Lewan Technology Blog

Potential issue if you are using VMware Changed Block Tracking and NFS storage.

NPIV or N-Port Virtualization is a method of utilizing a single Fibre Channel port to serve multiple physical or virtual servers. NPIV allows a single SAN device to service multiple WWNs without additional switching infrastructure. NPIV is the technique used by blade system hardware to reduce the complexity of SAN connected blades. NPIV allows SAN connectivity without requiring Fibre Channel switches to be installed within the blade chassis. VMware also uses NPIV within the Raw Device Mapping (RDM) infrastructure.

An excellent post that is very informative on VMware Raw Device Mapping (RDM) volumes that explains what they are, the different between physical and virtual compatibility, when to use which and when not to use RDM's at all:

I was at a customer site and was showing him how to expand the VMFS datastore on vSphere 4. Problem was however, it would not increase. If you clicked on the "Increase" button in the VMFS datastore's properties, the next screen is supposed to show you the available "free" space left on that disk so you can use that free space to increase the VMFS size. However it was coming up blank.

Running on vSphere 4.1, I installed a VM with Fedora 12 on it (Kernel version: 2.6.32.21-168.fc12.x86_64) and when I tried to install VMware Tools, I kept getting an error at the step that said:
"What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running kernel?"

A really good article by Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks.com on how to enable SSH on ESXi 4.1 (his post is at: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/10/03/enable-ssh-on-esxi-4-1/ -- See some very useful comments on his post).

I was helping a customer with their VMware environment which was unresponsive and we needed to shutdown all virtual machines. The typical methods (using vSphere Client, RDP, etc) were all unresponsive as the VM itself was hanging.

Here's a great write-up with screenshots on how to resize and extend a Windows 2003 "C" drive on VMware vSphere.

VMware vSphere 4.1 was released today. Please see the "What's New" link below to see all the new features and enhancements.

This probably affects other programs as well however for me it was trying to use the VMware vSphere Client to connect to a VMware vCenter server. For the life of me, I couldn't get it to connect. The vCenter services were all started, networking looked good, I could ping the vCenter server, everything that I tried didn't work.