Posts tagged VMware
Windows VM MAC Address Change
Oct 29th
Sometimes moving a server into a Virtual Infrastructure is not straightforward. Consider a server that has software on it that is licensed based on a MAC address for instance. MAC addresses start with a vendor ID and the rest of the address is made up with hexadecimal numbers to make each MAC address unique. VMware’s vendor ID is 00:50:56, all VM NICs will have MAC addresses starting with it.
So, suppose you have a piece of software installed on a Windows server that is licensed to a MAC address of 00:0B:CD:6D:17:D9. How do you P2V that server and still have the software work? More >
ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 4 Released
Mar 31st
Yesterday, VMware announced the availability of ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 4 (build number 153875). As usual you can view the release notes for all of the juicy details but in summary they are: More >
Which VMs are in which Port Groups
Feb 24th
This took me a little while to get sorted as I had a gap in my PowerShell knowledge around the handling and formating of nested objects. A bit of exploration with get-member and I came up witha working script. It’s based on a post by Hugo Peeters and lists the VMs that are connected to (or belong to) a particular Port Group.
I wanted to know this as I was producing some infrastructure diagrams for a customer and wanted to know the names of VMs in a cluster for each Port Group without having to visit each ESX server. More >
HA Agent on ESX-HOST in cluster CLUSTER-NAME has an error
Feb 24th
If I wanted to, this could be a very big post all about configuring HA correctly. But I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Instead I just want to share my experiences with this error:
HA Agent on ESX-HOST in cluster CLUSTER-NAME has an error
Odds are that you will eventually see this one pop up in vCenter for one of your ESX 3.x hosts. If you’re not sure what it means, well the translation basically is that the host displaying the error could fail and your VMs running on it probably won’t get started up automatically on another host. Essentially HA is broken on the host. More >
vCenter 2.5 Update 4 released
Feb 24th
Update 4 of vCenter 2.5 (the management tool for VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure) has been released. Not a huge number of new features and probably a few bug fixes is about all you’re going to get from it. The release notes can be found here.
vCenter now supports the customisation of Windows 2008 guest operating systems as well as introducing a Performance Overview plugin that provides a single view of performance metrics – I look forward to having a look at that.
