Friday, January 20. 2012
Video - Install vSphere Syslog Collector and configure ESXi logging
Thursday, January 12. 2012
Forbes Guthrie has released the vSphere 5 vReference Card


Tuesday, January 3. 2012
VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices
VMware supports in-place upgrades on 64-bit systems from vCenter Server 4.x to vCenter Server 5.0. You can upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or later and vCenter Server 4.0.x to vCenter Server 5.0 by installing vCenter Server 5.0 on a new machine and migrating the existing database.
This upgrade method makes it possible to upgrade from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. Alternatively, if the VirtualCenter or vCenter Server database is on a remote machine, you can upgrade the database. vCenter Server 5.0 can manage ESX 3.5.x/ESXi 3.5.x hosts in the same cluster with ESX 4.x/ESXi 4.x hosts.
You cannot upgrade a vCenter Server 4.x instance that is running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition to vCenter Server 5.0, because vCenter Server 5.0 does not support Windows XP Professional x64. This article provides information about upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0.
Sunday, December 11. 2011
Myth - VMware HA datastore heartbeats prevent host isolation
What are datastore heartbeats?
The host-X-hb (where X is the host’s MOID) is Located on each heartbeat datastore, this file is used to check for slave liveness through the heartbeat datastore. This file is checked by the master host if the master loses network heartbeats from the slave.
For VMFS datastores, the vSphere HA agent locks this file with an exclusive lock and relies on the VMkernel heartbeat to indicate liveness. For NFS datastores, vSphere HA periodically updates the time stamp to this file to indicate liveness.
The host-X-poweron (where X is the host’s MOID) is a per-host file that contains the list of all virtual machines that are powered on. This file is used as a communication channel if a management network outage occurs. Isolated slaves use this file to tell the master that it is isolated as well as to tell the master which virtual machines it has powered off.
The master host must determine whether the slave host:
• Actually crashed
• Is not responding because of a network failure
• The HA agent is in an unreachable state
The absence of both a network and datastore heartbeat indicates full host failure. Datastores are used as a backup communication channel to detect virtual machine and host heartbeats. Datastore heartbeats are used to make the distinction between a failed, an isolated or a partitioned host.