Site sponsor
Do you remember the days when VMware P2V Assistant costs $20.000? And a couple of years ago, the product was suddenly available for free? And what about the introduction of the free ESXi? VMware’s hypervisor available for free all of a sudden? Well, this is exactly what I think will happen to vCenter Server. It’s just a matter of time, but VMworld 2009 is getting close, so why wait, VMware? 
Read the rest of this entry »
A while ago I posted an article about my ESX whitebox and the HP P400 RAID controller I use in this whitebox server. At that time, I used ESXi 3.5 and there was no way I could configure or get the status from the RAID controller. Fortunately, someone commented that it was possible when using the regular ESX (no i) version by installing some HP software packages. I’ve been using ESXi 4 for some time now, but it was quiet annoying when of my disks died and I wasn’t informed about it or could not check the status, other than by restarting the server. I have switched to ESX 4 and now I want to be able to check and configure my P400 RAID controller. And I can! This is how I did it: Read the rest of this entry »
Today Veeam Backup 3.0 was released and the big eye-catcher of this backup and recovery tool is that it is the first tool ever that supports ESXi without the use of VCB:
Veeam Backup 3.0 now supports ESXi backup without VCB. Veeam Backup is the only VMware backup solution that lets you backup and restore virtual machines running on all existing editions of ESXi, including ESXi free.
As I’m using ESXi at home I decided to quickly test if there was a speed difference in backup with Veeam backup 3.0 vs Veeam Backup 3.0 with VCB (over LAN) vs Backup Exec 12.5 with VCB (over LAN). The VM has a disk size of 10GB and has 6,5 GB files on it. In all situations the backup-destination was to disk.
Here are the stats: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been playing around with my ESX whitebox lately and I had a problem with the write performance of the local storage. Fortunately, I found a solution that I wanted to share. It can be useful for your ESX whitebox or even your production server. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to troubleshooting on VMware ESX, esxtop is a tool that always comes in handy. CPU, memory, network and disk-related problems can be pinpointed with esxtop. Unfortunately, esxtop must be executed from the service console and my ESXi server doesn’t have that. I was looking for a way to use esxtop with ESXi and I found out that you can use resxtop. resxtop is the Remote CLI version of esxtop.
