delpart (now diskpart) in windows 7 rocks

If you ever have a hard drive or USB key that has partitions you can't get rid of in Disk Manager, just use the command line tool diskpart.

Make sure to select your disk / partition / volume / vdisk (if necessary) and use the "clean command"

like Delpart, this is a VERY powerful tool that will wipe your drive clean in a second, so use with extreme caution. Make absolutely certain you have the right thing selected before you say "clean" The selected items will have "*" stars by them, see below.

DISKPART> list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 H DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 2 System Rese NTFS Partition 100 MB Healthy System
Volume 3 C NTFS Partition 297 GB Healthy Boot
* Volume 4 Removable 0 B Unusable



Happy Partitioning.

Installing VMware vCM 5.4 and trying to collect vCenter data, what version of PowerShell do I have installed?

 

PowerShell 1.0

$Host.Version

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
1      0      0      0

PowerShell 2.0 (Windows 7 - 2008)

$Host.Version
Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
2      0      -1      -1

VDR backups failing due to error -390 ( cannot quiesce virtual machine)

This has been a frustrating error that started out of nowhere. Suddenly the backups of one of my VM's just stopped working. This VM does not do alot of transactions, not does it generate alot of disk activity. The error messages tend to suggest that. However, I tried powering down the VM to get the snapshot to work so the backup would complete, that worked as an interrum solution. Long term I moved the VM to other LUNS, I tried going from think to thick provisioned, that didn't help either. Finally got it fixed, I uninstalled the VMW tools, then reinstalled the tools with a 'custom' install and unchecked the option for VSS (from a suggestion I read). This seems to have fixed the issue and the online backup is running right now for the first time in a long time.

Consolidate VMDK disks

I have a VM with snapshots exported from lab manager, so I am using the vmware-vdiskmanager to consolidate my 14 or so linked clones/snapshots to one flat file.  the vmware-vdiskmanager can be found in server or workstation installations, it’s not in the path, you have to go to the directory to find it.

vmware-vdiskmanager -r 015495-2008R2.vmdk -t 2 2008R2.vmdk

ESXi NTP not syncing

What I found was that NTP has a default maximum correction of about 1000 seconds. I had this same issue, but if I set the clocks 3-4 minutes off, they would auto correct within about 15 minutes. Using ESXi 4.1, almost none of the ntpd commands gave me any output, but I was able to see the corrections happening in the /var/log/messages.

How to build a Lab Manager Server using ESX or ESXi

 

1) Firmware Upgrades, make sure VT & DEP are enabled.

2) If Blade Chassis

a. Make sure networking is ready, i.e. virtual connect

b. Rename blade in chassis/iLo

3) If using shared storage (and you better be)

a. Fiber Channel

    i. setup VSAN’d and Zoned.

b. iSCSI

    ii. Properly setup

c. Present LUN(s) to Server

4) Install ESX or ESXi

5) ESXi only

a. Change Root Password

b. Change IP to static

c. Change hostname

6) Allow SSH (if you want)

7) Install Hardwareproviders/ agents, i.e. HP ESX Agent

8) Add to vCenter

9) Apply vCenter templates (this should do the following automatically)

a. Setup Networking vNics, vMotion & Management

b. NTP

c. NFS storage

10) Patch with VUM

11) Setup Monitoring, SiteScope, vCM, etc..

12) Add to Lab Manager

The disadvantages to using ESXi instead of ESX for Lab Manager

1) no timezone support, ESXi is set to UTC only. (but this doesn't cause any issues that I can find)
2) No export to SMB (window) file shares, so users can't export VMs or templates.