Archive
VMWare Player with full-featured virtual networking
Eager to configure your virtual network in detail, but neither wanna bother with VMWare Workstation trials, nor have money for a license? Let’s use a Player, then. Read more…
More is not always better – CPU ready in VMware vSphere
You might have a situation, when your 2 vCPU webserver is having a high load (although CPU usage in MHz is normal).
In this situation most administrators would add extra vCPUs to the server, and expect to have an enhanced performance.
Unfortunately the additional vCPU can actually degrade performance. Let me explain why.
Configuring vSwitch ports
When people use standard vSwitches in vSphere it is always a problem, at least for me how
to configure switch security policies like promiscuous mode, or mac address changes just
for a few ports where these required. Using the standard vSwitch I always created a new
portgroup just for the few VMs which require special policies, but this is not the best
way, and really not a perfect solution.
If people change to use distributed vSwitches, and yes, if people has money for such
license this prblem could be solved much easier.
By default with a distributed vSwitch the same settings are defined at the portgroup
level, and the settings are inherited by all the ports. But this can be overridden if
required. To do so at first the override of the security settings at port level must be
enabled in the portgroup advanced settings tab.
After this, the inherited port settings can be changed.
Now, we have a port with custom port security policy. 
The Fairy Tale of the vSphere Update Manager and the DRS Policies
I’ve recently created a two node vSphere5 cluster in my test environment just for
testing, and playing around, with properly configured HA, and also DRS. I’ve created
various DRS policies, and tested a lot the cluster features throug a lot of scenario.
After that I started playing with VMware Update Manager. After configuration I ran into a
problem at the very beginning of the process when the Update Manager tried to place the
first ESX host into maintanance mode. The process were in stuck, and no error message at
all…
After a while (I am usually patient when trying something new ) I started
investigating, what the problem could be. I found quiet quickly that I hadn’t turned off
all the DRS policies, and one was active which forced 2 of my VMs running on different
hosts. This caused Update Manager not to be able to take the host into maintanace mode.
Turning off the DRS policy solved my problem, and Update Manager did the update
successfully.
How to get the type of the HDD in PowerCLI
I would like to determine each VM HDD type. Is it thin or thick? I realized that this question is not a trivial.
Here are the commands, which gather the type of the disc.
$vm = Get-VM -name testsrv
$thin = (((($vm |get-view).config).Hardware).Device | where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "VirtualDisk"}).Backing.ThinProvisioned
if ( $thin )
{
Write-Host " Disk provisioning type: Thin"
}
Else
{
Write-Host " Disk provisioning type: Thick"
}
That’s all!
Mystery of ODBCAD32.exe
I would like to install the vSphere Update Manager on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. The R2 is 64bit OS, but the Update manager needs a 32 bit version of ODBCAD. The vCenter Server located on the same machine, and I have already configured both ODBC DSN.
vCenter Server automated Inventory with PowerCLI
As you can see in my previous articles I created and filled in the Custom Attributes fields. The aim of the whole customization to store all data in the vCenter Server, easily do an automated inventory. The script not needs an SAP connection to gather the required information, because all data available in one information store.
PowerCLI version Differences
I would like to write a PowerCLI script, which gather VMs memory information from vCenter Server. I realized that if I put one of the VM into a variable, it have different property on different PowerCLI versions. I develop the script on PowerCLI 5.1 Release 1, and I run it on PowerCLI 5.0.1, and the result was not fine.
Mass Custom Attribute Writes with PowerCLI
In my previous article I mentioned that how can you handle Custom Attributes. I would like to provide you an example script, witch read attributes from a CSV file, and insert it to vCenter Server line by line.
Write and read custom attributes
In my previous article I described that how you can create Custom Attributes. If it created, and ready to use, you should read and write all virtual machine’ Custom Attributes via vSphere Client or PowerCLI.
