This week I have been spending time doing development time on the new course from VMware called “Virtual Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure”. It’s a equivilent of the older Vi-1 course based on ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x – and will lead to a VCP status for the new product.

While doing this development I spents sometime on the VMware Forums.

• This thread begins its life discussing the possibility of run ESX 3.x on PC hardware, but it quite quickly turns into a discussion about the limitations of using some “software” based iSCSI Targets such as iSCSI Enterprise Target many people use in OS like Fedora Core 5http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455002
• This thread is about some hassles people have had with the naming and renaming of datastores and volume labels in ESX 3.xhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455000
• This thread is about a PSOD issue caused by the HA Agents in ESX 3.x. A situation can arise where Service Console memory is sapped and swap activity goes through the roofhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=48234
• This thread became a length debate about how big the Service Console memory should be and as a consequence how big the the swap file should be. It has some interesting overlaps with the previous thread. There is a tension in the community about old best practises and whether they are applicable in Vi-3 – and whether VMware’s recommendations can be taken at face valuehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=455009
• Some guys on the forum have cracked the Active Directory setup with ESX 3.x – not something which is especially well documented. I intend to add this configuration to my Service Console guide in the near future but until then this thread should be very helpfulhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51145
• This thread discuss that old chestnut: do RDM’s in a virtual machine cluster HAVE to be on local storage. It’s been around this debate since ESX 2.x days – and doesn’ seem to want to go away. Personally, some of the comments made by VMware employees offer one the best explainations of why this is the case I have seen anywherehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=51258
• This thread discuss how memory is assigned, consummed and controlled is ESX 3.xhttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=48409
• This thread is one my own questions. One thing that bugs me in ESX 2.x is if I have change the volume label or switch labels – all my virtual machines VMX files need manually updating. This is less so in ESX 3.x where the volume labels are no longer problem – the switch problem persists though. Fortunately, my hardware is so Jurassic I can’t run many VM’s – so I don’t normally have that many VMX file to modify. But its always worried me – what I was running 30-40 VM’s or what if I had 80+ VM’s registered (but not powered on) how would I script a change like that. I’m no scripting guru, so I asked others on the Forum how they would do it. This was their responsehttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=50916
• This thread is about changing a VM’s MAC address to be static in ESX 3.x. VMware’s own Brian Rice steps into help out. In case you don’t know Brian is one of VMware’s top guys in VMware Education. I’ve met Brian once or twice – very nice guy – and has wonderful way of explaining stuff will out bamboozingly people with technical jargon. That said, you get the feeling if you wanted to he could!http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=438652
• This is a very long thread. In fact its one of the most posted too and read threads of the week. It’s all about “Cross LUN file operation performance”. OR put another way some poor guy is finding copying data from one LUN to another is very slow. To be honest I’ve not read this thread fully yet – but from the bits I’ve seen in my inbox (I watch entire forums) it makes very interesting readinghttp://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=49154

Well, that’s it for Forum Posts of the Week. I am on development this week coming too… but I’ve turn off some of watches – because quite frankly it was getting in the way of development. I was getting some 200 emails a day. Ouch!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under ESX, KB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.