Eric Sloof

Carter Shanklin over at the VI PowerShell Blog created another great Excel sheet with an integrated PowerShell script. If an ESX host you want to manage doesn't appear in VirtualCenter, you need to add it. This is a bit tricker than reconnecting since there's no inventory in VirtualCenter to tell you the IP addresses of all the hosts you use, and you also need to know a host's password in order to add it. This is another case where entering things in a spreadsheet can really speed things up. He made just such a spreadsheet, and here's a video of him using it.

Attaching lots of VMware ESX hosts to VMware VirtualCenter. from Carter Shanklin on Vimeo.

Is it possible to make your VMDK’s thin with the VI-Client? Just figured out how to create a thin grow able disk with the VI-Client. I created a normal virtual machine with a default disk and installed Windows 2003 as a guest. I converted the VM to a template with a thin disk. I copied both the VMDK files to another empty VM without any disk. After that I attached the thin template disks and started the VM. In the guest OS I can see the original size but the VMDK stays small. I didn’t had the time to test it any futher and haven’t seen it grow. You can also use the command line :

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/vmfs4all/Eric/Sloof_disk.vmdk -d thin /vmfs/volumes/vmfs4all/Eric/Sloof_disk.vmdk