I’ve had a requirement recently to create a small XenServer 6.2 test/demo environment. I decided to use a Windows 2008 R2 host as an NFS server to provide shared storage…

This is all covered in the vSphere Storage Guide which I will aim to summarise here. ESXi uses storage APIs known as the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) to manage storage…

Details on the path selection policies can be found in the vSphere Storage Guide, but are summarised below: The three default path selection policies (PSPs) are: MRU (Most Recently Used).…

I’ve been posting a few articles on using partedUtil and vmkfstools as part of my VCAP-DCA studies. One of the articles I’ve come across a few times is this one…

There are a number of VMFS filesystem related tasks you can run using vmkfstools. Query a VMFS Volume You can get information on a VMFS volume by running the following…

First of all, what is a slot size? The Host Failures Cluster Tolerates admission control policy uses the slot size calculation to determine how many virtual machines can be powered…

If you are troubleshooting a network issue from an ESXi host it may be necessary for you to check the host’s arp cache. Running ‘arp’ doesn’t work on ESXi, instead…

There are a few ways to troubleshoot network/VLAN configuration from a command line, using tools such as ESXCLI and vicfg/esxcfg either locally on the ESXi host or remotely using vCLI…

VMware-cmd is a command line utility that can be run from a vMA, which allows you to perform various virtual machine operations. There are a number of options available when running…

The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) is a virtual appliance which “allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESXi hosts and vCenter Server systems. vMA is a…