. It can hang your server during CPU model checking!!! Platespin released hotfix for that. But that's not all. When you use database PostgreSQL 8.3 which is bundled with Recon it has significant performance issues. I was waiting for some reports several hours!!! I have troubleshooted and realized that there is some problem with SQL communication between Plaspin Recon application server and PostgreSQL. You can find error messages in PostgreSQL log file. It says something about abnormal client termination. If you use MS SQL Server it works like a sharm.

MS Windows Virtual Memory Management on consolidated virtual workloads

When you virtualize lot of MS Window workloads you can observe lot of "Memory Pages/s" from virtual machines to physical disk subsystem (system swaping inactive memory pages to hard drive) . If you haven't enough IO performance in your storage your virtual machines becomes slow. For virtualization is normaly used SAN environment. Don't forget design capacity and performance on your storage for page files. If you want to tune your MS Windows and optimize page file IOs to your storage try disable (if you have enough RAM) or optimize Windows Page File.

Articles about this topic:
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=143
http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm
http://www.instantfundas.com/2008/07/disable-windows-page-file-save-your.html
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/04/27/pagefile.html
http://smallvoid.com/article/windows-page-file.html

20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/top-linux-monitoring-tools.html

Understanding VirtualCenter Performance Statistics

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5230

Howto use VMware esxtop

Official documentation http://www.vmware.com/info?id=193

Nice article http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/06/interactive-replay-batch-esxtop-modes/

Killing a frozen VM on a vSphere ESX host

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/killing-a-frozen-vm-on-a-vsphere-esx-host/?track=NL-915&ad=710968HOUSE&asrc=EM_NLN_8048495&uid=5373778

PERL Getopt and GetOptions

When you code unix program first of all you need to get user options. Two Perl modules (Getopt and Getoptions::Long) work to extract program flags and arguments much like Getopt and Getopts do for shell programming. The Perl modules, especially GetOptions::Long, are much more powerful and flexible.

See full article at http://aplawrence.com/Unix/perlgetopts.html

Ultimate Deployment Appliance

Unattended OS installations (Windows, Linux, ESX, Solaris) over the network set-up in minutes! Look at http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/

How to shutdown windows from linux

If you have samba you can use "net rpc SHUTDOWN -C "some comment here" -f -I x.x.x.x -U user_name%password"

Howto install Windows XP on ESX3

http://virtrix.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-installing-windows-xp-on-esx.html

How to copy (backup) files from ESX3i?

You can use RCLI and vifs command. More info at
http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/esx_3i_rcli/vifs.php

Examples:
List files in datastore directory:
vifs --server 192.168.4.4 --username root --password ***** --dir "[Datastore1]/win2k3"

Download file from ESX3i Datastore:
vifs --server 192.168.4.4 --username root --dc ha-datacenter --password ***** --get "[Datastore1] /win2k3/win2k3-flat.vmdk" my-clone.vmdk

Notes:
File write speed around 1MBps only