This is a short list of myths, failures and issues I faced while working with VMware. I think that everyone working with virtualization should know these so i want to share my experiences:Read More »Top 10 VMware Myths, Failures and Issues
One of my favorite developments by VMware is the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (vCSA) as I want to get rid of as much Windows Machines as possible in my environments. It also simplifies the administration because you do not to have to configure and patch another operating system. Unfortunately the vCSA is really rare in a production environment. In my opinion this is caused by the fact that the vCenter Server Appliance always has some limitations, which are often not completely understood.
Here are the limitations from the current version of VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1:Read More »VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 (vCSA) Limitations
As you might know it is a VMware best practice to keep snapshots for more than 24-72 hours. To monitor aged snapshots using Nagios i created a perl script that checks the whole vCenter for snapshots. The script throws a warning because i think this is still not a critical event. You can easily change the behavior by changing the exit code to 2.
I set the allowed age to 3 days, based on VMware KB1025279. You can change the maximum allowed age to whatever you want by changing the subroutine check_age.
You can use this script as source for Nagios. There is also a multiple line output which allows you to see the virtual machine that caused the warning event.Read More »Nagios Check: VMware Virtual Machine Snapshot Age
If you are using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) on a daily bases you might want to simplify the login process. Public Key authentication is an authentication method that relies on a generated public/private keypair and enables the login without entering a password.
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