Just a short post on some thoughts I had on improvements for VMware vSphere when I wanted to delete a datastore holding 10 VMs.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to put a datastore in maintenance mode like you can with an ESX host. When the datastore is set into maintenance mode, vCenter would Storage VMotion the VMs to other datastores and also make sure that other data stored on it, would be moved, the dvSwitch info for example. If this was possible it would greatly decrease the time an admin needs to clean out a datastore. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

My last VMware Capacity Planner job with a customer was a little cumbersome. The customer had around 350 systems spread all over the world and links between them with high latency which normally is just within limits, but it seemed the Capacity Planner had troubles with it. It took quite some time getting everything running the way I should. I decided to write a blog post on this since there is not much to be found on VMware Capacity Planner troubleshooting.

I couldn’t have done all the trouble shooting without the great tips from Kelly Culwell who had some notes from his VMware Capacity Planner training that helped me a lot. Thanks Kelly. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

Something I have been wanting since Virtual Center 2.5 / ESX 3.x is VLAN permissions. I would like to be able to allow certain admins to connect VLANs (actually to be 100% correct I should call them portgroups) to a VM, but for example for the DMZ VLANs I would only like to assign a specific group of Admins with the permission to connect those DMZ VLANs. Today I stumbled upon it by accident when my colleague Jos Vanaubel (http://nl.linkedin.com/in/vanaubel) was figuring out an issue with a user not being able to change the VLAN of a VM. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

Some time ago I wrote a posting on how to use vscsiStats to gather even more data from your VMs and their SCSI performance ( See: Using vscsiStats – the full how-to). Last week I received an e-mail from Paul Dunn who had written an Excel macro that can read the output from the vscsiStats exported csv file and convert it into Excel histograms. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments

Mike Laverick asked me to do a little video Chinwag with him. The main topic we discussed was about VDI licensing.

Follow this link to Mike’s post: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2010/02/17/chinwag-with-mike-and-gabrie-van-zanten-episode-03/

by Gabrie van Zanten.  View Comments