VMTN Blog

I need to keep it short this time, for most of you out there it's weekend... for me it's a working day here in Saudi Arabia. This weeks top 5 consists of mainly technical blogs. It seems that the tech-bloggers are picking it up again after all the news around vSphere. Keep them coming!

• Rich Brambley - Identify ESX Server Switch Ports Without Tracing Cables
  If you’ve ever had to manually trace the cables from servers to network switches in a rack you probably were not very happy about it. In fact, if you’ve ever had to trace 10 cables from each ESX host to multiple network switches you were most likely aggravated to say the least. The good news is that if you have ESX 3.5 and Cisco switches you can determine the switch ports in use via the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP).
• Aaron Sweemer - VCDX Admin Exam Notes section 1.2 (virtual insanity)
  [Duncan: This is something different but very useful for those studying for the VMware Enterprise Exam] Here are my notes for section 1.2 of the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam Blueprint v3.5. Everything in Blue is a direct cut and paste from the exam blueprint....
• Robert Patton - DIY ESX Server Health Monitoring Part1 & Part2
  In this four part series, we'll build our own ESX health report with a shell script, distribute SSH keys so that one ESX server can run the script on the others, and then email the report using a perl script. We'll then finish with a quick modification to enable the report to trigger an email when performance thresholds are reached. The format of the report will be designed to display perfectly on a BlackBerry Curve set to its smallest font size, allowing us to know about issues from anywhere.
• Duncan Epping - Block sizes and growing your VMFS
  Although the mechanism behaves differently it does not mean that locking does not need to occur. In my opinion it’s still better to have 1 lock vs 8 locks if a VMDK need to grow. But there’s another good reason, with vSphere comes growable VMFS volumes. You might start with a 500GB VMFS volume and a 1MB block size, but when you expand the disk this block size might not be sufficient when you create new VMs.
• Steve Chambers - VMotion and change management
  Let me ask you a question that a zillion Problem I.T. people have asked me in the past five years:
  “Steve, do other customers have a change record for a vMotion?”
  Instead of just saying “No”, which is the correct answer, I feel there is more value to my customer to ask “Why?” and the discussion goes something like this:
  “We need a change ticket for vMotion because the server has moved.”