HP DL380p Gen8 VMware ESXi Build Process

Recently I ran across an issue installing ESXi on an HP DL380p Gen8.  The VMware ESXi ISO image does not have the latest NIC and RAID Controller drivers to allow for install.  The HP packaged VMware ESXi ISO has the proper drivers, but it is an older ESXi build.  When you patch the HP VMware… Read More

Use PowerCLI to find all VMs with a mounted ISO file as a CD/DVD drive

I was doing some maintenance and wanted to clean up some old NFS mounts we had on our ESXi server. Here’s a one-liner you can slap in PowerCLI once you are auth’d to vCenter. It will essentially list all VMs that have an ISO mounted. Pretty easy! I was then able to umount the CD/DVD… Read More

DataCore SANSymphony-V VMware vSphere Plug-in

On May 7th 2012, DataCore Software released a plug-in for SANSymphony-V and VMware vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 and greater.  The plug-in adds a SANSymphony-V tab to your VMware vSphere Client.  This allows for integration between SANSymphony-V and VMware.  From the tab within the vSphere Client you can perform the following operations: Create virtual disks and present… Read More

VMware View 5.1 Announced

VMware recently announced that VMware View 5.1 will be released in Q2 2012.  Below is a summary listing of the new features and benefits.  VMware View Storage Accelerator will act as a read cache for common blocks of  Virtual Machine Disk Files (VMDK).  This will benefit performance by reducing the read IOPS on the underlying… Read More

Reclaiming Thin Provisioned Storage on Windows Using Sdelete

Many storage arrays such as HP’s 3Par line, Datacore, and others have the ability to thin provision storage.  VMware also has the ability to thin provision virtual disks (VMDK files).  Over time the storage utilization increases as data is created, fragmented, and moved.  When data is deleted the storage array does not automatically free up… Read More

Using VMware PowerCLI 5 to check for Snapshots

We recently integrated BackupExec for one of our existing clients, however, after getting woken up at 4am this past weekend, we found out that a snapshot filled up the LUN for a VM. We finally determined it was from BackupExec hanging! After restarting the service, we were able to fix it easily by doing a… Read More

Dynamic LUN Expansion on Solaris using Veritas

This article will give you a step by step guide on how to configure a DLE with VeritasVM on Sun Solaris. In a recent scenario for one of our clients, it was imperative that we manage this via DLE, rather than spanning an existing disk group with another LUN. It is always a good idea… Read More