The Problem: Since migrating to the Cisco UCS environment, a few of my client’s Windows System Administrators have been complaining about issues with the NLB (Network Load Balancing) service on their systems.  These machines were previously residing inside of a traditional vSphere 5.0 cluster running on HP BL465c G7 blades, and were recently migrated to […]

I recently received a help desk ticket asking me to investigate the reason why a large number of RedHat VMware guests were not keeping their clocks in sync.  The Linux administrators were very confused, as the NTP service was running on the guests in question. As you may or may not know, VMware has a […]

Update (05/24/2013) As it turns out, this was simply a misunderstanding on my part on how the metrics in the advanced memory performance graphs should look after releasing VM memory reservations. I was basing my assumption that resources were not being freed on the fact that the granted and consumed advanced performance metrics were not […]

It is an important practice to stay up to date on your VMFS versions as you upgrade vSphere. I have seen many clients that have upgraded from 4.1 to 5.0 or even directly to 5.1 without ever checking on their datastores. They assume that just because their VMs are up and running that they are […]

I was recently tasked with generating a human-readable capacity report for an environment that uses full memory reservations for all virtual machines (please, for the love of God do not ask!).  This environment had just changed over to using a percentage based HA policy instead of using designated failover hosts. Previously, while using the designated […]

For those of you that are not familiar with Graphite, it is an open source and scalable real-time graphing system.  It is very powerful for the simple fact that you can send any kind of metric its way at a regular interval and it performs all of the ‘magic’ behind the scenes to generate graphs […]

After about a week of checking my online VMware certification transcript every day, I was very pleased to see that the VCAP5-DCD certification was posted to my account this morning!  Now that it is ‘official’, I figured I would share what I could about the exam. For me, the VCAP5-DCD exam was the most difficult […]

Recently, I was tasked to investigate an error encountered when trying to power up a virtual machine.  The end user is getting the following error message: An unexpected error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM vm-26615.Reason: Failed to lock the file.Cannot open the disk /vmfs/volumes/5029553f-63b72580-1c18-002655238b38/Windows7x64-GoldImage/Windows7x64-GoldImage.vmdk or one of the snapshot disks […]