Monday, July 27, 2009

Expert level on Communities - Whoop!

That's right! Today, I reached Expert level (750 points) on the VMware Communities forum. I have been active on the english forums for about four months now, and that is where I have collected most of the points. Next level is Master and it requires 2000 points so that's propably going to take a while to reach ;-)

Click here for link to overview of the community levels.



Resizing disks in VMware Workstation

If you want to increase the size of a virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation, you can use the command line tool, vmware-vdiskmanager, from a command prompt. The command can be executed from the VMware Workstation folder under Program Files\VMware. The VM should be powered off.

The following command will increase the size of the virtual disk to 30 GB. In this case, the .vmdk file resides on a network share.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager -x 30GB "\\FILESERVER\folder-X\My Virtual Machines\testserver\testserver.vmdk"

This will work both on a disk where all space has been allocated and disk that are allowed to grow.

VLAN trunking / grouping in distributed virtual switch

In vSphere, there's a new networking feature which can be configured on the distributed virtual switch (or DVS). In VI3 it is only possible to add one VLAN to a specific port group in the vSwitch. in the DVS, you can add a range of VLANs to a single port group. The feature is called VLAN trunking and it can be configured when you add a new port group. There you have the option to define a VLAN type, which can be one of the following: None, VLAN, VLAN trunking, and Private VLAN. But this can only be done on the DVS, not on a regular vSwitch. See screendumps below (both from vSphere environment)


Thursday, July 23, 2009

Links to VMware documentation

I always seem to forget where VMware has placed their documentation and in which docs to look for what documentation (maybe it's just me). So here's a few links:

vSphere main documentation:

vSphere Upgrade guide:

VI3 documentation:

Hardware Compability List (HCL):

VI3 and vSphere patch download:

Supported guest OS'es


Thursday, July 16, 2009

VCP4 Beta exam

Today, I took the VCP4 Beta exam. And last chance to take is tomorrow. I was lucky to get an invitation, as I fulfilled the two prerequisites: 1. to be a VCP and 2. to have participated in the vSphere 4 beta program. However, I had my doubts about taking the exam as it was announced rather suddenly and it gave me less than two weeks to study for it. But I thought, what the heck, let's study hard for two weeks and then see what happens...

The exam was quite tough, there were more questions than there will be in the final test. Because I'm a non-native English speaker, I got an extra 30 minutes. But still, 270 minutes is not much for 270 questions! That's one question per minute for 4½ hours straight and no breaks... The exam is covered by the NDA so I can't go into details, but I'm glad I reviewed the configuration maximums and then I should have spent more time on resource management (resource pools), iSCSI, paravirtualization, NPIV, and storage.

For study material, I've used:

And now, we just have to wait 6-8 weeks to get the results...